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The 1950s Nuclear Family Was A LIE - Here's God's Real Design For Families · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Is the nuclear family God's original design for the family? Or is this something that sort of happened in the last 150 years? Jeff and I have thought and talked a lot about this. Jeff, your book, Take Back Your Family, really goes into detail about this question. And I wanted to play for you a clip about Adam Lane Smith, something he pointed out on the Lila Rose podcast. So Adam Lane Smith has really gone down this rabbit hole of trying to understand the
• 0:26
  What was God's actually design for the family? We've looked at this in different podcasts. I love the way often he will frame this because it's very similar to the way we talk about families and multi-generational team on mission. He's also the author of probably my favorite tweet of all time. He wrote this, and I've shared this a bunch of times. Remember that, quote, your kids should leave home at 18 is a sigh out by the central banks to make money.
• 0:47
  10 extended family members pay 10 mortgages, 10 sets of utilities, 10 car payments, 10 of every item needed for a home, plus entertainment and stress relief to cope with being alone. I'm like, OK, like we have been high up. I agree 100 percent with his assessment there. Now, I wanted you guys to like hear and Jeff and I interact with his whole thesis around the nuclear family, because I think this is really important. We do think nuclear family is important.
• 1:13
  really important, but it's the minimal way to think about the family, not the maximal way to think about the family. And so we want to really get this right. And so we want to talk through what was God's design for the family? Like, how were we supposed to live? So let me play this clip for you, and we'll dive in. The structure of the man works, and he comes home, and everything is perfect for him is not normal either.
• 1:34
  a structure where you have 20 family members and the men go farm in the fields and the women are working together, rotating and caring for children, resting, laughing, talking, playing. The men come back from the fields and they are all refreshed. They're tired, but they're refreshed and they come in and actually get to work doing things in the home and playing with the kids and integrating with the family and connected and bonded. And now you have dinners together.
• 2:01
  And all the women are rested and all the men are tired from work, but also have been working together all day. And they're bonded and they are solving problems and parenting. And the kids don't just have mom and dad. They have 20 other family members to engage with. So if dad dies, you have your brothers and his brothers and his dad and your dad.
• 2:20
  and uncles and everybody in there. So he has 10, 15 other masculine figures to teach him, right? And they don't just, yes, dad's gone, but they have all these other people to step into the gap. So now they have 20 permanent caregiver figures in their life to learn secure attachment from. And so if people die, they are not even not replaced, but so much redundancy is built into the system. That's a normal human structure.
• 2:45
  That is a normal human structure is 20, 30, 40 people your kids are connected to. Lifelong and lifelong. That's a normal structure. Now, that's what women's systems are designed for. Women's systems are not designed for this 1950s insanity. And that's what we should try to build. That's a good project. Family systems. Family systems with other families. With other families. Don't try to do it alone, nuclear family style. You need to build the village. Nuclear family is a lie.
• 3:13
  Nuclear family can only exist in a framework of a larger structure of family systems, of lifelong nannies that you have adopted as grandmothers, right? Stuff like that. That's beautiful. That's incredible, right? All of those structures, they must exist within larger structures. A nuclear family is not the solo unit that we are supposed to be looking at. Even the nuclear family itself on its own is an aberration. That's not something we're trying to build in as either.
• 3:41
  This concept of extended family, that's just family. Dividing it down to nuclear and extended itself is insanity. Kids need every good adult they can get.
• 3:53
  Boom. What'd you think about that? I loved it. I mean, I think, yeah, you know, there's a very interesting kind of historical case study here where 1945 to 1960 is by far the most prosperous 15 years in any country at any point in time in all of human history. This is falling exactly in line with the same amount of time that we are getting this vision in this narrative around a nuclear family. The mom stays at home. The dad goes out to work.
