When you picture a “typical” American family, it might look something like this: two parents, their 2.5 kids and a house in a neighborhood that does not include their extended family or friends. The neighbors are reasonably friendly, but you don’t support each other by sharing any caregiving responsibilities, and you wouldn’t count on them in an emergency. Grandparents are available sometimes, but not consistently and usually you have to go to their house if you want to see them. Each four-person family is more or less on their own.
But this is only a recent idea of how our lives should be structured. The self-reliant nuclear family has never been a sustainable model, and has historically not worked for certain groups, like BIPOC, low-income, queer found family and polyamorous folks. Yet the vision remains an ideal that our policies and laws are organized around, though that is starting to change with more states legally recognizing and protecting multi-parents and other diverse non-nuclear family structures.
Amidst changes in the economy, urbanization, immigration, caregiving burnout, rising loneliness and marriage and reproduction rates, however, there’s been a shift away from the self-reliant nuclear family as the center for family life. In fact, there is no one predominant family form anymore. Instead, people are returning to the idea of having a strong support network and living with or near the people we’re closest with, just like we did for most of humanity. In fact, it’s become such a ubiquitous desire that if you’re having a conversation with someone of millennial age or younger, it’s only a matter of time before they wistfully bring up their dream of getting a plot of land with their friends and living in a more communal way.
Families are looking for a way out of the self-reliant nuclear structure.
“We create memes and jokes about it, but why don't we actually do it?” asks Jessica Daylover, a digital media producer, entertainer and mom of two, one of whom has high medical, emotional and social needs. “Because it takes a lot of time and money to buy land and build a big house or several houses, so it's probably not going to happen for 99.99% of people who want to do it. But something that would change my life immensely is living with or at least sharing resources with just one other family — just one. It's like a micro version of the bigger dream.”
Phil Levin knows exactly how difficult it is to create an intentional community from scratch with friends. He helped found the co-owned Oakland community Radish, which has six buildings and 10 units, and is home to 19 adults and five babies. Phil and his wife, Kristen Berman, a behavioral scientist and the CEO and co-founder of the company Irrational Labs, are two of the 19 adults, and their child one of the five babies.
“The core impulse behind communal living is wanting a happier, healthier, more social life with more support,” said Levin. “People often find life overwhelming when they don’t have enough support, particularly when they’re taking care of kids or parents, or need their own extra help.”
Jessica did end up sharing childcare responsibilities with another family for a while. “I was able to find one family that wanted to do a childcare trade, and it was amazing!” she says. “I began to wonder if there was an app for people who desired this kind of community and connection.”
Daylover couldn’t find one, so she’s currently in the process of making an app through crowdfunding. Nuclear Fusion will match people looking to support each other’s caregiving needs (childcare, senior care, errand running, house and pet sitting, companionship, etc.) as well as teach the skills needed to build and maintain a village, like how to communicate, advocate for your needs, and navigate decision making and conflict. The app will function similar to a dating app, with the security and background checks of nanny-finding platforms like SitterCity and Care.com. They are currently searching for investors, and just launched the alpha version of the app in July of 2024 for Kickstarter backers and will launch it for the public sometime in August.
Phil recently started the social real estate platform, LiveNearFriends, which helps people find homes that are within a short walk of friends and family. (It’s reported that your happiness increases when you live within a mile of a friend.) The new venture, which began in November of 2023, closed a funding round in March of 2024. Ultimately, community and close relationships are really what people want when they talk about that plot of land with friends.
Rhaina Cohen, a producer and editor for the NPR podcast Embedded, discussed the importance of having a variety of different close relationships in her book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. “Research has shown that friendships are linked to happiness, greater marital satisfaction, and living longer,” she says in an interview with Good Housekeeping. “In interviews, I've heard people describe their friends as ‘soulmates’ or explain how deep friendships bring profound meaning to their lives.”
“We're taught that a romantic relationship is only successful if it functions as a one-stop-shop — where we can meet our needs for a confidant, co-parent, roommate, best friend and more,” she adds. “If a couple feels overwhelmed by all the responsibilities that fall to them, they may fault their relationship or themselves as individuals, rather than realize that we need larger support networks. One person is not enough to share all of life's burdens and joys.”
We weren’t always so focused on individual family units.
The benefits of having a village cannot be overstated. Studies have shown that healthy people who are more socially connected live longer, and that communities who engage in social connection regularly enjoy better health outcomes than communities who don’t. And according to the Harvard Happiness study, your relationships predict your happiness and healthiness later in life. It makes sense — villages are about taking care of each other and making sure everyone gets what they need.
Historically, having a village is also how we survived. “Anthropologists believe that for 95% of human history, we evolved within an egalitarian social structure. This shaped us to thrive on close social bonds, mutual support and shared responsibilities. We are hardwired to seek connection, collaboration, and fairness,” wrote Andie, who has a degree in anthropology and goes by Ancestral Habits on Instagram, in a May 20, 2024 post, citing evidence in How We Got Stuck: The Origins of Hierarchy and Inequality and Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress.
