WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Fact of Life: The Building Blocks: A Series on the Nuclear Family Part 2

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Propaganda will tell you the nuclear family only came about 70 years ago, In reality, that is simply when they began to attack it. Join Chloe Noller and Mattingly Watson as they discuss the Progressive attack on the nuclear family in part 2 of their latest series.

Hey, Chloe, is the nuclear family a modern invention? You know what, that's a great question. Let's talk about it. Culture, faith, and so much more. This is Fact of Life with Chloe Nuller and Maddie Lee Watson on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Hey, welcome back to Fact of Life. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We are so grateful and excited that you're with us. We're stoked for what we have for you today. We're getting back into the nuclear family. This is what we've been talking about in our last episode. We just briefly talked about the roots of the nuclear family, where family was established in the Garden of Eden with

Adam and Eve, and God's design and intents and purposes for marriage. But today, we're going to be taking it a little bit down on the line, and first we're going to look at a few different examples of family throughout history, you know, kind of counter that propaganda that is being spewed around, has been for the last to what, 50, 60, 70 years that the nuclear family is only a recent invention because that's just not true. And then we will dive a little bit more deeply into specifically the progressive attack on education because it was and is very clearly an attack. Absolutely. Oh, it's so premeditated. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I just think it's interesting. When you take a look at families of the past, you really don't see much differentiation.

And pretty much every society and every culture, depending on, you know, the rights of the women in the household or whatever, you're still seeing a man, a woman, the children. Especially in Asian cultures, you're seeing this family unit staying together for a long time. You know, that the son expected to take care of, the son is expected to take care of his grandparents. and his parents and, you know, like there's this really, this really huge family structure, this really tight family structure. And, you know, even in the Roman society, they kind of worshipped their ancestors. Like, there's this really strong, close tie with family. Family's so important. It's just seen as this integral backbone of society. Exactly. You know, family isn't, and has never really been just a state of being. Instead, it's a

complex system. You know, many people who haven't done a whole ton of research on the subject will say that the nuclear family either came around in, you know, 20th century America or even in the industrialization era over in Europe. But one thing I found interesting in my research is that actually historian Peter Laslitt suggests that that's not true at all. And actually those kind of those eras and the sequence of events that a lot of people say are the cause of the nuclear family were in fact actually caused by the nuclear family. You know, one thing that his evidence points towards is that the nuclear family, you know, was around for long before that. In pre-industrial Europe, people basically had two options. You have your simple household system, which is just kind

of what we casually think of as a nuclear family nowadays, you know, parents, children, but also So what I like to think of as an extension of the nuclear family, kind of that like joint family system that Chloe's talking about with, you know, your aunts, your uncles, your grandparents, because it really is a system of people relying on one another. That's how it's been for thousands of years. I mean, the family has always relied on one another. You have the individual, the family, the community, the polis, like it grows. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. So this is kind of funny. I'm in Greek right now and learning all that great grammar and all this stuff. We also do these readings and one that we've been doing is called Athanasia. It's an Italian book. It's like an Italian author's writing in Greek. I don't know why that is, but all the vocab is in Greek and my professor had to translate all of it.

Wow. I was still Dr. Conyopes for real. But anyways, I just thought it's interesting because this is like a story about an early, early like Greek family right and and you have the dad out working in the fields he's trying to provide for the family he's collecting and you know working the fruit and there's this dependence like his son is out there helping him as well the mother is you know taking care of her family by like by cooking for the family making sure that the house is set up right and in a good spot for her husband when he comes home and from the field

And I don't know, I was just, I'm thinking about this because I think a lot of times when people are looking at this, when they talk about or they refer back to the industrial society is when you kind of start to see this family, this nuclear family idea. I think the industrial era is really where we see a shift. Yeah. Because previously, with agrarian cultures, the fathers and the mothers depend on their children to help them. So you need a father to manage the estate, to manage the farming, you know, and an increasingly agrarian society, which most societies were up until a certain point. Up until industrialization? Right.

No, for sure. I mean, like, everyone has land. Everyone has, you know, they have to provide for themselves. Like, the food is coming from that land. And they're dependent upon each other. The father and the mother work in tandem together, working on the family. business if they're a cobbler or whatever you know the family business but they are also working in the fields they're working in the gardens to provide sustenance for the family the kids are out in the fields from the

earliest time they can walk you know helping with the farm and so it's just really increasingly codependent group of people but when the industrial revolution comes around you don't need that anymore yeah exactly i think the reason that people date they try to put a date on the nuclear family whether it's the Industrial Revolution or it's, you know, the 50s in America, is because that is when attacks started happening. And what it is is propaganda. That's what's telling you it was this recent because it's not true at all. But the propaganda comes from the attacks.

