Post-Nuclear Family: Answering Objections

1. Q: Are you recruiting people to join this project?

   Glenn Campbell in Vardø, Norway

   A: No, I'm just the architect. I'm not trying to actively sell this idea to anyone. I'm offering it as a potential solution if you happen to be in the market for solutions. Given the demographic challenges the world is facing—the lack of babies and high cost of parenting—I think it's the only realistic option, but I'm not a salesman. I'm really terrible at that. I'm just presenting an idea as clearly as I can and letting others decide whether they want to use it.

   I'm like an engineer designing a bridge. If the challenge is to build a bridge over a river according to certain criteria, I can think things through and offer a plan. It is up to others to decide whether the bridge is needed by their community and is worth the effort. If it is, they would have to organize it, fund it and build it.

   That said, I'm very proud of my design. It's a bridge to the future. I've spent a couple of years working out the kinks and preparing for any objections. Given everything I've learned about human nature over the years, I think it's workable. It addresses the demographic crisis without denying human nature. Like any engineer, it would be gratifying to me to see my bridge actually built, but that's not my department.

2. Why do you call it the "post-nuclear family"?

   

   The name is arbitrary. I just want it to be simple and memorable. The nuclear family is the one we already know, and I'm not even sure where that name came from. It is supposed to describe the 1950s sitcom family: Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best. You know: husband, wife and 2.5 kids. The modern world has expanded that definition a bit. Now it can be two dads, two moms or one parent trying to handle everything, but I still see it is a nuclear family: children are revolving around their parents. The post-nuclear family is what happens after that, when the nuclear family can't keep up with modern times.

3. What's wrong with the nuclear family?
   I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with it. It's just far too expensive, and it isn't getting the job done. People aren't having enough babies to sustain their society because the nuclear family has become so damn expensive. I'm also concerned with the quality and consistency of parenthood. It's fair to say that the quality of parenting in the world is uneven. Part of the problem is that there are no qualifications for parenthood. Anyone can do it, and parents have to learn the skills from scratch with their first baby. I propose that the post-nuclear family be a permanent institution that starts from scratch only once and accumulates wisdom as it goes along.

   See this March 2019 video for my objections to the nuclear family, when I was still formulating the system:

   I don't propose outlawing the nuclear family. If the traditional family works for you, you have my blessings. It's just a very scary proposition: to launch into parenthood without any experience, realizing how costly it's going to be and how huge the risks are. If you choose parenthood in today's world, it can monopolize the rest of your life, especially if something goes wrong, like some sort of birth defect. The post-nuclear family is intended reduce the stakes for each parent by distributing the costs and risks. It could make the parenting project palatable to more people, especially the best-equipped ones, while improving the final outcome.

4. What is the final outcome?
   Well-socialized, well-educated, responsible children who will carry on your core values and continue to support the family itself.

5. A commenter on one of your podcasts* writes: “This is very unrealistic. The Hippies have already tried this and it falls apart every time.”
   Actually, I don't think the hippies have tried it. The commenter must be talking about hippie communes, where everyone shares everything, and that's not what I'm proposing. This isn't a communistic system, at least among the adults. I'm not expecting them to share their resources with other adults, any more than you would share your bank account with your adult sibling. The adults are only cooperating on this one shared project; otherwise, they live in their own homes, pursue their own separate goals and accumulate wealth however they choose.

   The best analogy is a community church. Parishioners contribute their time and money to the church and its upkeep without giving up their property rights. Unlike hippie communes, churches have survived for hundreds of years supported solely by their parishioners. Both rich and poor can go to the same church, and in the Christian tradition, a plate is passed during every service where people deposit their donations. Naturally, the rich are expected to contribute more than the poor. The traditional assessment is a "tithe" or one-tenth of one's income. That's an arbitrary figure, and it may or may not be the right amount, but that's the general idea for family taxes in the post-nuclear system.

6. Who pays those taxes?
   Initially, it's going to be the founding parents, and it will probably end up costing them more than 10% because there are a lot of startup costs and relatively few parents, but once a child graduates from the family, you can start collecting taxes from them, too. You could even collect taxes from minor children.

