What is the Bare Minimum Needed for a Family Founder to Succeed?
What is the least you have to do?
What are the Minimum Conditions of Success
What are the minimum conditions for creating a sustainable family? I.e., a family that continues to exist past the second generation?
What are the minimum conditions for founding or continuing a multigenerational family?
What are the minimum conditions for your lineage surviving the ongoing lineage extinction event where human germ lines are being snuffed out every day?
These three questions are all the same question. It is the question we are answering in this transmission.
Although we have transmitted good suggestions for family line practices, and will continue to do so, we feel that any model benefits from exploring its minimum boundary conditions. This is an important question that we haven’t seen anyone in the family steader space explore.
What is the least you can get away with and still likely succeed? Explore this question with us.
Caveats
Let’s being our exploration by looking into the limits on what we are doing.
Family engineering is not number crunching. Although someday it may be possible to do a monster longitudinal study that pays amazing attention to method and data collection, no such study has been done or started today. You will not see percentage calculations here. The good news is that engineering and shopcraft existed before statistical methods did. We can still understand qualitatively what the minimum conditions are.
Children are wonderfully free to choose their own path as adults. We offer no guarantees. The marvel of raising children is that they are not automatons, you are forming fully realized independent human agents. If you could fully program your family, there would be no point in having a family. The downside though is inherent in the upside: the likelihood that your children once grown will catch the spark of your vision and carry it onward and upward with their own individual stamp comes from the same source as the smaller but real possibility that they will reject it. Nothing you can do can eliminate their human agency and it is not desirable that you do so.
Minimum conditions are not the same as absolute requirements. We think you may find find possible to succeed without some of these minimum conditions if you have a lot of luck and put an incredible amount of effort into it.
We are starting the discussion of minimum conditions, not ending it. We need your views. We anticipate at least one follow up transmission based on comments and we hope we will see continued discussion from time to time in the broader space on this important topic. Each one of you, married or not, parent or not, is a data scraper from lived experience. We need your views.
The Minimum Conditions List
Here’s the minimum conditions list for sustain for sustaining a multi-generation family. We’ll talk a little bit more about each one below. We’ll also have a list of extremely important practices that didn’t quite make the list.
Get married, have kids
Distinct family identity
Something rewarding about the family experience
Express, emphasized teaching on having kids and family continuation
Stay married
Children survive to adulthood and have sufficient calories for pregnancy, child birth, and feeding kids
Courtship
Children are fertile
Countercultural sexual ethic
Eat home prepared meals together
We did not plan on having a 10-item list, it just worked out that way.
1 - Get Married, Have Kids - well, obviously.
2 -Distinct Family Identity – most of our transmissions have been about how to achieve a distinct family identity because the stronger the identity, the better. Here however we are speaking of the minimum necessary family identity. It can be achieved just be spending time together. No particular form of family identity is necessary.
Without a distinct family identity, you can only offer your kids abstract and utilitarian rationales for having kids of their own. These are unlikely to have the spiritual and emotional resonance to be convincing.
3 - Rewarding Family Experience - The most common way to achieve this is family fun. It is not the only way. A sense of accomplishment or of noble mission or of beauty or intellectual growth can all be rewarding. Your home will normally be rewarding in more than one way. The minimum condition is that it be rewarding in at least one way.
We believe that it is probably a minimum condition that you as the authority occasionally explicitly point out the rewarding aspect. We also warn you that your experience of the home will be different from your children’s. Especially in bitter or frustrated moments, adults can belittle or downplay the rewarding aspect, which will tend to sabotage it in your children’s. We know of more than one sad case where this has happened. We also know a husband and wife who think of their home life as only partly happy because they go through frequent bouts of fighting but who are aware that their children think they have a happy home and don’t contradict them.
One corrollary is that the family experience should be rewarding for you on at least one dimension also. If not, you won’t be able to fake it sufficiently.
Your children need to desire to continue on the family. A rewarding childhood experience provides the desire.
4 - Teaching a Duty to Have Children and Continue the Family – these are natural duties that everyone naturally believes in, but only if taught. Teaching converts the latent potential for belief into actual belief. In other times and in other places, society and educators and churches were likely to supply this teaching. Now you must. Not only do these sources now not activate the sense of these duties for you, they often teach doctrines that suppress them.
Combined, the 3 minimum conditions we have explored so far let your child see that there is something to pass on (distinct family identity), that they want to pass it on (consciousness of a rewarding family experience), and that they should pass it on (duty to perpetuate the family).
5 - Stay married - Divorce terminates the family unit. Sad experience shows that it is hard to carry on afterwards. It is not impossible. We know heroic men and women who are making the extraordinary efforts to succeed despite it. But it does no good to pretend that divorce hasn’t deal them a vicious blow. Divorce is destructive enough and hard enough to overcome that staying married is on the list of minimum conditions.
Clearly divorce isn’t always a matter of personal choice. You cannot control your spouse’s agency any more than you can your childrens’. Remember that these minimum conditions are an engineering assessment not a moral one.