What I saw was really cool. There's actually an article by Michael Balter from Science.org, so like the Science Journal. This is back in 2008. So it's been a few years, but it's obviously still applicable. But at the time, some archaeologists had found this, had found some fossils that were 4,600 years old in Germany. And it was a family buried together, you know, mom, dad, kids. And what they were able to find in this, because you would actually find so much from archaeology. It's super cool.

like just so much about like the time period and what value to them but the way they were all laying in there like they were all like they were intertwined with one another in such like a tight way and it was cool because what they were to draw from this is that this structure we call a nuclear family i mean they had it then too they they were also living and surviving by that that's 4,600 years old yeah yeah like that's incredible So it's obviously been around for thousands of years. Right. And I mean, you even get this reinforced by the Bible. You see these families in the Bible.

I mean, obviously there are ones that are broken and such. But of course, that's going to be throughout history as well because we're leaving a fallen fallen, you know, sinful human beings. So that's certainly a part of it. But yeah, I just, I think also with the industrial revolution, the feminist movement really starts to also infiltrate this. And so, you know, you get women trying to assert their rights. And this also starts to break up the family unit.

But I really think a huge piece of this is the Industrial Revolution because you don't need the families and they're depending on one another anymore. And especially like with, you know, men going to work in the factories and such, like, this is a big deal. Like the mothers are now at home or maybe they are in the factory. It's no longer a home unit. sometimes the children are out there working in the factories as well too but you know it really there's really a change here and the important thing you know about this is it's not just coincidental not

these this rise in feminism and things like that was not coincidental it's all very very deliberate there's actually a government document i can't i wasn't able to find it before we recorded this but maybe next episode i'll have it of them basically admitting of trying to get women out of the home I wrote my term paper actually last semester for my American government class. I got to do a lot of research into this. And what was really interesting to find out is, see, with the nuclear family, that is what you, that's what you rely on. You know, that is what every member of that family, that is the cornerstone of their

life. But if you take away that reliance, if you try to get rid of the nuclear family, then it's no longer essential. And instead, you turn to what is supplying you with. that security with those benefits, with those things in life. And that is government. I mean, it's all an attempt to make this mass society all reliant on one another, which is, I mean, it's crazy.

People just don't realize that it's all intentional. Right. Yeah. So as looking through this, there's a very clear attack beginning in, you know, the mid-1960s. Prior to the mid-1960s, there's some information here from the Heritage Foundation. They have a great article on how welfare undermines marriage and what we can do about it. But prior to the mid-60s, nearly all children were born to married couples. And there's this shift that happens in 1964.

They begin the war on poverty, which is just a really interesting shift. Like they're trying to eradicate poverty, and yet it completely... utterly fails. And you see, when the war on poverty began, he says, when the war and poverty began in 1964, only 7% of children were born to unmarried women. However, over the next four and a half decades, the share of non-marital births exploded. In 2013, 41%. That's 7% to 41% of all children born in the U.S. were outside of marriage. So there's, I mean, the war on poverty begins in 1964 and you skyrocket from 7% to 40% just 45 years later. No, it's incredible. I was reading a similar article by Love to Know and they also gave some really similar statistics of, you know,

in the 60s. 73% of children lived with two parents in their first marriage. And then you get, they gave a few different statistics that kind of worked up till current day. But now, I mean, that's less than half children. Half of children. Half of children. that are living like that. And you know, you look at Chloe statistics too. And all of those together are just absolutely, it's heartbreaking because it doesn't have to be this way. People simultaneously fight for, you know, fight for the loss of the nuclear family, the destruction of it, yet also are perfectly okay with not recognizing that it directly correlates with so many other societal problems that we're seeing.

You know, crime goes up when you have a broken up family. Because these kids don't have role models anymore. They turn towards what can just like give them whatever they're needing, you know? And I mean, I don't know. It's just it's awful because people say, oh, you can live however you want. But I mean, humans were very clearly designed. Right. We're not made to live however we want.

