The cornerstone of society, the family, has seen unprecedented change since the 1950s. With the number of relatives that an individual has expected to drop by 35% in the near future, one might ask what the future of family life holds. Additionally, more and more Western adults are now child-free by choice, and alarmingly low Western birth rates are continuing to decline.
One crucial outcome has been a decline in mental health across the developed West. The decline of stable families, as one of the primary institutions of individual stability and sanity, was bound to be attended by such costs. With one in four people facing a mental illness at least once throughout their lives, and the rate of the most prominent mental health disorders—anxiety and depression—increasing by 28% and 25% respectively in 2023 alone, we can speak of a mental health crisis. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the mental health crisis is “indisputable and urgent.” It is high time that we take a deeper look at the relationship between prosperous families and mentally flourishing individuals.
Dominant progressive thinkers have argued that the liberation from family life has been a deliverance to people at large, bringing opportunities, independence, and a hitherto unimaginable degree of freedom. Declining family unity is generally written off as a small price to pay or even a natural good reflective only of the emancipation of the individual. Yet the negative impact on the ground is more drastic than first meets the eye. While much of conservative thought has stressed the societal importance of a renaissance of the family as a social institution, I believe that the public debate should additionally be focused on beating modernity at its own game: in creating psychologically resilient, stable, and meaningful lives for people. Modern culture, with its progressive language of self-actualization and happiness, promotes a paradigm in which individual happiness and liberty are deemed the greatest good. But what if we could demonstrate that traditional family life brings exactly that for which modern man claims to strive, and much more besides?
The first step towards family erosion
To understand why family life changed so rapidly throughout the 20th century, we must look at the sexual revolution and its long-lasting impact. Erupting in the 1960s, this wholesale reversal of values transformed how society perceives sex, from a predominantly marital, sacred, and procreative act towards a primary act of pleasure, liberty, and individual emancipation. The result, among other things, has been an increase in divorces and a decrease in household size, marriage rates, and—perhaps most concerning of all—fertility rates (which are now below replacement levels across the vast majority of the developed world).
Underlying these sociological changes is the quest for individual emancipation. This unquestionable dogma—that unlimited liberty represents the highest virtue—is where modernism meets the reality of human nature. Unfettered freedom of choice and radical independence were promised as guarantors of overall quality of life and well-being. In practice, the shift from complementarity towards egalitarianism and from normative behavior towards the worship of the will has in fact made families more vulnerable and unstable over time which, as I will show further, has decreased the quality of life of the individual.
The solution to family erosion
A psychological account of the importance of families is crucial, but it only can be applied once we put it in its proper framework to understand human nature at the most fundamental level. We must call upon the resources of the Western tradition to make explicit an old truth that, until very recent times, was taken for granted: society can only be prosperous to the extent that its families flourish. Aristotle, Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and Roger Scruton, as some of the (pre)conservative giants on whose shoulders we stand, provide key insights which do not only explain the psychological agony in which we find ourselves, but also supply the tools with which we might help ourselves get back on track.
Let’s start with Aristotle, as the classical spokesman for family life. In the Politics, Aristotle describes the procreative pair of man and woman as the beginning and fundamental unit of society. This basic unit branches out into the extended family, village, and the city as a whole. The family thus holds a fundamental role as the primary multigenerational institution which enables the formation of family narratives. As Aristotle makes clear, these narratives preserve the virtues that its members need to develop according to their telos—that is, their goal or purpose. Man’s purpose, for Aristotle, is happiness, though happiness understood in a far more robust way than it usually is today. In order to strive towards our telos, Aristotle claims that we need knowledge of morality, the will to make virtuous choices, and the resolve to perform virtuous deeds, quite independently of achieving personal gain or avoiding loss. The family provides nothing less than the practice grounds, fitted with correctional mechanisms, for reaching our telos.
In modern empirical psychology, we find further support for Aristotle’s foundational outlook on families. Family narratives have been shown to give children more self-embeddedness, security, better family functioning, self-control, and self-esteem. The lack of a family narrative or the complete erasure of its existence has been shown to inflict detrimental effects on everyone concerned.
Love and culture
Burke’s work has inspired many thinkers to pursue family-oriented philosophy. One of the most important figures in this respect is Kirk. In The Conservative Mind (1957), Kirk builds upon Burke’s vision of the family as the natural center of any good society. Kirk emphasized the true antidote of modern nihilism: love. As the old Jewish saying goes, we do not give to the ones we love, but we love the ones to whom we give. And as Kirk noted, primarily in family life we learn in a stable and practical environment to give to—and thus love—the people around us. Hence, the principal instrument of moral instruction, education and economic life should remain within the family. Only then can we learn to love ourselves and others. Additionally, Kirk understood that the family creates a vital tension in which one learns through moral effort to become a functional adult, a fully formed person within the social order, through the constructive disciplining of anti-social impulses. Most of contemporary psychology therefore misplaces the lack of self-love and meaning as a technical problem to do with individuals. No wonder these ‘specialists’ seem so unable to solve the ongoing mental health crisis.