7. How would that work?
   Let's say a teen gets a job at a fast food restaurant—assuming such a thing exists 50 years from now. When they bring their paycheck home, they immediately pay their family 10% of it. It's hardly a drop in the bucket toward total family expenses, but the ritual is important, and it should start early.

   Likewise, there could be paid jobs within the home. No one gets paid for routine duties like making dinner, cleaning house or changing diapers—That's just your family duty.—but you might get paid for an unusual task like painting the house. If the family pays you a dollar, you immediately pay them back a dime. I know it sounds silly, but this ritual of giving back is a vital exercise. It is preparing children for their eventual tithe as adults.

   The promise of the tithe gives the family some reward for its sacrifices. You raise kids for 20 years at great expense, but for the next 45 years or so, they pay you back. It's sort of like running a tree farm: You plant a tree then tend to it for 20 years before you can harvest the wood. In this case, after its 20-year investment, the family reaps the benefits for the next 45 years.

   I don't mean that the family should be a purely economic undertaking—raising children so you can exploit them later—but the family has to be economically sustainable. It has to have a way to fund itself beyond the first generation. There could be a family business that everyone participates in, but I think the more likely scenario is that adult family members hold ordinary jobs anywhere in the world and send money back home. That's called remittances, and it's common today. If you leave your family in the Philippines to seek more lucrative work elsewhere, you're going to send money back home.

8. So a child who is raised by the family is expected to pay the family 10% of their income for the rest of their life?
   Yes, for as long as they are able to. And I don't know that it will be 10%. It could be a different percentage, based on the family's needs.

9. What would make them want to do that?
   Loyalty to the people they grew up with. It would seem shameful to not contribute to the family that raised you when your siblings are. If you don't pay, you also run the risk of losing family services, like emergency help when you need it and care in your old age.

   The family isn't just a system for raising children. It's a lifelong support structure. When you get in trouble, you know your family will help. In adulthood, a family is a kind of mutual aid society. I can own things and my sibling isn't entitled to them, but when someone gets in trouble, the walls come down and you help however you can.

   The walls also come down when family member is old or sick and can't care for themselves. This is an important service, because everyone gets sick. Sooner or later, everyone is going to be an invalid. I've learned that myself in the past couple of years, fighting cancer. It's a scary position to be in if you don't have a family backing you up.

10. What are the values your trying to instill in kids?
    I'm not saying. That's what I call a "policy" matter, not part of the core definition of the post-nuclear family. The family's values are established by the founding parents. I have my own ideas about what a family should teach its kids, but that's my opinion. I'm not going to dictate your philosophy of life. Maybe you want kids to read the Bible every day or eat only organic food. It's really not my place to say what your belief system should be.

    I can only say that if you want your children to pick up where you left off, your belief system has to make rational sense to them. It has to be meaningful, compassionate and internally consistent. If childhood is unpleasant and the lessons harsh, there's a risk of defection. Once they're adults, your children could abandon the path you've laid out for them if it doesn't make sense in their own lives.

    That's what happened with the kibbutz's of Israel, another form of collective parenting. The system was rather brutal and bureaucratic, segregating children by age and restricting access to their biological parents. When children graduated from the system, most of them didn't care to keep it going. They left the Kibbutz as soon as they could. I guess that's the ultimate test of the post-nuclear family and whatever values or culture you are trying to teach: Will your offspring actually keep it up after you're gone?

11. But aren't you doing the same thing here: restricting a child's access to their biological parents? Doesn't every kid need one reliable adult to bond with?
    I agree that a secure parental bond is essential, especially for the youngest kids, but the definition of "parental" is somewhat flexible. Frankly, kids don't care much about how they came into existence. They don't remember being born and don't care where their egg and sperm came from. What they do know is who is caring for them, talking to them and comforting them. Those are the people who they naturally bond with and need to have regular access to.