• 4:15
  But that's because of the unbelievable amounts of wealth and resource allowed that to be true. And it coincides also, sadly, with around the same time or about the second or third generation of us, of Americans, and most people in the West, having less and less kids. So these two things converge. And now that we have less kids to spend money on or do things on, et cetera, and now everyone feels enormously resourced, enormously wealthy, and enormously able to...
• 4:41
  to actually kind of walk in this illusion, which is the nuclear family can do it on your own. But when actual real life hits you, which it has outside of any other time in human history, outside of those 15 years, you realize, oh, I might actually be built to need more than just my nuclear family.
• 4:58
  And this is what I think a sociologist kind of called young families have been kind of left out in the cold the last couple generations, meaning they think because they were sold the lie and promise of wealth and resource and go move to a big city and get a job. But then with the declining economy or certain things being deflated, all these other things, they get to those places and are left out in the cold, realizing that actually it's very, very difficult to sustain. And it's much easier if we live how most people have lived for all of human history, which is a web and network of relationships in your extended family.
• 5:27
  So I love how he said it's not nuclear family, it's not extended family. Extended family is just family. Now, of course, that doesn't mean every single person under one roof, but there is a web of connections and shared resources and ability of mentoring that catches everyone as a safety net. And so what happened in that 15 years in 1945 to 1960 is because they had so much
• 5:47
  tailwinds and momentum, they thought it was their idea that was creating that rather than the tailwinds and the momentum. Does that make sense? Yes. And so when those tailwinds escaped, I think they've had to realize like, oh, it actually was this idea we could get away with in this 15 years, the nuclear family being enough, but actually we can't now. And so I find it very fascinating to look at. And we're still living in it 70, 60 years later, the ramifications of kind of that illusion, which is really interesting. Yeah.
• 6:15
  Yeah. Yeah. That nuclear family is unbelievably fragile. And you think about like part of what we have to deal with is God designed something and God's a really good designer, but he wants children to be cared for. And imagine if God designed the nuclear family, this thing that falls apart so predictably, that has so many single points of failure.
• 6:38
  Was that God's design for caring for children? No, it was not. His design was this larger extended family team. That's how people throughout history thought about family, lived with their family. There was all of these safety nets. It's an incredibly robust design. You have a father and mother. If that breaks down, you have grandparents on both sides. If that breaks down, you have uncles and aunts absolutely everywhere. You've got cousins everywhere. If that breaks down, then you have the church. The worst situation you could possibly imagine if you fall through all
• 7:06
  all 20 safety nets that just designed around helping children, then maybe you would say, okay, to the larger community. But to say that the federal government's going to step in and for a massive percentage of families just say, we're going to be your safety net for everything. This is craziness. But this is what we've created with this nuclear family myth
• 7:25
  That is not working for so many families. But the problem that I find so aggravating is that people then blame family and say, well, family is a bad design. Family really betrayed me. It's not family, right? It's this design of family that you just described, something that happened for a blip when it comes to world history, this tiny little period of time that reformatted the way everybody thought what family was because we lacked any kind of information.
• 7:52
  ancient wisdom because we are just obsessed with this chronological snobbery that if it didn't happen in our century, then it's not actual wisdom. It doesn't actually need to impinge or something that I can learn from. No, you need to go back and see the way family's been done for thousands of years. This is an incredibly robust design. It's beautiful. It's wonderful. And so, yeah, this is this tension that he's describing is...
• 8:16
  It really starts with Christians in particular. We need to understand, we need to be talking about this. Stop building fragile nuclear families as the ideal. We understand that a lot of us start there, but then you've got to begin to create this larger, extended, multi-generational family. That's where we all need to head. A nuclear family gives you a shot at creating this larger family. And I do agree. I love how he says, it's just family.
• 8:41
  We've redefined the word. Now I hear pastors all the time actually baptizing the nuclear family as what the Bible is describing when it describes family. Because in the Bible, when it says, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother, cleave to his wife, and the two will become one flesh, therefore they are no longer two but one, and the man and his wife were both naked and felt no shame. They take that passage from Genesis 2, then they read into it,
• 9:09
  the 15 years you described about, okay, what, what the Bible is talking about there is every nuclear family is family. And, and so I'm hearing this being preached and I'm like, this is, this is like historical insanity. Nobody thought that way. Right.