Detrimentally, modernity promises man unparalleled stability and prosperity, even while he abandons all moral efforts and throws off every possible check on personal appetite. This is not only false, but it serves to create generations which are unable to control their destructive desires for the good of their future, their surroundings, and society. This has harmed our mental welfare in two ways: first, by destabilizing families, chaos, insecurity, anxiety and reduced well-being follow; and second, guilt, nihilism, and despair enter the picture due to the inability to harness moral effort. The solution to this cultural sickness is more moral effort, instead of acceptance of moral withdrawal. Again, the family comes to the rescue with its great, ennobling demands to pursue the maximal flourishing proper to human nature.
The role of parents
Scruton lands the most fundamental conservative blow against modern society’s outlook on families as merely “procreative contracts.” In The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), he points out the most problematic thing about the rights-obsessed language of the modern age. The liberal view of society starts from a contractual relationship between individual citizens and the state. Through the conferral by autonomous individuals of a mandate to the state, liberals believe that the state can defend abstract human rights. Yet, in practice, there are no abstract rights to be found. Rights are a product of the particular social history to which we belong. Thus, far from creating society through an indefinite number of acts by individual wills, conservatives understand the dependence that we all have, as individuals, on society. It follows that society should be defended from destabilization by individual selfishness, instead of the liberal view in which the individual should be protected from society. This is crucial, for it legitimizes the conservative defense of one’s society and culture.
To bring Scruton’s vision into the realm of the family, we must look at his understanding of authority and power. According to Scruton, society exists through the alliance of authority and power. Authority and power are drawn to each other, as classically has been observed in the relationship between the church (authority) and the state (power). The establishment is defended by conservatives based on a bond that is prior to any possibility of choice or contract. The primary example of just such a bond, transcending individual will, is the family. Having been established prior to our birth, we do not choose our family. The established power of the family is a great good due to the child’s need for its parents’ power over it. This manifestation of the parents’ will over their children is strongly related to the natural love which parents feel for their children to guide them throughout their primary developmental stages. This description of love is where Scruton and Kirk coincide. The initial feeling for things outside the family is one of love and dependency, like that of the family. Just as we become adults through the established power of our parents, in society we become persons through the society’s power over us.
Relating this to the mental health crisis, the loss of authority and power of parents over their children has broken the foundation of stability and security which is crucial to the rite of passage into stable adulthood. By labeling the authority of parents over their children as an act of oppressive power instead of love, parents have gradually lost the moral claim, let alone the tools, to raise their children in a prosperous way. Instead of trying to heal broken children, modern psychology should focus on healing the family basis that gave rise to stable people in the first place.
Well-being requires family
So far, we have made the case why a strong family life is needed to create psychologically stable and prosperous individuals, as well as flourishing societies. Now, it is crucial to understand the underlying psychological mechanisms that have made the family such a powerful social institution and increased individual well-being. This unites the philosophical and psychological underpinning of the family and indicates how modern psychology might contribute to family policy.
An important psychological theory to understand family life is stress process theory, which tells us that stress can undermine mental health. Additionally, receiving family support increases a sense of self-worth, self-esteem, optimism, positive affect, and overall good mental health. In short, family relations reduce stress and therefore can improve the individual’s mental health. Moreover, family relationships also play a role in regulating other’s behavior and providing information and encouragement to behave in healthier ways, in accordance with the vision of the family, promoted by Aristotle and Scruton, as the primary institution to develop prosperous people. Finally, the quality of family relations is important to highlight. Positive family relations are associated with a lower allostatic load (wear and tear on the body accumulating from stress), whereas negative family relations are associated with a higher allostatic load. When relating this to modern society, the increased instability and erosion of family relations reduces the potential for positive family relations to form and therefore reduces individual well-being, in line with Burke’s warning that only strong families are able to bring forth flourishing people.
Overall, the family forms one of the most important cornerstones of human flourishing. It makes us psychologically able to develop through intergenerational narratives, moral effort, and love. Families are thus entitled to power and authority in society, so that parents are able to nourish their children for the common good. This gives new generations the freedom to develop in accordance with their own adventures. Perhaps counterintuitively for today’s sensibilities, the conservative outlook, with its cardinal emphasis on family, nevertheless fulfills the modern dream of happiness and mental flourishing. A tremendous amount of social capital is lost with the modern shift towards radical individualization. It has reduced the cooperative strength of human beings into fractures and vulnerabilities. Modern man, as he becomes increasingly psychologically fragile, needs to rediscover that most basic of great assets to deal with an increasingly complex and changing world: an embedded family.