    One of the core principles of the post-nuclear family is that older children care for younger ones as much as they are capable of doing so. There will be a responsible adult on duty most of the time, but they are delegating most tasks rather than doing them themselves. All the routine tasks of the household are handled by kids. That means the teenagers of the family are largely responsible for raising the babies. They change the diapers, run the baths, prepare the meals and engage in the labor-intensive one-on-one teaching that gives rise to language. They'll consult with the on-duty adult as needed, but when things are working well, the adult needs to back off and let the teens handle things.

    If you're a baby, and the person caring for you from birth is initially a 14-year-old, you're going to see that person as your parent. That's the person you want to have regular access to. If the kid stubs their toe, who do they run to? It actually doesn't have to be one person; it can be several. Today's working-parent households show a parental bond can be easily distributed over two or more adults.

12. What would the post-nuclear family look like in practice?
    If you were to visit the post-nuclear family of the future, it would probably look a lot like a nuclear family of today, just an unusually big one. It's also more decentralized, with more responsibility expected of the kids. Everything doesn't have to revolve around Mom and Dad. There can be multiple Moms and Dads, rotating into the household on a schedule. Power also revolves around the older teens, who would take on more of a parental role than they do today.

    If you step into a nuclear family, it might seem like pandemonium at first. With nine kids, there are a lot of things happening. Lots of energy, lots of little dramas taking place. But behind it all, there's plenty of structure, more so than most families today. Dinner always takes place at a certain time, and well-defined procedures have to take place before and after. Everyone knows these procedures because they take place in exactly the same sequence every night.

13. I understand you're a consumer of Soylent, a powered mix that is supposed to constitute a whole meal. Assuming it is nutritionally complete, wouldn't it make sense to feed the children that?
    Absolutely not. I drink Soylent for one or two meals a day, but I don't think kids should have access to it—and that's not for nutritional reasons. What is important about dinner is the process, not the product. Kids should be preparing real meals and not mixing a glass of Soylent precisely because its complicated and required cooperation and organization. It's a socialization exercise.

    The skills of preparing dinner and cleaning up afterwards are exactly the skills we should be trying to instill in our youth. If anything, I'd want to make it more complicated by supplying food to the household in its most primitive form. I'd give them potatoes, not frozen french fries, and they'd have to cut the french fries themselves.

    In the post-nuclear family, the process is just as important as the product.

14. So would you deliberately try to make things harder for the kids?
    I wouldn't throw any deliberate barriers in their way, but I'm going to think long and hard about any supposedly labor-saving devices I bring into the home. Like a microwave oven. Does the family really need it? It's not a matter of how easily you can cook food but what the social ramifications are going to be. And I honestly don't know whether the family should have a microwave. That's a policy decision.

15. Do you really think parents can serve in the household only one day a week?
    I think that's a reasonable goal, but again, that's a policy decision. The basic theory is that only one adult needs to be on duty at any one time, and maybe it's only in the afternoon and evening.

    I can imagine a schedule where the kids get themselves up in the morning. They get themselves dressed and prepared for the day, because the morning stuff is routine and the teens can manage things.

    Then after breakfast, the paid teacher comes in and gets everyone set up with their assignments. School goes on for a fixed number of hours, and then an adult come in. This is the freewheeling period of the day—you could call it play time.—say between 3pm and 8pm, with a break in the middle for the serious business of preparing dinner. Some of the kids might go out to play. Others are going to engage in whatever activities interest them. The on-duty adult can organize an activity if it suits them, but it's totally up to them. There are all sorts of rules governing both children and adults, but within the boundary of those rules, anything goes.

    There might be some kind of entertainment in the evening like, God forbid, a TV show or a movie. Maybe there is already an inventory of approved entertainment available—picture a shelf of videos.—and kids themselves choose the one they'll consume. Kids being kids, there will probably be one movie they'll watch over and over again.

    The on-duty adult has a lot of leeway to nudge things in whatever direction that want, and kids learn that an evening with Aunt Mary is different than one with Uncle Jack. Maybe some kids will withdraw altogether and spend 6 hours with a book. Only dinner and bedtime are fixed. Everything else can be flexible.

