Family Culture, Family Structure

I feel like more and more people are becoming interested in the question of how you can propagate a strong family culture. It’s a hard question. When I started thinking about it myself, I was coming from a place where many of my ideas and cultural preferences are different from those of my parents. In fact, many of my friends come from religious backgrounds, but are much more secular than their parents.

But one thing I find missing from much of the discourse about family culture is a clear reckoning with the kinds of ways that families have historically differed. Consider this image of different family structural differences across Europe (found from this blog post):

As we can see, family structure differs across cultures in several key ways:

• Do adult children live with their parents (none, one, many)?

• Are inheritances equal or unequal?

• Do people marry their cousins?

To this I would add one important factor not found on this chart:

• Do people have many kids (r strategy) or few kids (k strategy)?

Economics and Family Structure

Some of the differences in family structure (especially when it comes to inheritance) are related to economic differences. For example, in cultures where people work largely as farmers and farms need to be a certain size to be viable, inheritance systems usually keep family wealth together and hand it down primarily to one child.

But there is another important economic difference that has a big impact on family structure: the degree of specialization in the economy. In highly complex societies, people tend to leave home into a large labor market to find a specialization instead of learning a relatively simple family trade. Of course, some people still have family businesses even in societies as complex as ours, but the family business has to compete with the fluid labor market to keep the kids interested.

This raises a big question when talking about family culture. Is your model that you (or your local community/extended family) are going to teach your kids the skills they need to work or are they going to go looking for skills and careers from distant strangers. Our society is more or less built on the working-with-strangers model so if you don’t want your family culture/structure to be that you are swimming against the current.

In any case, the question of family structure is deeply intertwined with your economic model. If you don’t have a plan for how your children are going to make money you have little chance of passing on your family culture.

Personally, I intend to build a family culture that embraces the idea of specialization and engaging with the global labor market. This raises some challenges because it means that it actually won’t be me that teaches my children how to make money and preparing them for their specific career. I accept that and am building it into the plan.

Local Marriage

Similar to the question of where your children will look for a job is the question of where they will look for a companion. Do you plan on encouraging your kids to stay local when looking for a spouse? Cousin marriage is no longer a thing, but many people still marry within their local communities.

As with genetics, the culture of your grandchildren will depend by default more or less equally on the culture of your children and the culture of their spouse. Thus, if you want to propagate a specific family culture, you more or less need to plan on having your kids select from a similar cultural group.

However, as with the job question, I personally don’t plan on encouraging my daughters to look locally for a spouse. Instead, I plan on developing a family culture that is consistent with the prevailing culture. Only a few carefully selected parts are different and the challenge is to ensure that those specific parts are preserved if my daughters marry someone with default American standard cultural leanings.

One reason for not encouraging my daughters to look locally is that I want to make them feel empowered in their choice. There is a tradeoff between empowering them and limiting them. I believe they are more likely to hold sacred their responsibility to choose a spouse if they are tasked with choosing the best one possible.

My Answers

With this in mind, let me spell out my current thoughts with respect to the questions above.

Do adult children live with their parents?

My take on this would be that rather than the children staying near the parents, the parents should move to be closer to the children. Since each child must go out to find work and a marriage partner, they are at least initially going to leave the nest. When it is time to settle down, if they can’t be near the parents the parents should move.

If the children aren’t near each other the parents can split time, but it isn’t going to be equal. Thus, ultimately parents should choose one child (probably the oldest) and commit to living by them. The rest of the children should move nearby if possible when deciding where to settle down.

Are inheritances equal or unequal?

This question is somewhat related to the last one. In terms of financial investments over the course of childhood things are never going to be perfectly equal, but some attempt should be made to treat each child fairly. If you have some business that will do better if it is kept together, keep it together. And of course, you are going to have to choose one place as your primary residence. The child you live near has the birthright to some extent.

Do people marry their cousins?

No, not cousins and not local kids (except after a wider search).

Do people have many kids (r strategy) or few kids (k strategy)?

Unlike many pro-natalists (and I do consider myself a pro-natalist) I am an advocate of k strategy (i.e., having a small number of kids). But for me “small number” is more like 2-4 than 0-1. I think children benefit from getting a lot of attention from their parents. Daughters in particular get a lot of benefit from having attention from their father. I tend to think young men can deal with less attention and can be ruined if they don’t have the opportunity to prove themselves without parental intervention.

Perhaps you could come up with some clever model, like families specializing in either raising boys or raising girls…or maybe keep having kids until you have two girls and then stop.

What does your preferred family structure look like?