6 - Physical survival for children and grandchildren - Even though we anticipate rough times ahead, we think it is unlikely that you will need to preoccupy yourself with this aspect. Whereas in other times physical survival would have been first on the list it is now of much less importance though perhaps increasing. However, black swan events and catastrophes are always possible and deserve some planning and consideration on your part. Emergency plans, food and water supplies on hand and other basic attention to preparedness will mitigate the risk; doing these things are not a minimum condition until suddenly they are.
Participation in a Steader Hamlet would be an advanced level but is clearly exceeds what is needed for a minimum condition of physical survival in modern America.
A Steader Hamlet – a model for joint homestead living. It can range from a group of collocated friends using or able to adopt agricultural techniques that would allow for subsistence; to a group ofnon-colocated patrons who patronize a family farm capable of supporting all the patrons using their joint labor and subsistence techniques in an emergency; to a group of non-colocated friends who jointly have access to property where they would meet and could convert to subsistence farming in an emergency. Mutual aid and support is vastly more important in catastrophes than having extra boxes of ammunition. More to come.
More of a direct concern would be that your children have the material situation that makes them feel comfortable marrying and having children. Addressing this concern is partly a problem of expectation management—most First Worlders have unnecessary ideas about the standard they need to reach before they can have kids; partly an issue of raising your children to be financially sound; and partly an issue of you yourself preparing to be able to lend material aid to your children. However, while these actions are really important, we do not feel that any of them are necessary enough to themselves be a minimum condition.
7 - Courtship – your children need people to marry who either share their values or else are able to adopt them. This aspect is partly out of your control and your children’s control, but it’s worth paying attention to. There are more partial solutions than you think, and being conscious of the issue can only help. The Steader Hamlet is partly a solution to this problem.
8 - Fertility – like physical survival, this is one minimum condition that probably does not require sustained attention from you for your kids to achieve it. Bodies were meant to breed. It is increasingly an issue though. So, although not a minimum condition, it is very important to make sure your children are getting good nutrition, not processed foods and vegetable oils, and make sure they understand to not put off marriage.
The last two in. We went back and forth on the last two minimum conditions, especially the last one. They are clearly very important. But are they important enough to be minimum conditions? We think so.
9 - Countercultural sexual ethic – the most successful groups under conditions of modernity, Mormons/Amish/Latin-mass Catholics/quiverful Protestants, have vigorously embraced an anti-cultural sexual ethic of virginity until marriage, no abortions, differentiated sex roles, and often noncontraceptive practices within marriage.
At first blush, there doesn’t seem to be a necessary connection between all of these pieces of the picture and having and raising children. However, we are persuaded that even if the suite of modern cultural sexual ethics are not inherently connected, they are put together so much by the cultural that they form a de facto “seamless garment of sterility.”
Whether or not you adopt the full best practices anti-cultural sexual ethic, you and your family need a countercultural sexual ethic distinct enough from the culture’s that your children have some footing to resist falling fully into the standard model.
10 - Eat home prepared meals together – We are persuaded that preparing and eating a meal together is a core human bonding experience with roots deep in the mythic and evolutionary past. To forego it is to cripple yourself without cause. Eating together every night exceeds the minimum condition, but it is hard to quantify how much the minimum condition is. Perhaps once a week, at the very least on all major holidays. Certainly you should ensure that your children have the plurality of their group meals in the family setting. Don’t neglect the preparation aspect, this deeply intensifies the bonding.
First out
These are incredibly important, but important enough to make the minimum conditions list? We reluctantly concluded they weren’t. Please let us know if you disagree.
Experience the family as a household (i.e., economic unit)
Engage in primary production in the family (hunting, fishing, growing, canning, stockraising)
A supportive tightknit church community
Perhaps some of the emergency preparedness we mentioned above as important
Perhaps some of the material financial preparation for your kids or for you to help your kids we mentioned above as important
Perhaps the good nutrition and earlier marriage ethic we mentioned above as important
Other Steader Transmissions
You should also take a look at the It’s Easy section of
and at
Contribute Your Views
We need to hear from you. What did we miss? What did we over-rate? Comment below or link us to material we should consider.
I think the idea of belonging to a communitythat self conscious embraces these values to some extent might be necessary. I think this would fall under your "tight knit church" point that you decided to leave out. I am not certain it has to be a whole church that is that way, but if you know no one in real life who embraces these principles, can two parents by themselves pass them on? Where would the children find spouses? Etc. So, whether this is a local church, a subset of members of a church, a group of people from different churches, or even a group of non-local friends who meet a few times a year, I think there must be something larger than the family, to which the family can tangibly belong, and can link their individual identity to.
I agree with almost everything here. I have many of the same goals and strategies for achieving them. However, I did find the part about calories a bit weird. In a modern society if you are intelligent and focused it’s easy to get a job. If you have a job, you have money. If you have money, calories are not difficult to come by. Part of the family identity I am building is a sense of responsibility for being (and marrying others who are) intelligent. For me that also means that young women should not be taught to restrict their search to local men. If the local men aren’t worthy, go where the intelligent men are. Strong women can carry the culture even if they marry outsiders.