    Around 8pm, we start our end-of-day procedures, which means the older kids getting the younger kids ready for bed. Maybe there's story time, where the older kids read to the younger ones. These are probably well-worn books that have been read many times before. Once the younger kids are in bed, say be 9pm, the house goes quiet and the teens have some time to themselves.

    If everything is running well, household time shouldn't be too taxing for the adults. They can have fun with it. They might serve from the end of school until the youngest children go to bed. Then they go home and leave the teens in charge of the house overnight.

16. Do you really think that's possible?
    I think it's plausible. The oldest teen is 17 or 18, old enough to take on most adult responsibilities. If they have trained for these responsibilities all their life, it's trivial for them to hold down the fort overnight and get the kids mobilized in the morning. The key is having all the systems and procedures in place so that most things run themselves.

    Of course, if there are wolves outside the door and the family needs more protection, then maybe an adult should spend the night. It depends on the neighborhood and on the era in history. We're talking about a family system that should last for centuries, and there could be a lot of different external threats during this time. There could be roaming zombies, for all I know. There may be a time when the whole family needs to live in a walled compound for protection. I have no idea what the future will bring, but the family will adapt.

17. If you've got six or more adult parents in the family, how do you prevent conflicts between them? It seems hard enough to get two people to cooperate on parenting. How do you get a half-dozen to cooperate?
    That's one reason the parents don't live in the household. They live a comfortable distance away in their own homes. Each adult has an assigned shift. On any particular day, only one adult is in charge, and the other adults have to respect their authority.

18. But won't you still have conflicts? People can have a lot of different ideas about how to raise kids. What is to prevent one parent from imposing a certain rule on Monday and another parent reversing it on Tuesday.
    I have two solutions to this. First of all, the adults have already agreed to the basic principles of parenting by the time they form the collective. The parents who enter into this arrangement are going to carefully vet each other before they sign up. You wouldn't enter into this alliance if you didn't already agree on the main point. You're not going to get the situation where one parent thinks there should be biblical teachings in the home and another doesn't, because that's decided before the family is formed. You won't have one parent insisting all food should be organic and another thinking the ordinary supermarket stuff is fine. They've already filtered for things like this when choosing to align themselves.

    Anyone who is admitted to the group has to display certain personality traits. They have to be willing to work within the system, to obey the rules that everyone else has agreed on and respect the process for changing them. Obviously, you don't want any sociopath or narcissists in your group, and you're going to evaluate these things before the group even gets off the ground.

    After that, the family is governed by rules and policies that the adults have to follow as much as the kids. Dinner is at 6 o'clock, night after night. There are certain procedures that everyone goes through to prepare dinner. There are procedures for cleanup after dinner. In the post-nuclear family, policies and procedures govern everything that is governable. These aren't just rules; they form part of the culture of the family. These procedures are part of what you are trying to preserve when you create a family.

    When an adult is on duty, they are empowered to solve certain problems on their own, according to the established policies. Other problems require consultation with the other adults. There are rules of engagement for all the important stuff, but there's also room for creativity and differences in parenting style. If Thursday is Uncle Jack's day to be on duty, the kids are going to expect different things than when Aunt Jane is on duty. What makes this possible is that everyone knows the rules. Both Matt and Jane know the rules about what they can and cannot do without consulting the others.

    The policies of the family include systems of dispute resolution. Disputes between the kids, disputes between the adults: How should we handle them? Yes, there are going to be differences of opinion between the parents about how various situations should be resolved, and there are mechanisms in place to handle them.

    Disputes between parents are more likely to be a fine-tuning of the system, adapting it to new circumstances. For example, I'm sure the electronic media policy will often be a matter of debate and revision. One parent might think video games should be banned outright, and another might think they can be allowed in moderation. These disputes would be submitted to the usual resolution process, perhaps coming down to a vote.

19. What's an "electronic media policy"?
    That's the policy every family should have about how they are going to use technology within the home. In today's terms, you can ask, should the kids have cellphones? Can they watch commercial TV? Should they be allowed to surf the web without restriction? These questions are just going to get more complicated with time. This family, like any other, should be spending a lot of time figuring out what their children should have access to and what the restrictions should be.

