Many modern thinkers, of various thinking abilities, have proposed notions that the family is rather less of a beneficial construct than most of we moderns would tend to think. Here's an interesting article from The New Stateman magazine examining one such tradition of anti-family thinking:
https://www.newstatesman.com/internatio ... ish-family
A quote giving a flavour of the article:
"The family, Lewis and other abolitionists and feminists argue, privatises care. The legal and economic structure of the nuclear household warps love and intimacy into abuse, ownership, scarcity. Children are private property, legally owned and fully economically dependent on their parents. The hard work of care – looking after children, cooking and cleaning – is hidden away and devalued, performed for free by women or for scandalously low pay by domestic workers. Even the happiest families, in the words of the writer Ursula Le Guin, are built upon a “whole substructure of sacrifices, repressions, suppressions, choices made or forgone, chances taken or lost, balancings of greater or lesser evils”. If we abolish the family, we abolish the most fundamental unit of privatisation and scarcity in our society. More care, more love, for all".
For many of us, this will sound rather shocking. Children as private property!? "Whole substructures of sacrifice, repressions, suppressions ......"!?
My own working life, not to mention my early upbringing in a working class suburb of Tyneside, did reveal that the family is often a major source of damage to it's members. There is indeed a trend for children to be "owned and controlled as property" and for women to be given various forms of low-standard status, sometimes bordering on slavery.
Of course, not all families are that bad. But the article mentioned above suggests that families of the modern kind, even the nice ones, are in practice denying their members all sorts of potential betterments and advantages.
But wot U fink?
Cugel