While there’s no straight line from our egalitarian villages to the nuclear family, eventually society moved away from resource sharing, and wealth and power amassed in the hands of the few. Capitalism and the church told us how we should live and what our families should look like. The ubiquitous nature of the nuclear family developed over periods of economic downturns, unrest, and times of prosperity, like during the Industrial Revolution, WWI, WWII, post-WWII growth and colonization.
Today a wide variety of non-nuclear family structures and living arrangements are on the rise. For instance, there’s been an increase in multigenerational households (which doubled from 9% in 1971 to 18% in 2021), communal living and intentional community co-housing developments, living with one or more roommates, mommunes (i.e., single moms who live together), platonic friends or partners teaming up to live and sometimes raise kids together, and housing and resource sharing among people for whom the nuclear family has never worked.
Families who’ve tried different living arrangements feel supported by community.
Sam and Benjamin Hunter, who have been married for 15 years, live in a multigenerational household. They built a home together with Sam’s parents seven years ago. Sam’s parents were then in their late 60s/early 70s, and would eventually need help as they got older. Meanwhile, Sam and Ben had two young kids and needed help right then. “My mom suggested we move in together,” Sam says. “It was a very conscious and intentional decision.”
They spent months planning how the new living arrangement would work, going over things like privacy, childcare, day-to-day responsibilities and the design of the house. Sam’s parents help take care of the kids (Sam and Ben had a third child two years after moving in with Sam’s parents) and have a separate area of the house with a full kitchen, bedroom, den and a door that closes their section of the house off. For now, Sam and Ben mainly just help with property upkeep and the occasional technology-related task for Sam’s parents. “Everyone is responsive to people’s shifting needs,” Ben says.
Sam and Ben are also polyamorous and in a triad with Allie Long (they all date each other, and are open to dating others as well), who moved in with them in June 2023. All three co-parent together. “After my divorce, I was coming to terms with the fact that I might not have kids,” Allie says. “It all took shape at once. Sam's parents have been incredibly welcoming and wonderful.”
Allie is a musician, as are Sam’s parents. Before Allie moved in, Sam’s parents had gotten out of the habit of playing music. Now all three play their instruments after dinner, which is something Sam’s parents used to do when Sam was growing up. “It means a lot to them to have so much music back in the house,” Sam says.
Sam’s parents also appreciate knowing that there are three adults living at the house. “Both Allie and Ben work remotely, so there's almost always at least one of us there during the day. I think that’s really comforting to them,” Sam says. “And with so many adults there, Ben and I have more time for ourselves and our hobbies, so we can feel like more than just parents.”
Ember Cooley lives with a platonic partner who is aromantic, which means having little to no romantic attraction to others, and they often open their home to their village of loved ones.
They once lived with a roommate who has a young daughter. “When this child lived with us, caring for her became a community effort, involving people dear to us, including my partner's father, who we rent from and lives upstairs, and some neighbors,” Ember says. “Eventually, they found good housing far away, so we text and video call her daughter regularly, and have her stay with us on school breaks.”
They consider each of their loved ones irreplaceable. “Each deserves regular conversation about our needs and expectations, even if we have never been romantic or sexual. I value all the types of love I'm lucky enough to receive, equally,” Ember says.
Families have to be intentional about their organization.
Though the American family has changed, tax breaks, healthcare, citizenship and protection against discrimination still mainly applies to the nuclear family.
Lawyer Diana Adams thinks that U.S. laws need to expand to include protections for a diversity of families, and has helped spearhead efforts to do so in a variety of states. Most recently, they were part of the coalition that drafted and passed bills in Oakland and Berkeley to extend non-discrimination laws to cover individuals with diverse family and intimate relationship structures, including multi-partner/multi-parent families and relationships, step-families, multi-generational households, non-nuclear family structures, consensually nonmonogamous relationships and platonic partnerships, including asexual and aromantic relationships. “It benefits all of us to allow for the kinds of families that exist and give them the support they need to be stable,” Adams says.
No matter what kind of family or village you have or want to have, setting up agreements and really getting to know each other ahead of time is important. In particular, Adams encourages people and potential communities to make co-living agreements and parenting agreements, which are out-of-court agreements that you can make through contract law.
“What's important is that people make really clear what their expectations are,” they add. “If you don't make a plan for how you communicate with each other, the loudest person is always going to be the default leader. It’s important that we be mindful about the power dynamics of gender, race, and class too, and think about what our decision making process is going to be and what our shared values are.”
Another thing to keep in mind: Before you make agreements and get started, you go slow. “Make sure that you've had your first fights and worked on a major project together that's going to be stressful and intense to see and develop that level of trust first,” Adams says.
They note that it’s important to acknowledge that her work, and in particular, her suggestions about how we can live together well in community, non-nuclear family structures and extended family dynamics, are informed by wisdom found in immigrant communities, indigenous communities, and communities of color.
Without our villages, burnout and exhaustion have become the norm. But we have it within ourselves and our imaginations to create communities that return us to our roots. Alternatives to the nuclear family, including having a village, are becoming not only normalized, but desirable, reintroducing us to an idea that our ancestors took for granted — that we all function best when we’re part of a community.