• 9:25
  Until very recently, that is not what Genesis 2 is describing. Genesis 2 is not describing people who are getting married and moving a couple states away and see their parents on Christmas and Thanksgiving. That is not what it's describing. It's describing what happened. You see it happen with Isaac. When he got a wife, he had to move out of his father's tent into his own tent. But he would still work with his father. He was still surrounded by family. This is the reason why Jesus says in John, when he's...
• 9:53
  really trying to comfort his disciples. In my father's house, there are many rooms because any Middle Eastern household exists with generations living together. This was normal. This was how they lived. Yes, you would need a separate place when you got married because as he's describing, you're becoming one. And it is really important that that new branch of the family has its own authority, has its own privacy. Absolutely. It's not about starting over.
• 10:19
  It's not about redefining family as the nuclear family. Some of the most influential Christian pastors are preaching that the nuclear family is in the Bible. It does not exist in the Bible. It is a brand new modern invention that is falling apart. And instead of actually going back to what the Bible actually describes family as being, we are going right along with this crazy failed experiment and not actually being salt and light in this one incredibly valuable area. Why is the church falling for this? Because this is so strange to me that this has happened.
• 10:49
  Well, I think we're still living in the fruit and the illusion of that time period, again, of massive affluence and not needing other people. There was a serious period in America where we just didn't need anyone. And so then the trade we saw was the illusion we were given, the fruit we were given almost from the tempter was...
• 11:09
  You don't need anyone because you have enough money and resources and the West has made such a strong middle class. And so now you can choose ease and comfort and individualism. And there's really no downside. That is the kind of the offer that was given. And I think we've eaten that fruit and realized there is a downside. Yeah.
• 11:28
  Yeah, man. Well, and then it's had an influence on the way men think about their role, how women think about their role. They're kind of the trad wife, stay-at-home mom. Like, how do we think about this? So it has all these ripple effects. We've redefined families as a nuclear family. We've redefined motherhood. We've redefined fatherhood. So I want to play you a clip. What's his name? I think it's the charismatic Calvinist. That's great. We'll handle. He had a take on this that I think is valuable and we can interact with. Try to really understand, like, how does this affect roles like that?
• 11:57
  Stay-at-home moms are not in the Bible. Now, this might come as a surprise to you if you've gotten trapped in the conservative trad algorithm on Instagram, but what those men and women are selling is a brand, not a holy commandment from God. Before the Industrial Revolution, both husbands and wives worked together in or near the home. Everyone was a work-from-home, stay-at-home parent. The house was like a mini factory, and both domestic and waged labor was shared by all.
• 12:21
  When the West finally industrialized, the waged labor left the homestead, it went to the urban factories, and the men had to follow it there. But this is the very first time in history we see this division. But for some reason, the trad folks completely ignore this period in history, and they really hone in on the 1950s. The 50s, which saw the United States holding more than 50% of global manufacturing, because our factories were the only ones still standing, which saw a temporary bubble of high wages for non-college-educated American men.
• 12:48
  This post-war period is an idealized myth, remembered mostly through advertising, and it's something we will never see again in our lifetime. That's the history. Here's the theology. Titus 2.5 says that women should be domestically minded. But again, that was written to the Homestead Factory, so we cannot anachronistically apply this to the modern archetype of sourdough and sundresses.
• 13:08
  God has given women all kinds of gifts and abilities, and many of them have no domestic application. So for a woman to receive gifts from God and then do nothing with them is literally burying her talents in the sand. Look, I'm not saying that all moms need to go out tomorrow and get a job. I'm also not saying that if somebody has been called to be a stay-at-home mom by God, that they're doing anything wrong. They're doing what God's called them to do, and that's amazing. And I will also cede that if a woman is doing work in the marketplace at the expense of her domestic labor, she has transgressed God's design.
