Growing up, Rozella Apel-Hernández had dozens of nonbiological aunts and uncles. Apel-Hernández, now 24, was born and raised at Beatitude House Catholic Worker community in Guadalupe, California—a community her parents founded that works with immigrant farmworkers and provides a free food program, medical clinic, legal advocacy, and a house of hospitality.
“When I was younger, it always felt like there was some dissonance between loving being home and also feeling like I didn’t always fit in with my peers who had more traditional parents who were working nine-to-fives and living independently,” Apel-Hernández says. “That being said, it was really a wonderful way to grow up, because I was exposed to so many incredible people [and an] extended community that was really invested in my upbringing.”
Although the adults who lived in the community were like aunts and uncles to Apel-Hernández and her brother, her parents emphasized that they were the ones who did the actual parenting and set family boundaries and values. “Nobody [else] was there to discipline us or steer or shape us as young children; that was all my parents,” she says.
Now living in Virginia, Apel-Hernández has an apartment of her own, but she still feels that web of support. “If I really needed something, there would be truly dozens if not hundreds of people I could call on the phone and say, ‘I’m in a really tight spot,’ and they would be there to support me,” she says. “I don’t think that’s a common feeling and experience within the traditional American psyche; my sense is that the mainstream lifestyle is much more isolated.”
Being raised communally like Apel-Hernández was, rather than in a traditional nuclear family, isn’t the norm for many American families. “It takes a village to raise a child,” often cited as an African proverb, speaks to the need for community and support outside of biological parents, but in a society where the nuclear family model is prioritized, finding and creating the “village” is largely left to individuals.
Around the world, birthrates are falling, and more people are choosing not to have families and kids, says Julie Hanlon Rubio, a Catholic feminist theologian. These falling birthrates suggest a change in how people think about parenting, including the belief that parenthood is overwhelming, which is tied to unrealistic “perfect parent” ideals.
There’s also a “significant loss of cultural networks that used to be supportive, like extended family and neighborhoods that made parenting less of a solo adventure,” Rubio says. “Now people are wanting [a support network] but having to dream it up.” For example, when Rubio raised her kids in the 1990s, she was part of a babysitting co-op where neighbors helped each other with child care, but the co-op doesn’t exist anymore.
It would require critiquing and rethinking the nuclear family model, but the church has an opportunity to play a role and step into these spaces of building intergenerational and community support networks. “There is a need now,” Rubio says. “I know that churches are looking for new ways to reach young Catholics, and this seems like a really good way to do that.”
Unusual and stressful
In 1840, the president of Amherst College, Heman Humphrey, wrote, “Every family is a little state, or empire within itself. . . . In the family there is but one model for all times and all places. It is just the same now, as it was in the beginning, and it is impossible to alter it.”
But the patriarchal, nuclear model of the family that Humphrey described was a recent invention at the time, says Peggy Heffington, a historian and professor at the University of Chicago. For most of history, around the world, children were raised communally.
The nuclear family—what Heffington describes as the “self-contained unit where the parents do all the work and no other adults really have any role in raising the children”—began to emerge in Northern Europe in the late 18th century, and it made its way to the United States in the early 19th century. Around this time, people began to have fewer kids; they also moved away from their families and started actively controlling their fertility. “By the 1840s, the way people talk about the nuclear family is as though it is the only way that families could ever possibly be created,” she says.
Just two generations before Humphrey wrote about the family, colonial Americans—women, in particular—raised one another’s children, went in and out of one another’s houses, and fed and disciplined one another’s kids. They “only understood the family in the context of the community,” Heffington says. “They lived in a world where children weren’t the sole possession of the biological parents, and the community had a role in raising the children. It spread the work of raising children in ways that were incredibly helpful; it also spread the joy of having children onto people who were not biological parents.”
Last year, Heffington wrote a book called Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother (Seal Press) about women in U.S. history who chose not to have children. She found that just 150 years ago, most women, whether they had biological children or not, participated in raising kids.
