\u201cIn my childhood,\u201d [ Barry] Levinson told me, \u201cyou\u2019d gather around the grandparents and they would tell the family stories \u2026 Now individuals sit around the TV, watching other families\u2019 stories.\u201d The main theme of Avalon, he said, is \u201cthe decentralization of the family. And that has continued even further today. Once, families at least gathered around the television. Now each person has their own screen.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is the story of our times\u2014the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn\u2019t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.<\/p>\n
If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We\u2019ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We\u2019ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We\u2019ve 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 (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.<\/p>\n