2000s: History: The New Zealand Nuclear Family
August 29, 2018
By AHNZ
History: The New Zealand nuclear family itself!? Mother and father form a pair bond to pool their resources to raise children, thus meeting their biological attachment needs. It’s on the way out according to NZ Herald Senior Writer Geraldine Jones today and single mother households are in.
Geraldine should know if she’s done it twice! After going through one pregnancy alone she wrote Going it Alone: The Single Woman’s Guide to Pregnancy and Birth (2003). Within 10 years she had a new pair bond and another son though. From today’s article though we must assume she’s flipped back again to the ranks of the “emerging power force”.
“NO NEED TO PUT A RING ON IT”
A wife, she says, means being economically, sexually, socially, reproductively dependent on husbands.
“MEN HAVE THEIR USES”
“Hamilton-raised Sue says they can come in handy in the garden. And for regular house maintenance.”
That’s it. All she wrote.
“FAMILY AND FRIENDS PLAY A ROLE”
“Career-wise, there have been no impediments, she says.”
This means free, or paid, childcare because someone still has to attach to and mother the child while the biological mother is absent.
Image supplied by Johns. How she sees herself!
The New Zealand family is changing rapidly as kids grow up today who never experienced an intact family and go on to reproduce what they patterned on to. Geraldine’s arguments, explanations, and flip-flops don’t seem to come from an informed understanding of family systems and child development needs. Seems to be writing only about own experience, putting a normalising gloss on her own failed family history. There’s a potent distrust and dislike for men here and the institution of marriage.
Herald readers may mistake for journalism what is in fact a mother in crisis leading other women into crisis.
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Image: Prime Minister Gordon Coates and family, 1925
Ref. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22472124
Initially wrote this when Johns’ book came out, Feb 2017. Since then our (unmarried) Prime Minister (mother) has moved New Zealand further away from Coates and toward Johns.
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