… as the family dissolves.

[rickyrickygrimes]

I listened to an FT podcast today about demographic change, which was fascinating and quite 😱. One phrase that caught my attention was : ‘“There is a huge vulnerability that I don't have an answer for, and that's what happens as the family dissolves, as the family evolves. I don't know what fits into that space.”

The interviewer asked him to explain what he meant by this, and it was basically: when so few women are having children, and the generational family structure that humans have evolved to rely on for thousands of years essentially ceases to exist, what will replace it? And where will people find meaning in life, when family doesn’t exist? And an answer to loneliness?

I can see this playing out in my own family, with 5 out of 6 grandparents now entering their 80s, with only 3 grandchildren between them. My sister chose not to have children, my SIL has only 1. All for reasons that are very valid on an individual level - but at a population level the consequences are huge and will impact everyone. And I choose to live outside the UK - I’m not on hand to provide any kind of care for my own parents - again for valid personal reasons but which will have big consequences at a societal level.

What do you think will replace the family structure, as it dissolves?

From The Rachman Review: Our shrinking and ageing world, 24 Jul 2025
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-rachman-review/id1504048545?i=1000718767539&r=1001
This material may be protected by copyright.

I think that so much of “family support” has meant and still means women doing unpaid mental, emotional and domestic labour. As well as a lot of paid work as well, but paid less than men. I do not want to perpetuate that model so if we want women to have more babies we need to restructure things socially and economically so it’s not just more women’s graft behind the scenes.

Edited for a typo

What an interesting post OP. The family unit, marriage, genetic links, has formed our laws, the passing on/building up of wealth, it underpins (created?) class in the UK, it feeds our sense of who we are (or wish not to be).

You see on MN a lot, mind your own business, when someone is concerned about others, whether family or outsiders.

Without family we will maybe have even more anomie and self-interest, more violence - as strength (via youth or gender) is less ameliorated by bonds of duty or “convention”. If you don’t have a grannie then hitting old ladies might be psychologically easier. If you don’t have kids maybe sex abuse is easier.

Given that most violence and sexual abuse is within the family I don’t think your statements / pessimism hold true

you need cohesive units - nuclear families are a recent invention- and relying on them is naff for those who can’t have children. Or for those who hate their families because of abuse and violence

the old mining communities are another type of “family” where people tended to look out for each other

it needs some kind of stability and some commonality but it doesn’t have to be genetic

I’m going to get hammered for saying this but what if it’s not a flaw in the ‘old’ system of doing things: what if it is the system because it works and has done for millennia?

What if human societies actually work best when women are doing all this ‘family support’ work? And men are doing other work? And everyone contributes?

What if the actual flaw is that the capitalist system tells us that unpaid labour - done for love, obligation, reciprocity - is a mugs game because it’s not remunerated financially? When perhaps it’s the single most important thing that establishes family bonds and binds our communities together?

I wasn’t aware of the setup in France, thanks for the outline. I like many of the aspects of it - I wonder what happens if children are estranged from their parents, however, are they still legally obligated to provide care for them?

To be fair, the American Enterprise Institute is a right-wing think tank

if they can prove parental neglect or abuse, they can be exempted. Everything in France had to be proved in some way.

is it selfish or is it a core feature of humanity?

If the unpaid labour done for love was so important and fulfilling men would have worked out how to send women out to work years ago.

Because money is power basically, if you have the all the money that pays for the house and food, which are essentials for the unpaid labour to happen in, you can control the people in that house.

Come on OP you understand this? How many of those women would've stayed if they could have afforded to leave? How many women now stay because they can't afford to run a house alone, or for "standard of living", they know it's a transaction and ask for advice "how can they change the man because leaving is out of the question" but if they had all the money they needed they would be out of the door like a shot.

In yesteryear times were socially different, there was only a small amount of tv that everyone had to watch at the same time, pubs weren't open a lot of the time, no one had to run around creating content of how many amazing activities and days out they were having. So men and women were around more, bored at home, so yes the blue jobs and pink jobs got done.

But now even if a women is running around, tending the house, bringing in money, looking after youngers and olders, many men aren't keeping up their blue jobs, they go to the pub, or days cycling or playing golf or whatever, or even if at home on their phones or gaming.

This contributes to the fuck you attitude of women, they see that they are working and still doing the majority of pink jobs at home whereas they are also having to do the some blue jobs as well.

Plus people used to go to church, and would be judged by the rest of the flock, everyone knew about everyone else's household. Now you people don't even want you to know what book you are reading in the garden.

