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    PowerStruggle: Profiles indicate MOST SEHI's still live in nuclear family units...why?

    The nuclear family is a huge drain on resources, why are we still upholding it?

    Started by: mudmama Raves:9

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    Most profiles I've read indicate that the SEHI population is still, by and far, living in nuclear model family units. What is up with that? What will it take for you to reconfigure your living arrangements?

    Frankly, I\\\'m not willing to open up my home (yet). While I\\\'m trying to help other people and do what I can to keep society from collapsing I also have a very good security system and weapons to protect my family.

    But do you feel that is theonly option? Opening your home to complete strangers? What about multigenerational living? What about cooperative living with friends and connubity?

    I\\\'ve been living in cohousing for two years with a few members of my own family and another family. Of course there are minor tensions, as with any group living together, but I wouldn\\\'t go back for the world. Pooling our resources and skills and simply having a greater number of close \\\'kin\\\' are enormous benefits.

    We are living in a multigenerational setting - my mother lives with us and our grown children are welcome home with their partners any time. While they\\\'re out in the world we\\\'ve opened our home to WWOOFers (Willing - read unpaid except in room and board - Workers On Organic Farms. In exchange for room and board we have an extra hand on our homestead. They get skills in exchange for their labour so its a win win situation. Our homestead really isn\\\'t big enough to give them that much experience so we \\\"share\\\" them with the farm next door. From me they learn herbalism, wildcrafting, permaculture, and woodworking, next door they can learn about larger scale farming practices.

    I have found that family is one of the few supports you can really count on in times of crisis. My family, and the families of my companion, her cousins and their partners, my brother\\\'s wife, and etc. have banded together to make sure everyone has food, utility and living space. Sure we have networks of close friends and colleagues that we work together with, and we donate our time and resources to helping refugees and REDS victims etc. But to the point of actually letting people stay in your home - let alone staying in a big communal space full of strangers? I think people have to get pretty desperate before that happens. Especially these days, I\\\'d need a hell of a lot of trust before I\\\'d let someone in to where Perky and I sleep, where we keep the guns and the gold, etc. At least with family you have a pretty good idea who\\\'s going to steal from you, who will get drunk and violent, etc. On the other hand, i have heard of some people making good with collective living arrangements. The refugees especially seem to band together in groups of people from the same area. They take over whole buildings and share a lot of responsibility, whoever can get access to food or has technical skill or child care skill will often help out the whole building. They seem to do well with building communal business arrangements too, they\\\'re resilient and adaptable (they pretty much have to be). On the other hand I hear about some bad situations too, like a lot of sexual assaults or creepy control mechanisms cropping up in such communal arrangements. Maybe this is just prejudice? It\\\'s not for me, anyway.

    well i live on my own so mabye we should make it mandatory for people to have familys (or at least groups of freinds) of at least 8

    Hobo, I'm thinking about this and the issue of civil liberties. What about rationing and extra credits for things like water/power given to those that conserve via sharing space? In 2007 we moved to a community that was trying to "encourage" - not force - people to recycle and compost their waste. They did it through limitting the number of bags of garbage each house could put out every two weeks. 8 bags total plus a large green compostable waste bin (and you could compost fats and animal products as well as green and brown plant waste). Only 4 of which could be garbage - the garbage had to be in clear bags and they reserved the right to refuse to pick up bags that were not sorted. Now this sounds pretty good given the times right? It would have been except that was determined by address, not the number of people living there. So the single woman living in the 1200 sq ft house was allowed the same amount of garbage as the cohousing family with 4 kids and two extra housemates (students they boarded). Each household could put out 8 bags, with a maximum of 4 garbage. That family could stay within the garbage output mandate with 8 people sharing the allotted garbage output. So they were really only putting out a a quarter bag of garbage a week per person. What if that was the norm? So I'm wondering about incentives to cohousing?

    I dunno, since I don't really have any family out here I live with my college roommate James and his girlfriend. So yeah we've sorta consolidated on space. And it's been quite handy, considering it REALLY makes an impact on sharing and such. (@)Mudmama: That's an interesting point. Maybe we could make some kind of incentives to collective living? It's not like we have to have huge convents of 8 or more people--even just having two couples live together can really make things better! And I grew up in a family of four, so having other people in the house is actually much more comfortable than being alone or having just one other person.

    Nuclear family units are an indispensable basis of society, and have been since the beginning of recorded history. I'm not saying there isn't some good to be had in having parents live with you, or grown children with their families live with you or nearby (common arrangement on American ranches). What I am saying, however, is that even extended family situations tend to create tensions and stress (one of the reasons that the newly affluent masses at the ned of the nineteenth century began to do away with them), and communal living arrangements are fraught with a wide variety of perils to security, morality, and stability. At the end of the day, for all of those things, nothing beats the nuclear family home.

    People have lived with their extended families since the beginning of history and in most non-Western parts of the world where things are relatively stable, they continue to. It is a uniquely Western experience to place our old in homes and send our young away. As it's been noted, this is extremely inefficient (especially when it comes to the elderly) and isn't the optimum structure for a sustainable society. As we wean ourselves off materialism I think we'll find that communal living situations make more and more sense. In cities like San Francisco, very few people can actually afford housing and it has created a community that has adapted to communal living options and a greater shared existence.

