This week's Ecosophia talks about synchronicity, and with that theme comes this article:

The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
"The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together."

Its interesting that this subject would come up, just as I'm beginning to seek a new family structure, living together with my unmarried sister in a shared home.

(The article is long but very informative. I urge you to read it.)

The bottom line is that for those of us less affluent and with access to money, the two parent, single family living on their own has been both an aberration of the way families have lived for millennium, and today, a complete and utter disaster. The statistics from the article are sobering. By every measure we do less well than our families of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This isn't to say things were perfect then. That better life came at the cost of the women of the family, who shared much of the physical effort that made the success happen. Yet if modern family structure freed women of that toil, its come at a terrible emotional and financial cost.

If the statistics get a bit long, skip to the last part of the article, it discusses some of the new extended family structures which are being done now.

Things are changing though, people are rediscovering the extended family life that was so common before, but in new ways and new structures. The definition of who is family is expanding to become more than just your kin, but to who you want to be family and who in your new "tribe".

What families look like in one hundred years will be interesting to see.