Heffington has studied how the model of family in the United States and the West has prevented people from forming deep ties to communities, which seems to “discourage people from having large families or having children at all,” she says. Heffington refers to sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, who said that the nuclear family model in the history of humanity is not only the most unusual way to raise children; it’s also the most stressful.
Why did this shift toward the nuclear family happen? Heffington says there’s a host of reasons why, one being the Industrial Revolution. Because it happened in the Protestant part of Europe, “there’s some sort of individualism baked into that,” Heffington says. “It also fits nicely with the ideals of the American Revolution: that each person has the individual right to life, liberty, and happiness.”
It also corresponds with the emerging ideals of capitalism and “competition between your neighbors,” she adds. “All of this coalesces into people drawing back from their communities and into their nuclear families.”
Different possibilities
Despite the lack of greater societal and governmental support, some Catholics are seeking different ways to raise their children outside the isolated nuclear family model.
A few months ago, Matt Harper, who is part of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community, hosted a series of discussions about raising kids in the Catholic Worker communities to which Apel-Hernández belonged. Harper first wanted to host these talks out of a personal desire—he and his partner are considering having kids but remain committed to living in community—but he soon realized there was a lot of interest in how kids and families fit into the lifestyle of an intentional community.
For Harper, the discussions affirmed that in raising children communally, “you’re not going to find a perfect example,” he says. “A lot of Black, Latino/a, and poor working-class communities have been doing this for a long time. Sometimes it feels like we’re trying to build something new, but really, it’s reclaiming something pretty ancient.”
Harper grew up in a predominantly white, wealthier neighborhood in Los Angeles and went to a Jesuit university where a lot of students came from similar backgrounds and were getting involved in justice issues. After college, as his friends began to start families, he saw them lose energy and momentum for justice work due to the demands of parenting in a nuclear family model.
“I saw a lot of fear and insecurity—the things we were promised that make sure we’ll all be OK are just not there,” Harper says. “I look around me, and I feel from folks the desire for a different way of going about things, but they just don’t know how.”
Harper says that by living communally and intergenerationally, “I’m not trying to sell people do-gooderism.” Instead, he says, “Our collective interest is at stake here.” On Skid Row in Los Angeles, for example, the fastest-growing population of people experiencing homelessness is made up of people 55 and older who have never experienced homelessness before. “They can’t afford rent and Social Security doesn’t go very far; pensions disappear,” Harper says.
Frida Berrigan, the daughter of Catholic peace activists Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, was also part of Harper’s discussions about raising children in community. Berrigan grew up in Jonah House, the antiwar community her parents founded in the 1970s. Berrigan, her parents, and her two siblings often lived with other families and young people.
“Members of the community took turns cooking meals, cleaning; they also took responsibility for child care,” Berrigan says. “That was a really important part of our growing up, because our parents spent time in jail for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, and the folks who were members of the community really softened the impact of that on my brother and sister and me.”
Berrigan, 50, now lives in Connecticut with her husband and three children. Berrigan’s husband, Patrick, also grew up in a home that practiced hospitality.
“When we became parents we wanted to honor what our parents had done in different ways,” Berrigan says, “and also give our kids a structure and privacy that we never really felt like we had.” They decided to not live in an intentional community when they got married, but seeing her parents disagree with other adults, communicate, and solve problems while she was young “was really important, and we definitely wanted that for our kids,” she says.
Even though Berrigan and her family aren’t part of a live-in community, they prioritize connections, shared time, resources, and trust with their neighbors, church, and public school to give “our kids a taste of this very rich but complicated upbringing that I had, but without breakfast being a 20-person affair every morning,” she says.
Berrigan sees the demands of an insular nuclear family as contributing to “so much of the epidemic of anxiety and depression within young people and this distracted, perfection-seeking parenting where it all looks good for social media,” she says. “I think we were never meant to raise children the way white middle-class people are corralled into. As people who want to show a different way, I think this anti-nuclear, larger definition of family and trust in community, even if it’s not a live-in intentional community, is really important.”