    Race the nuclear family was a construct dreamed up by advertisers in the post war period in the mid 20th century. It is far from an age old system! There would be little need for a welfare state (disintegrating!) daycare and seniors housing (closed due to ReDS!)if people simply RETURNED to multigenerational living. The nuclear family was designed to sell the suburban lifestyle, commuter culture.

    Maybe the problem lays, not with the "nuclear-family" structure, but how that structure interacts with others.//Our problem isn't that we have nuclear families, it's that these families choose to isolate themselves significantly from the community.//The reason why co-housing type arrangements fail is because, despite the goal of togetherness, they are still isolating themselves from the larger group. Co-housing is probably worse because it gets claustrophobic real quick.//If you are seriously concerned with familial isolation, start building communities that are based on togetherness from the outstart (instead of trying to fit one into the old system).

    Though my profile says I live with just my partner, I would consider my colleagues as an extended 'community' group. We eat in each others houses, borrow and lend money, things and space in our homes as needed or requested. They're a really mixed international bunch from all the different subsidiaries and we all know what it is like to live far away from where your roots so we make people feel welcome and help out. I suppose there is probably an element of 'like minded people' since we all got here through HR's filters and corporate induction and have been working together for a decade or more now...

    @mudmama: Welfare states still fill important places in multigenerational living. IE: Socialized welfare is a good thing regardless of whether or not you live in a multigenerational unit. Personally I'm not concerned that people should live in multigenerational family units, but they should live in communities from which they can draw support. The problem with the Nuclear Family unit in Western Culture is that it drives us all to not rely on the community at all, savage individualism equates to much duplication of skills that could otherwise be possessed by just a few members of the community, and lots of wasted time/resources.

    @IanWayne: Right on. My ideal would be if my community of friends could manage to all live in the same cul-de-sac, but economic realities keep us from physical proximity, which hampers rigging up larger support structures.

    Y.T. I totally agree with you about the value of social welfare programmes - it's too bad our governments have decided they aren't affordable or cost effective, it is incredibly shortsighted thinking. Socialized medicine is something I grew up with, it was scrapped here in Canada in 2015, but actual useful social programming has been in decline here since the 1980's. I think some conservative thinktank must of decided keeping people in poverty and under threat was a better business plan than actually putting dollars into plans that helped people become productive members of society. Educate them and they might actually vote...and anyone who has been poor isn't going to vote for the far right here. The elderly vote but once all the boomers die off you can bet all olds age security programs will die too.

    I have opened my home to the de Cabeza family. They are from Ecuador, both former staff from the Museo Ecuatoriano de Ciencias Naturales (Ecuadorian Museum of Natural Sciences) in Quito. Dolores, Magnifico and their three children Evita (8), Juan Pablo (5) and Chevre (2) are lovely people, but it is quite a strain. I am posting about trying to adapt to this new way of living at www.emerritt2019.blogspot.com. Any advice from other SEHIs is appreciated.

    Companies actively discourage co-living. My electric company has recent moved to have two tiers on my electric bill - one tier up to a threshold of electricity per month, then a higher rate is you are over that. Houses that have only one occupant are able to keep their electric bill down below the threshold, but if your home has 5+ people, you will inevitably go over the threshold even though the per-person energy consumption is less than that in the single occupant home! If companies continue to create policies that encourage wastefulness, people will not change.

    More people doesn't always = higher electric bills etc.. in 2008 we had a changing family situatuiom - 3 some of the time and 7 the rest of the time and we just creatively modified our small space to make do. I think part of the issue in North America is that we are so used to big spaces - the idea that everyone has their own room, their own car, etc.. I think that people do need space, but maybe not so much as we think and not in the way that we think. Personally, one downside that I do see to multigenerational living is the possible stasis of mores- people being/.feeling trapped by traditions and expectations of their elders but with internet and the connectedness of communities now, I don't suppose it would be as much of a strain. Also, I might not choose to live with just family. My own family is not so nuclear and would be complicated, but I would feel comfortable living with my sister and friends - I've updated my profile to indicate this.

    After a (second) tornado wiped out my childhood neighborhood, I moved my father up to my new home in New England. Not a nuclear family but still not the most efficient situation. At least my home also functions as my workplace. When you think about it, perhaps an equally inefficient solution is demanding company employees burn fuel to travel to a large building so they can all sit in segregated cubicles and work in front of their computers all day. And this merely because we've yet to move beyond old hierarchical systems.

    Stop using nuclear Power!

    A group housing situation is the way to go. The benefits outweight the negatives. The major negative is privacy. That negative can be taken care of by going to your room when times get stressful. The positives are practically limitless. 1)Lower cost on rent or mortgage when you split it multiple ways. 2) In a world where there is over population multiple family hosing saves precious space. Why be greedy and demand far too much space for yourself and add to the space issue. 3) If you live in a multiple family house you can spare the cost of necessities such as day care, and the time it takes to cook a meal. If the retired stay at home all day while those who can work do, the elderly can prepare the meals and watch the children. So, precious time after work isn't lost cooking, and you do not have to pay for daycare. There are many other reasons to open your house up to other families. Or if you can't stand that idea, why not open it up to your whole extended family? It only has been in recent times where the idea of the perfect family was 4 people. And that is only in the western parts of the world. Where did this idea come from? It is economically beneficial as well as earth friendly to live in a multiple family house.




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