We're made to live according to our design. Another interesting statistic is there, since like around 1965, there's been no significant increase in the number of married couple families with children since 1965. But by contrast, the number of single parent families with children has skyrocketed nearly 10 million, rose from 3.3 million in 1965 to 13.2 million in 2012. So, I mean, you have roughly as a pretty stable amount of married couple families with children, but the single parent families with children skyrockets. And so there's just this huge dichotomy. And so, and they talk about here the fact that, like, there is no, there's no, it's no accident that the collapse of marriage in America began with the war on poverty because of things they passed to incentivize, you know, and provide

benefits to families with children, with single parents, making it worse for two low-income people to get married. You know, they get less food stamps or less money if they get married, so they just end up living together. And so there's all these incentivizations that, I mean, wait, there's all these incentives that the government gives to these families to either not get married, to not have children, or to have children in a single family home. And next week we're really going to go into the huge consequences of a society that kind of functions this way.

Consequences that, you know, if you just look outside the window, you'll see everywhere, which is unfortunate because we're living in the consequences. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's literally that the welfare system that we have today actively penalizes low-income parents who do marry. So this is a good example. mother with two children who earns $15,000 a year would generally see around $5,000 with food stamp benefits. But if she marries a father with the same earnings level, she wouldn't get any food stamps. So already you're seeing like a $5,000 decrease from what she would get. So this is just some tangible, like real reasons and facts about how the families are being targeted. Exactly. Here,

here's the thing. Non-nuclear families due to dire circumstances, you know, death, divorce, sexual immorality, that kind of thing. Those are going to happen. And we, those are, you know, things we can't control. We can't condemn that. But the thing is, we as a community must work together to subsidize that loss and help them. With the government doing it, it's just putting the reliance on the government more. There are some things that are government's role and there are some things that are a community's role. And our role as a community is to help those families that cannot control. the circumstance they're in. But it is not the government's role.

No, it should not be. And it's especially not their role to encourage it, which is what they're doing. And, you know, as we said, we're living in the consequences of that, which we will get into more next week. Yeah, definitely. But, yeah, I think it's interesting too because

you see Alexander de Tocqueville in the early 1800s, this guy that comes over from France. And in his book, Democracy in America, he talks about these really incredible independent institutions or like voluntary associations that the Americans have. And it's he's he's remarking that this is incredible. Like these these are voluntary things that people have you know they gather together to to take care of societal problems like poverty

in the community, things like that. But that's something that like eventually starts leaving America. And what's interesting about this attack is that it's not just coming through, you know, food steps or encouragement or propaganda, but it's coming at the very core of what shapes the minds of our nation. It's coming through the education system even. And you don't realize it, but it's in literally every single aspect. So looking at education, like a large part that's breaking up the family nowadays is the pro-LGBQ plus. like curriculum that's I don't know the right word for it but you know there's just like several instances there was one instance that I found that was absolutely mind-blowing there was one instance

specifically of a teacher and this was just in November of 2023 so not that long ago um and it was in Seattle Washington sorry about that state Chloe no Seattle is the thing of its own that that's true but Anne Christensen she had her students send letters to a parental rights group, Moms for Liberty, and the letters were derogatory. They said things like, gay is slay, stop being a rat, stop bullying, and like things like, and was just very much so that day was attacking this, you know, mom's parental right group. And at first glance, you're like, oh, like, this is one, this is like, this is like, blatantly propaganda in the classroom, which is a whole other issue. But it's also teaching them

that no matter what happens, what the government and the regime defines as what is right and what society finds what is right comes like miles before family. And it's teaching them to, you know, be rude and stand up to their parents and breaking, like, fracturing that relationship. Yeah. And I mean, that goes all the way back to what we talked about in our education episodes. Just like, you know, there's this huge attack on education and there's so many repercussions from what happens, you know, when you are telling children the wrong thing, when you're teaching them the wrong thing. This has huge repercussions on society. And so next week, we're really going to talk about some of these consequences. You know, we know that, and because it's biblical design that marriage is good for children, mothers, and fathers, but it is disappearing. And this is a huge problem, and there's a lot of repercussions on this.

So we're going to talk about those consequences next week. We hope you will tune in. Thank you so much for joining us today. As always, my name is Chloe Nuller. And I'm Maddingley-Watson. And this is Fact of Life. The Fact of Life podcast can be found at at Fact of Life podcast on Instagram or at fact-of-life podcast. on Twitter.

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