Single women, mothers, and the nuclear family

I recently read an interesting Atlantic article on the current singleness epidemic among women, and while the topic was singleness, the article also made some broader statements about how women participate in society.  One idea in particular struck me:

“We are not designed, as a species, to raise children in nuclear families,” Christopher Ryan, one of the Sex at Dawn co-authors, told me over the telephone late last summer. Women who try to be “supermoms,” whether single or married, holding down a career and running a household simultaneously, are “swimming upstream.” Could we have a modernization of the Mosuo, Ryan mused, with several women and their children living together—perhaps in one of the nation’s many foreclosed and abandoned McMansions—bonding, sharing expenses, having a higher quality of life? “In every society where women have power—whether humans or primates—the key is female bonding,” he added.

Image: graur codrin

My mom lived with us the first month after I gave birth, and I still went into my room to cry without her knowledge almost every night, so having other people around won't prevent PPD.  But my mom's presence did help with a lot of new-mom anxieties.  She didn't know how to use the new, high-tech diapers we have these days (she used cloth back in the day), but she reassured me of some obvious truths:  newborns can't be controlled by a schedule, kids are resilient and won't be easily messed up, and most importantly, it will get better.  Not to mention her cooking and what a relief it was for me to have someone else do baby-rocking duty when I couldn't stand it any longer.   I believe in the traditional, nuclear family, but it's quite possible that the way our nuclear families are organized (each one separated by walls, fences, and a lot of space) may not be the way God intended. 

I don't see our society ever moving back toward communal living, but the concept goes a long way in perhaps explaining why motherhood is so hard for so many of us.  Stay-at-home-moms have a martyr complex about their brains turning to mush for the sake of the kids, and working moms have a constant guilt complex about not being home with the kids.  Maybe if we lived more communally, SAHMs would have more of the community and intellectual stimulation they seek and working moms would have a greater ability to work from home to be around their kids more.