Origin of Everything

[upbeat music] We're all pretty familiar with the image of the American nuclear family, with two parents, a couple of kids, and a loyal canine companion, but when did we start thinking of the nuclear family as the most natural one?

[upbeat music] So with Thanksgiving coming up, we thought it would be fun to talk about family.

It's safe to say that most of us know more than a few families that don't fit into the typical nuclear-family mold.

Yet, despite this diversity, if asked to describe a prototype of the American family, a lot of us will still recall images more reminiscent of "Leave it to Beaver" than anything we've witnessed in real life.

But if all of us can imagine or know families of all shapes, sizes, and styles, then why does the expression "nuclear family" still get lobbied around to represent some sort of idealized unit?

Well, before we dive into the incongruous history of the family structure with the same name as the center of an atom, we should ask ourselves: What is the history of family structures before the idea of the nuclear family became the shorthand for "normal"?

So, this answer varies based on time period, region, and culture.

Kinship, or the recognition of relationships between people within the same community or biological family, plays a huge role in how we define our family structure.

And, yes, everyone all over the world has a biological ancestry, but who and what we call our familial relations is not that cut and dried.

In the Iroquois system, your father's brothers were also your father.

And your mother's sisters were also your mother.

In the Kaw Nation kinship system, your mother's brother's daughter, who we would call your cousin, is also called your mother.

And in the matrilineal Masuo culture in Northern China, women freely chose their partners, and who your biological father is is not considered very important at all.

Frequently, your biological father wouldn't even live with you, and your mother's brothers often fill in the role of the father figure.

Plus, all of this is frequently even more complicated by language barriers.

So, if you think your family structure is weird, trust me--it's not.

But in terms of European history, from the 1500s until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it was common for peasant families in Northern and Central Europe to live in two-generational households consisting of the parents as the older generation, in charge of the family, and the children as the second generation.

That was also because kids were a big part of the economic structure of the household, working with their parents to sustain the family's livelihood.

At any given point in time, only less than 10% of these peasant families lived intergenerationally, in part because a lot of the grandparents didn't live long enough to make this a reality.

And by the end of the Middle Ages, most families in those regions were in the traditional nuclear format, owing in part to the influence of the Christian-church- sanctioned monogamy.

By contrast, in the same periods in Eastern and Southern Europe, intergenerational living was much more common, with several generations of the family all living within the same household.

But not everyone thought the nuclear family was ideal.

In the 19th century, researchers who were studying family structures theorized that nuclear families they observed in manufacturing regions of Western Europe and England might not be the best since once children left to form their own families, it left elder parents alone.

There are also other structures that were practiced, such as conjugal families-- or families that were connected through marriage-- and consanguineal families-- families that are connected by their common bloodline.

But another big part of how families were defined centered on the question of marriage.

Although there are more contemporary notions that marriage are about love, fidelity, building a life together, and making cute centerpieces out of Mason jars, that wasn't always the case.

Marriage is an ancient custom dating back thousands of years, and evidence shows that marriage customs have varied as widely as family structures.

According to Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage: A History," a lot of those marriages were more about family connections than love.

"What marriage had in common was that "it really wasn't about the relationship "between the man and the woman.

"It was a way of getting in-laws, of making alliances, and expanding the family labor force."

Not romantic.

And marriage includes a laundry list of options like arranged marriages, where families choose their children's spouse, or polygamy, where there are multiple marriages within one defined group.

That includes both polygyny, or one man with multiple wives, and polyandry, or one woman with multiple husbands.

And although polygyny is the more commonly known practice, accounts of polyandry exist in approximately 53 societies around the world, such as Tibet.

Although religious marriages have a long history, as centuries have passed, the state has played a larger and larger role in regulating marriage practices.

So, a marriage can have a religious ceremony, a civil ceremony, or a combination of both.

And it wasn't until the last 250 years or so that the idea that marriages should be love matches started gaining traction.

So, we've established that families have lots of different shapes, sizes, and customs, so that brings us to our next question: When did the "nuclear family" become shorthand for the American household?

Well, the use of the specific phrase, "nuclear family" in English can be dated back to the 1920s.

But as the evidence shows, the concept or form of the nuclear family wasn't exactly new.

But in the 1950s U.S., the Cold War was accompanied by an economic boom, the growth of suburban developments on the outskirts of major cities, and a growth in the middle class and a population surge, all of which encouraged the nuclear family.

But it wasn't inherently a natural development.

PSAs and how-to videos broadcast across the country were specifically designed to teach families how to behave appropriately and what to do if they were going to achieve this stylized ideal.

But these realities were marked heavily by divisions of class and race, as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s was occurring simultaneously.

So, even though in the 1960s, some historians and sociologists interested in family structures were concluding that nuclear families were the only widely-spread version of the family, the contemporary reality for many American families differed greatly from the ones presented in popular media.

But, I mean, if even "The Brady Bunch" was blended, then that leads us to asking our final question: Is the nuclear family really the most popular form in the U.S.?

And if not, what kind of families are out there?

Well, let's look at the data.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2012, 66% of households were family households, down from 81% in 1970.

And in those same years, married couples with children under 18 dropped from 40% to 20%.

Black and Latino children were more likely to live in single-parent households, and households with only one person jumped from 17% to 27%.

So, it seems that while "married couples with kids" still describes a substantial number of families in the U.S., that number is shifting every day.

But in the last hundred years, marriages and families have continued to evolve, at least in regards to the types of unions becoming legally recognized and visible in the popular consciousness.

The political and legal system of a region can determine the types of marriages recognized by law, which in turn impacts the type of families that are most visible.

In 1967, the Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia struck down all laws prohibiting interracial marriage in the United States.

And in 2015, Obergefell v. Hodges ruled that laws against same-sex marriage in the U.S. were unconstitutional.

But families also exist outside of legal and state recognition, and that's not a new phenomena.

In Ancient Greece, "alumni" was the term for children who were fostered by another family, and there is legal precedent for adoption dating back to the Code of Hammurabi in the 18th century B.C.

And today, there are over a quarter of a million adoptions worldwide every year.

So clearly, blood ties, marriage, and children aren't the only ways that family can be defined.

So, how does it all add up?

Well, marriages, families, and kinship groups have been going strong for thousands of years, in almost every configuration that we can think of, and that includes the nuclear family.

But while the image of the nuclear family is often held up as the ideal and only form a family can take, whether or not that's true seems to vary by social group and region.

But, as we gear up for the holidays and think about passing various side dishes to members of our own family with both joy and maybe a little bit of caution, it's important to remember, whatever form, shape, or size it takes, we have the power to define what family should look like for ourselves.