Could lockdown be the final nail in the coffin of the nuclear family?

In China, divorce rates are said to have risen significantly because families are spending too much time together during self-isolation. In France, the UK and Australia, there have been reports of rising domestic violence. Right now the nuclear family - a married couple and two-and-a-half children - is arguably under more threat than it ever has been in its brief, tenuous history.

Where people previously found space to breathe, whether at work or for social reasons, now there is none. Is the coronavirus highlighting the possibility that the family structure upheld as the socio-cultural ideal for just over half a century has been a catastrophe for many?

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE CLAN

In ancient societies people organised in clans, groups united by actual or perceived kinship and descent. This family comprised father, mother and their children, aunts, uncles, grandparents and people who were accepted as kin, even if not related by blood. Tellingly, South African anthropologist Monica Wilson described kinsmen as "mystically dependent" on one another. The widely quoted African proverb, "It takes a village to raise a child", comes to mind.

Extended families in a single homestead offered certain advantages, including a greater sense of security and belonging, shared resources, a wide pool of role models to help perpetuate desired behaviours and people to turn to during a crisis such as death or natural disaster.

Even in cultures where adults left home after marriage to start their own households, the extended family formed an important support network offering similar advantages, with these families often living in neighbouring areas and helping one another financially and emotionally, giving each other direction every step of the way.

In the Western world much of that changed after industrialisation as unmarried young men left farms and villages for urban centres, where they became employed workers who sought out partners in the city, leading to the dissolution of many extended families.

In a powerful essay he wrote for The Atlantic, The Nuclear Family was a Mistake, New York Times columnist David Brooks argues that the nuclear family, rather than being the norm for humans to flourish, was a freakish aberration that peaked in the US between 1950 and 1965, after which men's wages began declining, society became more individualistic, the feminist movement paved the way for women to move out of the household and into the workplace and the birth-control pill meant that people could have sex outside of marriage. As a result, we began wanting different things from relationships.

Brook traces family arrangements across time and cultures, noting that bands, clans and extended families have been the norm throughout human history. By bringing about their demise, he says, "We've made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We've made life better for adults but worse for children. We've moved from big, interconnected and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families." It's a system that's liberated the rich and ravaged the working class and the poor.

APARTHEID AND THE NUCLEAR FAMILY

Closer to home, apartheid legacies like forced removals and migrant labour have had a fundamental influence on the structure of family life and the concept of home in South Africa, with many children growing up in fatherless homes and seeing their fathers once a year. Today dual, or stretched, households continue to link urban and rural family nodes and it's not unusual for children to be raised by grandmothers or other family members.

But in the South African Child Gauge 2018, published by the University of Cape Town, it is reported that the state still tends to view the nuclear family as the standard, conferring on it a privileged status when it comes to policies and the attitudes of the policymakers.

Yet Stats SA figures show that in 2016 most children up to age six lived in single-parent families, 45.6% with their mothers only and 2% with their fathers only. Of the 989,318 babies born last year in South Africa, 61.7% have no information about their father included on their birth certificate. The reality is that the nuclear family is unlikely to make a big comeback.

It's not a situation unique to this country. In fact, 62% of all births to non-university- educated mothers in the US in 2014 were to unmarried women.

ABANDONING THE WRECKAGE OF HYPER INDIVIDUALISM

Family structure is rapidly changing. And here is where it becomes complicated. More children are now growing up with only one parent. With family life more richly varied than ever before, researchers have been looking at how children from single-parent and two-parent families fare in life and the evidence is beginning to suggest there's a measurable difference in how well they do.

It's a deeply sensitive subject and the academics involved insist it's not about judging but rather capturing the challenges of single-parent life.

In the US the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study recruited 5,000 children and their parents in large American cities, mostly in families where the parents were not married. Those whose parents had divorced were more likely to fail to progress at school. Children in what the researchers termed a "fragile family", where parents were cohabiting or there was a lone parent, were twice as likely not to graduate from high school. Even a child in a stable single-parent household was likely to do worse on some measures than a child of a married couple.

In the UK, in the year 2000, 19,000 children were recruited with their parents into the Millennium Cohort Study. The idea was to track their lives through to adulthood, looking at many different aspects of how they were doing. Unlike the US study, the data here shows little difference between married and cohabiting parents, perhaps because this large study is more representative of the population as a whole. The children in the Millennium Cohort Study are assessed every year for basic skills such as numeracy and literacy, and children in single-parent families appear to be worse off.

Neither study aims to change or challenge the complex decisions individuals make about how to raise their children but they are asking questions of wider society about what could be done to provide more support to parents taking on the difficult job of bringing up children on their own.

According to Brooks, though, the demise of the nuclear family has had deleterious effect on children and adults, resulting in a vicious cycle. "People who grow up in disrupted families have more trouble getting the education they need to have prosperous careers. People who don't have prosperous careers have trouble building stable families. The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatised."

But Brooks is by no means advocating for a return to the halcyon days of the nuclear family. On the contrary, as a large percentage of families with children enter new relationships and marriages in new shapes and varieties that are no longer heteronormative, he makes a case for more experimentation with the emerging phenomenon of forged families, a return, if you will, to the days of our ancestors.

What's required in an approach that is both new and ancient, he says, citing the gay and lesbian communities in San Francisco in the early '80s, those frequently banished from their nuclear families, as being at the forefront in the US of forged families.

He advocates for more connected ways of living, with things like coaching programmes, subsidised early education and expanded parental leave, noting; the most important shifts will be cultural and driven by individual choices. The social stress and economic pressures of our hyper-individualistic societies in which being true to yourself is the most important achievement - at any cost - are simply too exhausting to maintain. Given the spiralling number of children growing up in one-parent families, perhaps there's indeed a case to be made for looking after the health of the tribe.

"The two-parent family, meanwhile, is not about to go extinct," Brooks says. "For many people, especially those with financial and social resources, it is a great way to live and raise children. But a new and more communal ethos is emerging, one that is consistent with 21st-century reality and 21st-century values."