    The Electronic Media Policy is part of broader policies on how children should be introduced to the outside world. By necessity, childhood starts out as an entirely artificial world—call it a sort of Disneyland—where children are protected from risks they can't reasonably handle. Human children aren't like reptiles who are thrown out into the world immediately. For humans, there is a transition period between Disneyland and the full brunt of the real world. There should be policies about how this transition proceeds, at least through age 18. What is a child allowed to do at each age that younger children are protected from?

20. Not Your Cup Of Tea?
    Here is a comment posted to the YouTube version of Podcast Episode 52 (Fifteen Defining Features):

    This comment is substantial, hitting a lot of different issues, so let me respond sequentially:

    1. The fact that you've constructed a thoughtful family system doesn't mean there is no love. There's an element of social engineering in this set-up, but so is there in any carefully considered family. Even today, many couples think long and hard about how they're going to raise children before they begin the project. The fact that they have a "system" for parenting does not diminish their love. Other couple may not think at all about how they're going to raise kids. They just plunge into it. These households tend to be more chaotic, because they have no rules. You can't claim that the latter group of parents love their children more, because they didn't plan anything.

       Whenever you have children growing up together in the same home, there will be love. I expect the strongest bonds to be between siblings, but there can be strong bonds between kids and adults. Aunts, uncles and grandparents can still have great love for "their" children, even if they see them only once a week, and that's basically the role that individual adults play in this family.

    2. I would never try to separate a mother and her baby. If you do that with a grizzly bear and her cub, you get eaten. While I'm not declaring in advance where the babies come from, every human obviously has a mother. I propose that mothers and their children should have access to each other whenever they want, but the mother-child bond doesn't have to be the only one. As a child gets older they can have strong bonds with other family members as well.

       I've never been there myself, but I understand that when a woman gives birth from her own body, she can get very possessive about the child that results. At the same time, caring for a baby can get tedious very quickly. In wealthy families of the past, you would turn over the tedious tasks of parenting to nurses and nannies. The lady of the house could see her children whenever she wanted yet still engage in her previous social life. That's what I am proposing here. The mother can play with her baby, bond with them and maybe nurse them, but she can turn over all the unpleasant tasks, like changing diapers, to the older children of the household, effectively the nurses and nannies. The mother can feel free to take long vacations, knowing that her babies are well-cared-for. Maybe she can even leave for months at a time or pursue a full unfettered career.

       The role of a father is much more ambiguous. While you always know who your mother is, you don't always know your father. Depending on the reproductive policies of the family, the sperm could be obtained from a sperm bank, in which case no relationship with the father is expected. I don't think kids give a whit about where their sperm and egg came from—at least until they learn about such concepts in science class. They only care about who it taking care of them right now, which could be a mother plus a whole army of helpers.

    3. Communism? Yes, a family is a communistic system, internally at least. Within every nuclear family, most resources are shared. Everyone eats from the same pot, so to speak. Marriage is a communistic system, where two people legally agree to share resources. (You may not know that when you get married, but you'll find out when you get divorced.) I am explicitly saying that the post-nuclear family is not a marriage. It is not a merging of the resources of the adults. They can continue to live their own separate lives, just like church members do. Two adults in the family can be married, but they don't have to be, and if a couple gets divorced, it doesn't matter much to the children, because those relationships all take place outside the main household.

    4. "There is no mind control in a community of love." — I beg to differ. A family—any family—is all about mind control. It's about shaping young minds into the forms you desire. A family is the very definition of the Stockholm Syndrome. If you're raised by a family—any family—you're going to believe in its values for life, so long as those values aren't wildly dissonant with what you encounter in real life.

    5. Ultimately, if you don't believe in the post-nuclear family, you don't sign up. Forming a structure like this would take a lot of initiative and cooperation, and if you don't feel compelled to do it—or you think it's immoral—you simply don't participate. I'm not proposing this as a solution for a whole country or society, only for a small group of adults who it happens to click with.

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