Unfortunately, it seems very likely that the nuclear family is not a viable social form. It is too small. Each person in a nuclear family is too tightly linked to other members of the family; any one relationship which goes sour, even for a few hours, becomes critical; people cannot simply turn away toward uncles, aunts, grandchildren, cousins, brothers. Instead, each difficulty twists the family unit into ever tighter spirals of discomfort; the children become prey to all kinds of dependencies and Oedipal neuroses; the parents are so dependent on each other that they are finally forced to separate.

Philip Slater describes this situation for American families and finds in the adults of the family, especially the women, a terrible, brooding sense of deprivation. There are simply not enough people around, not enough communal action, to give the ordinary experience around the home any depth or richness. (Philip E. Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness, Boston: Beacon Press, 1970, page 67, and throughout.)

It seems essential that the people in a household have at least a dozen people around them, so that they can find the comfort and relationships they need to sustain them during their ups and downs. Since the old extended family, based on blood ties, seems to be gone---at least for the moment---this can only happen if small families, couples, and single people join together in voluntary "families" of ten or so. In his final book, Island, Aldous Huxley portrayed a lovely vision of such a development:

• "How many homes does a Palanese child have?"
• "About twenty on the average."
• "Twenty? My God!"
• "We all belong," Susila explained, "to a MAC---a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old-timers with growing children, grandparents, and great-grandparents--- everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teen-agers."
• Will shook his head. "Making twenty families grow where only one grew before."
• "But what grew before was your kind of family. . . ." As though reading from a cookery book, "Take one sexually inept wage slave," she went on, "one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice. Our recipe is rather different: Take twenty sexually satisified couples and their offspring; add science, intuition, and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection."
• "And what comes out of your open pan?" he asked.
• "An entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family. Twenty pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and ex-mothers, and forty or fifty assorted children of all ages."
• (Aldous Huxley, Island, New York: Bantam, 1962, pages 89-90.)

Physically, the setting for a large voluntary family must provide for a balance of privacy and communality. Each small family, each person, each couple, needs a private realm, almost a private household of their own, according to their territorial need. In the movement to build communes, it is our experience that groups have not taken this need for privacy seriously enough. It has been shrugged off, as something to overcome. But it is a deep and basic need; and if the setting does not let each person and each small household regulate itself on this dimension, it is sure to cause trouble. We propose, therefore, that individuals, couples, people young and old---each subgroup---have its own legally independent household ---in some cases, physically separate households and cottages, at least separate rooms, suites, and floors.

The private realms are then set off against the common space and the common functions. The most vital commons are the kitchen, the place to sit down and eat, and a garden. Common meals, at least several nights a week, seem to play the biggest role in binding the group. The meals, and taking time at the cooking, provide the kind of casual meeting time when everything else can be comfortably discussed: the child care arrangements, maintenance, projects---see COMMUNAL EATING (Pattern 147).

This would suggest, then, a large family room-farmhouse kitchen, right at the heart of the site---at the main crossroads, where everyone would tend to meet toward the end of the day. Again, according to the style of the family, this might be a separate building, with workshop and gardens, or one wing of a house, or the entire first floor of a two or three story building.

Catherine Dibble (cath@econ.ucsb.edu) Last updated: 2 September 1995.