>Moral of the story: don't be so quick to condemn the old ways of family life. They have survived for millenia, and will continue to do so long after we're gone.
Humans existed for tens of thousands of years without doing anything interesting. Humans did lots of things then. Most of them haven't survived into modernity; if you want an idea of what humans used to do before agriculture, there are still some cultures existing now that exist at that stage.
The wealth of the West was maybe built on nuclear families; it was also built on colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, patriarchy, and corporatism. Plenty of things have existed in the brief infancy of humanity. Very few of them are worth taking with us into the future.
Starting a family is sometimes the right thing to do. Remaining free of children is also sometimes the right thing to do, just like it's sometimes right to stay single and sometimes right to have a partner, or more than one partner.
Whatever you do, be intentional and do it because it's the right thing for you to do in your life, not because of any societal diktat or because of pressure from other people.
> Whatever you do, be intentional and do it because it's the right thing for you to do in your life
I'm not going to morally judge someone for benign lifestyle decisions, but it's baldly not true that someone can just live whatever life one wants without affecting the people around them.
Keeping your kids out of school, verbal abuse, avoiding vaccinations, trapping people into relationships with pregnancies, running out on child support, substance abuse during pregnancy, unprotected sex with strangers ... there are clearly things that are intentional and (ignorantly) someone's right to do. And they are clearly the wrong thing to do, for the individuals involved and for society at large.
I realize that you probably didn't mean to include all those decisions as valid in your sweeping case for non-judgemental social norms, but the fact is that norms are incredibly important because, especially when it comes to family, decisions do affect other people. If we can agree that some norms are important, the only discussion is about which are important, why, and how much.
I'll go one further and defend social diktat since it's probably not something most people consider. Given that norms are important, I'd rather people enforce these norms outside of the laws. The norm used to be that gay sex was a bad idea. People were (and are) thrown into prison and legally executed because people decided to turn social norms into laws. Since norms are greatly affected by technology and culture, keeping enforcement confined to social pressure provides a level of protection to people who decide to try something outside-the-box.
Humans existed for tens of thousands of years without doing anything interesting. Humans did lots of things then. Most of them haven't survived into modernity; if you want an idea of what humans used to do before agriculture, there are still some cultures existing now that exist at that stage.
The wealth of the West was maybe built on nuclear families; it was also built on colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, patriarchy, and corporatism. Plenty of things have existed in the brief infancy of humanity. Very few of them are worth taking with us into the future.
Starting a family is sometimes the right thing to do. Remaining free of children is also sometimes the right thing to do, just like it's sometimes right to stay single and sometimes right to have a partner, or more than one partner.
Whatever you do, be intentional and do it because it's the right thing for you to do in your life, not because of any societal diktat or because of pressure from other people.