To have the society of yesteryear you have to give up a lot of what modern humans have come to cherish, you can't cherry pick the good bits and leave out the bad bits.

Society changes, in recent times largely better for women, plus you didn't have to look after older family members for anything like the length of time that it could be nowadays. People would get cancer that couldn't be cured or drop dead of heart attacks because there was the medicines around to prevent them. Looking after someone into their late 80s with increasing dementia, is very different to looking after someone who in their early 70s who hasn't got that long left.

There is no comparison from what it was to what it is now in any way.

Thank you for posting the podcast, it sounds interesting. I can't be alone that whilst GPs offered to have my kids in the holidays, they simply aren't fit enough to do it. GP mid-70s cannot barely walk, very immobile, not safe to keep up with child, step in if car came when crossing road. And kids not old enough to go out alone. This would mean weeks of being in, or driven around. I had my kids in early-mid 30s, perhaps in France they are generally having them in their 20s and have younger GPs.

We tried GP care for one summer hol week, it was a nightmare. Both sides moaned, and more hassle than it was worth!

Thank you for posting the podcast, it sounds interesting. I can't be alone that whilst GPs offered to have my kids in the holidays, they simply aren't fit enough to do it. GP mid-70s cannot barely walk, very immobile, not safe to keep up with child, step in if car came when crossing road. And kids not old enough to go out alone. This would mean weeks of being in, or driven around. I had my kids in early-mid 30s, perhaps in France they are generally having them in their 20s and have younger GPs.

We tried GP care for one summer hol week, it was a nightmare. Both sides moaned, and more hassle than it was worth!

I think it is more the geographical spread that is the issue.

My grandad was the only one of his siblings to have children. His brother was infertile due to being a POW and his sister never married. My grandad had 3 children, 1 of whom had no children. In fact out of 5 of us grandkids we have produced 9 great grandkids so actually increased the family! However my grandads generation and my mums generation all live in the same town so those without kids have always been part of the family and looked after/involved in everything.

I no longer live near where I grew up and most of my friends don't either. That means when our parents are elderly it won't be easy to just pop round with shopping or to help with housework.
People move house a lot too. We were in our old house for 12 years. If we had stayed there, in years time when the older couple across the road become elderly we would have had years of history and interaction and would have looked out for them. we have lived in our current house for 4 years and there are constantly people selling and moving so it is harder to make those connections.

My mum was one of those who looked after everyone. But that was because she was expected to, as she didn't work or worked jobs around us. I think she found a kind of purpose in always being the go- to, but she also resented it.

I have always worked full time. My job demands a lot of me and I have given it, and more. A lot of the kids i teach don't have the life I can give my kids, so I do what I can to help.

It doesn't leave a lot of time or energy for helping elderly parents etc. Equally though, I don't expect my dc to help me.

I guess society is built on a bigger version of what we see as a family unit, but that's not to say it's actually the best model for societies today. Families themselves are often dysfunctional, but force people together because people are held together by obligation.

I often wonder whether we'd be better off in a more fluid model. You come together to have kids, but as they grow up, you all get to live separately, or with people you choose. A bit like today, but work more communities. Maybe coming together if you fancy a shag. As I get older, I can see why so many people chose to live in monasteries and convents (and why they were often so close together!)

This is terribly romantacised in many ways but I sort o see where you're going with it.

One thing I often say that tends to be ignored though is that where these family groups you're referring to worked, usually it was because both partners were genuinely involved and sharing the load. I think, if anything, we've gone backwards in men not taking responsibility for caring and family responsibilities. Me and my siblings spent a lot of time with our dad - he took us with him if he had to go into work on the weekend and he introduced us to his hobbies, he took us out and about while he was doing chores for the family (garden centre, hardware store etc) then he had us there helping him with those chores. He took on all the "heavy lifting" of family life from DIY to late night pick ups. And this was normal - it was the dads we saw carting us all aroudn to sports fixtures, the dads who taught us all to swim and who were then monitoring us in the pool, the dads who were out with us in the gardens doing the lawns and garden maintenance, the dads who had a rota of who was doing the Saturday night party collections. There was this sort of view that as they were physically stronger, they had to step up (and my dad brought my mum tea in bed almost every day of their married life!)

Whereas these days, in so-called "traditional" relationships I see the women doing all the things they used to do as well as all the things my dad and his peers did while these women's husbands are at home watching sport or having lie ins.

So this sense of family that was there before doesn't seem to be there.