As a mom, Berrigan tries to resist the perfectionist parenting mindset. “ ‘I am enough’—not me personally as Frida, I’m not enough for my kid— but I created this environment, and I have invited people into this context that is safe and stimulating and loving for my kids, and that is enough,” she says. “The idea of the perfect mommy and daddy is just capitalism.”
That sense of trust in community is something we’ve started to lose, Rubio says, even in how “we don’t want to ask people to [care for our kids] anymore; there aren’t people around that we feel comfortable asking, or we’re afraid of leaving our kids in other people’s hands.” Rubio acknowledges parents must keep their kids safe while also recognizing children’s well-being is put at risk when there aren’t connections with the community beyond the biological family.
Ben Stegbauer, 27, deeply values community, not only on an abstract moral level but also practically: Rent is expensive, climate catastrophe affects us all, and capitalist society is set up to be alienating and lonely. He recently wrote a piece for the Spirit of Solidarity Substack about “family abolition,” a concept that has its roots in Marx and Engels and their call to abolish private property. It revolves around the idea that we should create alternatives to the nuclear family, showing how the idealization of it has led to a harmful privatization of care, imposition of heteronormative ideals, economic dependence, and isolation. The idea has had a surge in interest through books such as Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis (Verso) and Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care by M. E. O’Brien (Pluto Press).
Stegbauer says that the privatization of care has made it so that, when encountering someone in need, “one of the first questions you ask is, ‘Do you have family?’ Most of the time the answer is no, and we think, ‘If only they had a family to take over all of this care.’ At some point, you stop asking that question and you realize that [the nuclear family], as a whole system, is not enough.”
Intentional communities can also come with their own pitfalls, Stegbauer says, such as “gendered and racial dynamics where some people turn out to be the leaders, or not.” In some Catholic Worker communities, “dynamics of disability and mental illness” can emerge in people’s relationship to the community as “guests” or “volunteers.”
“Where I lived, people wanted [guests versus volunteers] to not be so much of a dynamic, which is a very good pursuit,” Stegbauer says. “But still, it was there, and it created this dynamic where people were very easily manipulated because of a lot of the power structures. How do you create a system where people are interdependent but not easily manipulated and not abused because of it? I’ve found family abolition to be a healthy, useful tool for analyzing some of these dynamics.”
Still, Stegbauer says, he’s drawn to community, because “I can actually be the happiest I can be in life if I can live with other people,” and it’s important to him to be mindful of how not to replicate harmful family power dynamics while living in community. Stegbauer is planning to move into a house soon with friends who have two young children. “Who knows how we’ll do decision-making, but it’s important that [the kids] do have a role in decision-making so that they’ll always feel listened to and so that we don’t forget their needs,” he says.
Given the epidemic of loneliness and isolation in the United States, Rubio hopes more people will share space, not only to make the cost of living more affordable, but because it is valuable for child care, cooking, and shared responsibility. “There is a Christian case to be made for living in a more social or communal way—that’s what the church is,” she says.
A nuclear threat
Because the nuclear family emerged as a white, middle-class ideal, it was “absolutely weaponized against communities of color, in particular Indigenous communities,” Heffington says.
As American settlers moved west, they encountered Indigenous communities where family structures did not look like the nuclear family. Indigenous people were forced to marry and physically separate from the rest of their communities if they wanted to own land. “It becomes assimilation that demands the breaking down of Native family structures to conform to this stressful and unusual way of parenting,” Heffington says.
Delwin Fiddler Jr. says the phrase “it takes a village to raise a child” means a lot to many Indigenous communities. Fiddler is an enrolled member in the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and comes from the Sans Arc band. He founded the nonprofit PAZA, Tree of Life, which supports Indigenous people as they reclaim their traditions through community and conservation efforts. Fiddler has written about how important community is for Indigenous families and children.
“Since I was a young man, elders shared stories and songs of long ago, every day, every night,” he says. “Then I got taken to boarding school [at St. Joseph’s Indian School]. I didn’t know what my parents or my family were doing for about six years.”