• 13:37
  But there is a real problem when you idolize a homesteading, stay-at-home lifestyle that's being sold to you by mega-influencers who themselves are ironically making a full-time paycheck selling you a lie. And there's a sinful problem when you moralize your lifestyle, your personal choices to shame or condemn working bombs who themselves are only doing what God has called and enabled them to do. Boom. All right. I'm curious. Where do you agree with him? Any place you would take issue with what he just described?
• 14:04
  Man, I mean, I thought he was he articulated a lot of things. Well, I actually totally agree with one of the things I always call out is sometimes the trad wife movement that is so popular on the Internet. And a lot of those things, again, I think there's some really beautiful things from that showing that this is a valuable place to work and hold the line on.
• 14:23
  But I do find it interesting that most of the biggest people that are influencing us in that regard are multimillionaires doing probably 40 hours a week of video editing and content creation around that being their job. So I do find that being I think that that's a meta level of understanding it. But I do find that very interesting that we like never talk about. That's probably the first times I've ever heard someone even mention it. But I do agree. I think what we have to get back to is.
• 14:49
  is a vision for the home, that the home should be the primary place of deploying everyone's gifts. That's the best way to think about it. And that home might launch someone out into the world where they're not there, but it was from the home. It's a philosophical difference, meaning like this is the place. Home is the place of identity. Home is the place of value creation in the world for the kids, wife and husband.
• 15:14
  And again, that might place you in other places in the world, but this is the energy. All of the things happening are happening in the home. It's almost like the home is your boardroom and out in the world might be your business and the business also might be at home. And in all of that is both the domestic care as well as the actual like kind of economic output in a more traditional sense. That's all under the same boardroom. And so I think
• 15:39
  Kind of that's such a helpful way to think about it because we either do one or the other. It was definitely the trad wife versus the girl boss for the last 10 years. And it's either, no, I got to be able to go work for the – I don't think men struggle with this as much. And so that's why I'm kind of using the female examples for the ladies is that, you know, the girl boss is at the expense of my family. And sometimes the trad wife is actually burying talents.
• 15:59
  Is there a version where neither of those are right? I think so. And is there a version of those, by the way, where it might look exactly like those being right? Yes, I also think so. That comes down to each family kind of understanding the gifts that you have been given as a team, not as an individual, right? No one looks at Steph Curry, some of these other people on teams and say, oh, you were given those skills to not bless our team at all.
• 16:20
  You were given those skills to not inform our team. I don't know that the skills are for the team. Like that's literally how it works is that person leverages themselves for the good of the championship of the whole team. And so I think, yeah, it's a really helpful way to think about it. I think he's opening up the boundaries and the borders of, hey, the home can fit a lot more than you think. But, yeah, what do you think?
• 16:37
  Man. Well, I know we've talked before, and I think this is really surprising to people. And that is that instead of arguing for stay-at-home moms, oftentimes we are trying to argue for coming back to home dads. Like, I think where this really broke down, and he says this in Desperate Revolution, when the dads went to the factories, something fundamentally changed about the nature of the home, which is the home stopped being an economically productive house.
• 17:02
  atmosphere, the household, right? The oikos you see in the Bible, the idea that the household itself is supposed to be economically productive. And so part of what we want to encourage dads to consider is making their household economically viable so that all of their wives' skills can be.
• 17:21
  can be brought to bear to something that you get to do together as a family that your kids can then become a part of. And I know this sounds ideal and challenging. We have Family Inc., which, you know, we've had hundreds of families we've coached through this transition to really begin to understand. How do you start something economically viable through the house? And I think there does seem to be like, what would you say to the dad who's like, well, this seems like a female problem. Like, I'm out there, you know, working separate from my family.
