Beyond the Nuclear Family: Reimagining Kinship and Care

by Nnenaya Bloomstein (she/her) Williams College Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies student and Mabel Wadsworth Center intern

What does the American family look like? Typically, our families are portrayed as being white, upper-middle class, and having two parents with biological children. This might even be the first depiction that comes to mind when you think of family, but the reality is that the nuclear family is becoming harder and harder to find. As a result of changes in our economy, laws, social beliefs, and in our population size and demographics, the American family has taken a much different form. In 1970, the percentage of children living with two married parents was 88% but the most recent census taken by Pew research in 2021 showed that this statistic has dropped to around 59%. Additionally, fewer women are choosing to have children and even less Americans are deciding to get married at all. Compared to 3.1 births in 1976, the average number of lifetime births per woman has gone down to 2.0 and the amount of married adults has gone from 69% in 1970 to 50% in 2021 (Aragão et al.). These trends don’t just reflect changes to our physical and social world, they also reveal that, perhaps without even intending to, we are creating families outside of the norm. There are more families that have single parents, multigenerational households, non-biological relatives, and people parenting pets. Yet despite these clear patterns, the private, two parent household still dominates our cultural imagination, preventing us from seeing the power of having diverse families that aren’t solely based around biological kin. 

Media portrayal, government policies, and our idealization of the past, all contribute to the ceaseless desire for the nuclear family even in the face of a changing world (Johnson). However, not only is the nuclear family an unrealistic depiction of American families, it is also a deeply harmful model that reinforces the normativity of whiteness, capitalism, heterosexuality and patriarchy. In “Kidless Lit: Childlessness and Minor Kinship Forms,” Natasha Hurley writes that our societies desire for the nuclear family is about “the reproduction of dominance in the form of whiteness, of settler colonialism, of capitalism, and of cultural monogamy” (Hurley 252). While the structure of the nuclear family has a complicated past, its development in the 19th and 20th century was rooted in the privatization of the home and economy (Tallbear). Keeping the care labor of mothers hidden and the capitalist labor of fathers compulsory, are key components of both the nuclear family and American capitalism. This model enables the unequal treatment of men and women, while completely ignoring queer and polyamorous families along with all of the alternative ways we create kin. In “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family,” Kim Tallbear writes on this issue, showing how “growing the white population through biologically reproductive heterosexual marriage(…)was crucial to settler-colonial nation-building” (Tallbear 146). While the perpetuation of the private, monogamous, white family with a mother, father, and two kids is rooted in prejudice and racism, this doesn’t mean that all families that exist under this model are causing harm. However, it does mean that creating alternative family structures and working to destabilize the nuclear family is an essential form of activism and social change. 

Although families are becoming more diverse in nearly every demographic, many groups have always existed outside of nuclear family norms. Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic people, along with queer people and people with disabilities, have consistently had higher rates of single-person households, multigenerational families, and family formations with nonbiological kin (Aragão et al.). Not only do these marginalized groups have different inherent cultural practices around family, they have also been denied access to the security and privilege that comes with the nuclear family, resulting in the creation of these chosen families. While being unable to fit into the normative family model can also mean being marginalized, creating kin in diverse and queer ways can create more possibilities for more meaningful care and love. In the New York Times article, “The Joy In Finding Your Chosen Family,” Dani Blum writes about five chosen families which formed as a result of the rejection many queer people face from their biological families. Not only do these families produce the same kind of unconditional love that we associate with biological kin, their love and care is, in some ways, deeper than normative families. Chosen families are based, not on an inherent obligation, but on a decision to love one another against all odds (Blum). Although the white, heterosexual family still represents the norm in American society, we are slowly learning and modeling our families after these queer ones, which is a step in the right direction. 

As mentioned before, we are at a point in history in which the modern American family looks nothing like the nuclear family of the 20th century. We are getting divorced at higher rates, choosing not to have children, and parenting and caring for children that aren’t our own.  All of these changes are presented to us as negative, but in reality they are completely normal and, if done right, still produce healthy and joyful families. Those of you reading this might have been parented by step-parents or single parents, maybe you have adopted siblings or cousins, you might live with friends and take care of their children, or maybe your children are your pets and plants. All of these changes expand our community of kin and make it more possible to create family with those that do not share our DNA. It’s time we start recognizing the work we are doing to create non-normative families as revolutionary, rather than a failure to live up to the “traditional” American family. A family structure that teaches us to keep our families and the love we share with them completely private. The transformation of family we are seeing all around us and within our own homes moves us towards a world in which we are able to extend familial care to everyone. A world in which love is not a commodity, but something to be shared. 

Works Cited

Aragão, Carolina et al. “The Modern American Family.” Pew Research Center, September 14, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/09/14/the-modern-american-family/ 

Blum, Dani. “The Joy In Finding Your Chosen Family.” The New York Times, July 25, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/25/well/lgbtq-chosen-families.html. Accessed 10 August 2026. 

Hurley, Natasha. “Kidless Lit: Childlessness and Minor Kinship Forms.” Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form, edited by Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 248-68. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2vr9cnp.15. 

Johnson, Kent. “The Persistent Myth of the Nuclear Family.” Anthropology News, September 1, 2025. https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/the-persistent-myth-of-the-nuclear-family/.

Tallbear, Kim. “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family.” Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations, edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway, University of Chicago Press, 2018, pp. 145-209, https://isgradresearchcluster.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tallbear-making-love-and-relations-beyond-settler-sex-and-family.pdf.