This experience and others throughout his life helped him realize how important intergenerational connections are, Fiddler says. This connectedness can take “different forms through spirituality, praying together or having a meal together, sitting down with others and asking questions,” he says.
There is also a long history of communal childrearing in Black communities, Heffington points out. Models of communal parenting from cultures on the west coast of Africa were kept alive when enslaved people were brought to the United States, “not only as tradition but also as a mechanism of community survival,” she says. “In enslaved communities, parents are torn away from their children all the time. People care for children that are not biologically theirs for community survival.”
This idea that the nuclear family is the natural way to raise children has, by implication, “made us as a society believe that it is therefore unnatural to need help,” Heffington says. “You can see that everywhere, in the way conservatives talk about welfare, or the way everyone talks about universal basic income or benefits from the government. [U.S. society] is built on this foundation that the family should be able to sustain itself.”
Yet that kind of thinking cuts off possibilities for communal ways of raising children and sustaining families, Heffington says. “From a communal perspective, if one family can’t feed their child, that is very much the community’s problem.”
Evidence of how embedded the nuclear family is in American political thought happened in 1971, when a bipartisan bill for universal day care called the Comprehensive Child Development Act passed in the Senate and House. It would have created a sliding scale for day care and provided health and dental insurance and early childhood education. But Richard Nixon vetoed it.
“He not only vetoes it, but he writes a letter back to Congress saying that is profoundly un-American,” Heffington says. “He sees it as a threat to the nuclear family, which it kind of is, but that’s the point. He also sees it in the context of the Cold War and thinks that the nuclear family is something that makes the United States and democracy different from the Soviet Union.” Never since then has a bill like that reemerged.
The nuclear family model also isolates adults without children from the project of raising the next generation, Heffington says. “To be clear, there are some people for whom that is awesome. But I do think there is a sense from society that because you have not reproduced yourself, you’re irrelevant to raising the next generation.” Vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, for example, has said that politicians without children “have no physical commitment to the future of this country.”
If parents feel isolated, and people without children feel like they don’t have a way to be meaningfully involved in children’s lives, “the answer seems kind of obvious,” Heffington says. “It would take people rethinking the idea of the nuclear family as natural. But I think that there are real possibilities for moving forward, and they’re not novel innovations. You just look to the past.”
Deeper humanity and hospitality
Stegbauer sees the early Christians in the book of Acts as emulating values of community and care not based on biological ties. “One time I was carrying my Family Abolition book around the Worker, and one of the older members said, Jesus already said that 2,000 years ago when he said whoever [follows him] is my brother and sister and mother (Matt. 12:50),” he says. “Even within church history, you have people getting their needs met and being cared for outside of the family.”
When Jesus says in the gospels to forsake your family, Harper doesn’t think he was saying family isn’t important but that your biological family shouldn’t be the central priority of your life. “The more we can expand those margins, the safer and more taken care of we will all be,” Harper says.
There’s a line in Gaudium et Spes (On the Church in the Modern World) that says family is a “school of deeper humanity,” Rubio says. “It’s not just about procreating, but there’s a real sense that together parents and kids help each other grow in virtues of citizenship, of being human.” The model of the nuclear family “can be isolating and not as much a school of deeper humanity and hospitality as we would hope for,” she says.
Heffington says it’s a good sign that people are thinking beyond the nuclear family. But the “challenge remains if you’re living in a society that still idealizes the nuclear family or assumes that’s the only way children can be raised,” she says. “I do think that there are higher-level things that need to be addressed in order to fully get us out of this problem we’re in.”
Being raised in community, Apel-Hernández says, eased anxieties for her about needing to make money, have a career and family, or buy a house in order to be successful and happy in life. “I know there are alternatives available,” she says. “I’d really like to see more people having the opportunity to grow up with experiences that I had, feeling that sense of liberation, knowing there are people out there who will always support you.”
This article also appears in the September 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 9, pages 10-15). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: adapted from iStock/CSA images
Add comment