But then, I think people are also very selfish. I'm always gobsmacked at christmas time with people saying, "we just want our own little family of 4" and refusing to spend christmas with parents and in laws or extended family. We've just been talking about Christmas with some extra family visiting this year and the agreement is we can't do it at my brother's house because we can't fir his family, our family, the family who are visiting AND the family (who aren't related to us) who have nowhere else to go and therefore are absolutely 100% guaranteed a spot at our table. so we're re-organising our years for hosting. It literally hasn't crossed our minds that we wouldn't include this other family.

When MIL used to come for Christmas with us, she'd always check what children (ours, my siblings', other random childre) would be there so that she could bring small individual gifts for each one, even if she didnt know them. Because that's what community is about. And yet I know so many people who wouldn't dream of allowing their MIL to attend christmas if their own family was with them and who wouldn't cross their minds to think about small gifts for other chilren.

Sorry, this has got long, but I think it's far more than just about families. It's about people's attitudes of every man for themselves and I hate it.

I think there are a lot of cultural differences. GPs in France aren’t generally expected to entertain children during the holidays, children are very much expected to be a bit bored and be polite about it. It’s also very normal for them to take a friend with them - both my kids have been invited for a week to various grandparents places with their friends. They are all either in the countryside or by the sea, and the kids are definitely expected to make their own entertainment. There are often other cousins etc visiting at the same time. They seem to do very simple things - cooking, shopping, picking fruit, swimming, etc.

I think that there's also an issue because we infantalise children these days whcih means they need a lot more care and the more casual care of a grandparent is not sufficient, or considered not sufficient.

I didn't have grandparents, but it was absolutely a thing that we were expected just to get on with things and if we were bored, that was our problem. It did force us into more community events though - we knew the children on our street and even if we weren't good friends, we played together because frankly, otherwise we were bored! ditto, we therefore knew all the neighbours. And there was a general sense of looking out for each other.

Oh but it's been happening for quite some time now: in absence of the family structure, people get into politics to project their traumas change the world.

In fact I think this has always happened in one way or another: dysfunctional families create a dysfunctional society (and adults who run away from building a family because they think that the only way to do it is the dysfunctional way they grew up in). Maybe the novelty factor here is that the awareness of the dysfunction is now available to more people. It's the scale of it, that has no historical precedent, I would argue.

It's a fascinating issue, for me: I love reading other people's perspectives on this.

Very hard to prove childhood abuse. I wouldn't like this system. I'm not trying to be negative, I think the ideas you've put forward such as women not working as much and being available to help the family and others are ideal, but only in good situations. If you're in an abusive family or marriage it would be terrible for individual women.

I think for young women (I'm 30 and my mom didn't work when I was young), a lot of us saw our parents divorce and then our mothers were cast as "taking everything even though she didn't contribute", it's made us very reluctant to be reliant on our husband because it's a massive risk.

I think the changes you've suggested would need to come from men changing and showing women they can be relied upon. I wish things were like that.

The one thing that has changed for everyone, men and women, is that individual ‘happiness’ / fulfilment / achievement is now seen as a goal in itself. Just being a cog in the wheel of raising the next generation is no longer enough, especially when all around us we are presented with visions of what happiness / fulfilment / achievement should look like - and they are a lot more attractive than the relentless grind of parenting or caring for an older person, or (for men) having the heavy responsibility of being the breadwinner and supporting a family.

Alain de Botton adresses this in Status Anxiety, and tbh I can’t see any way of putting that genie back in the bottle and many many people wouldn’t want to because the individual benefits, materially speaking, have been huge. But at a societal level, it’s a problem.

I very much agree, good points.

I plan to move back to my country when I retire. You still have a strong sense of community there compared to the UK. People have more respect for elderly people. Also our relatives here like DH's siblings seem to hate children. They are childless themselves and SIL has said she's giving her inheritance to her friends daughter. She hopes she'll take care of her when she's old.

@frozendaisy The funny thing is, year’s ago (in non-toxic homes) the wives ruled the household money. Dad handed over his wage packet and mum did the budget. Obviously not every household but a lot. This doesn’t of course take into account that women were left penniless if their marriages broke down. In an ideal world we would all be looking out for each and children would all have caring and well nurtured upbringings. MN has enough examples of awful men to show women have no choice but to make sure they can look after themselves when the rubbish man is gone. I want to know why there are so many really poor quality men out there.

The people I worry about most are those who find it hard to make friends and meaningful connections with other people outside their families, because this has become necessary nowadays.

One of my cousins has a child whom I suspect has ASD traits. His parents are older and he doesn’t have friends. If he isn’t able to form some meaningful relationships, he’ll be very alone in the future (he’s an only child).