• 17:51
  Yeah, I think you're right. That is a good point. I think it's both tracks. I think the philosophical battle tends to usually happen in with the women. Yeah. And that's kind of the which one should I choose. And then I think the practical battle happens with the men of, well, how do I do that and make as much as I am right now or something like that.
• 18:07
  And I mean, there's, you know, there's a lot of prophetic voices out there. What he just said was one of them. But I mean, I always think of Wendell Berry's quote, where I think this is a little harsh, but he's talking about basically anyone out there has kind of, you know, working for another person is you're essentially working for another family's vision. And he would call it almost like wage slavery, that we no longer own our own vision, gifts and talents. And we're kind of just applying them in a factory model for someone else's life.
• 18:27
  Yeah. Family vision. And he kind of says, you know, like, hey, and he's talking actually to the ladies as he says, hey, the the men chose wage slavery 100 years ago. Why are you clawing at the door to choose it to basically like and I'm like, that's it. And that's kind of that. Yeah. Like he's actually arguing for how about we all come back both home rather than both go out. And again, a lot of this I do want to actually split hairs here because it's so easy for people to get triggered and hear something that we're not saying.
• 18:51
  This can mean all of the above, a wife going out, a wife staying in, a husband going out, a husband staying in. It can mean all of these things. What we're kind of saying is that the philosophical identity of the home and the value creation of the home, the most magnetic force of that was designed to be in the home, not somewhere else. When the magnetic force of everyone's gift fails,
• 19:16
  feels like it's not serving the home, but actually degrading the home, that is kind of what we're talking about. And that can look a million different ways. But that's really, I think, the way to kind of put it in its most distilled form. Yeah, we need to make our homes economically viable if we're going to have this kind of experience where we're going to get to work together and see each other's gifts. A lot of times when your wife's gifts are being underutilized in a domestic context,
• 19:39
  you need to expand the domestic context. You need to think, are there economically productive things that we can be doing together? Like asking the question, when I think about my gifts, my wife's gifts, when they come together, is there something that we uniquely can create value for in the world that we get to work on together? And how would we begin to cultivate that? The word household in Greek, oikos, is where we get the word economics, oikosnomics. Economics always was a pursuit that happened through the household
• 20:08
  When husbands and wives came together, and part of what they were trying to do to become fruitful wasn't just having children, but it was doing economically productive activity together. And we've sort of stripped that away in this industrialized economy. And there's lots of ways back in, you guys. There's lots of ways back in. And please consider those ways back in because it creates a kind of experience that you see.
• 20:29
  really articulated in Proverbs 31. People read Proverbs 31 and they're like scratching their heads all the time saying, this doesn't sound like the 1950s housewife. And it's like, no, she's like considering a field and buying it. She's got servants. You know, she's like, she's doing all kinds of economically productive activities. She's importing things. She's like, they're like,
• 20:46
  What was this ideal woman, this wife that's described in the Bible? And you look at that and you're like, she's running an enterprise. That's what she's doing. And this used to be normal. And it can be normal. Again, anyone listening to this, you could choose to say, like, let's make our family economically productive.
• 21:08
  You can move that direction with your family. That's a choice you can make. You can resist what happened in the industrial revolution. You can use some of those elements and bring them in and use them to actually launch economically productive activities with your wife and your kiddos or your husband and your kids. But we have to begin to make this massive paradigm shift.
• 21:27
  Amen. Awesome. Well, guys, I hope that's helpful for you guys. If you're like thinking about, oh my gosh, this sounds like such a different way to think. Like family is not the nuclear family. How do we, how do I get my head around this? What are you guys talking about? Well, we've got a five-part course at familyteams.com slash transform. It takes you through a five-day process to kind of go through the paradigm shift because this is...
• 21:48
  Pretty complicated and pretty surprising for a lot of people. So check that out, familyteams.com slash transform if you guys want to grab that course. And we'd love to introduce you to this idea. And yeah, Jeff, thanks so much for jumping on here today.