The nuclear family isn't working

I also wonder at what salary level does it make more sense for a breadwinner household over a dual income household. Childcare is expensive, and likely scales with your standard of living. I net of increased tax rates, child care costs, and time spent navigating childcare costs, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot of dual income households that might actually get more disposable income with one person staying home.

Changing a culture's norms is pretty hard. When it's something "easy", like "give all people respect/human rights", that only takes around 120 years to take effect (or about 60 in the case of gay rights, a crazy fast timeline). But changing gender roles? That's so ingrained that it's foundational in many languages.

I think it will be a lot easier to tackle this economically than via social norms. Give women more money for work, child care, maternity, etc and give men a small stipend if they don't work. Give both a bonus if they work in a non-gender-traditional field. It won't flip the whole thing on its head, but the change will start immediately.

"A nuclear family, elementary family or conjugal family is a family group consisting of parents and their children (one or more), typically living in one home residence. It is in contrast to a single-parent family, the larger extended family, or a family with more than two parents."[1]

From the Miriam Webster site:

"Well, yes. Nuclear families—the term refers to a family group that consists only of parents and children—are nuclear but in a sense of that word that's now much less common than today's most common uses of nuclear."[2]

I take it you mean "both parents + any number of extras" with your definition?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/nuclear-family...

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RE: >With that approach then all nuclear families contain subset single-parent and childless families as well.

Yes, now you understand. Someone saying nuclear families do well is not saying extended families do worse. Your premise is completely a straw man.

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>If we go with this "subset" logic and nuclear families are the best because they are a subset of extended families, then the best outcomes for children are single orphaned people without children because they are subsets of every family.

This is another strawman. You made the assertion about extended families, not op. Op was talking about nuclear families. If the extended family includes the nuclear family, then necessarily a statement made about the nuclear family still applies to the child contained in that family.

No one said they were better because they are a subset, they're saying the superset of the subset is not said to be worse. That is, a nuclear family is not said to be worse than an orphan child. It's entirely an argument of your own making to imply one is saying the superset is worse than the subset, when nothing of the sort was implied.

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>There are no supersets of a nuclear family that are worse than the nuclear family?

I'm sure there are. Just because no one is saying it is objectively worse doesn't mean there aren't cases where it is worse. Not claiming that something is worse is different than claiming that it is never worse.

>There are possibly properties of a nuclear family that only exist when it is a singular nuclear family and those don't necessarily extend to every superset, which is why I asked my original question.

Yes the bizarre thing was your accusation:

>Really? We know this for a fact that the nuclear family is better than extended families or group co-housing arrangements for children?

OP never claimed that a nuclear family inside of an extended family was worse.