Do you remember right at the start of COVID lockdowns there was this brief, and I mean very brief, sense of a burden being lifted; where life was perhaps a little simpler and more peaceful? Unless we had a so-called “essential” job, both mom and dad were home and the kids were out of school.
There were few obligations and even fewer activities; there was no need to race through the day to the next thing because the next thing was canceled. We could all be at home together as a family and enjoy peace and contentment.
This feeling seemed to last a few days, maybe a week or two for some before it drove nearly everyone insane. It turns out that we have nothing to do at home and it’s difficult for most to create a sense of anything but restlessness there.
This state of home affairs is in clear contrast to the pre-industrial “productive household” in which the home was the center of economic production and activity. There was always something to do at home.
Would you like to eat your meals at a table? If so, Dad’s chopping wood and making a table himself. Would you like new clothes for a growing child? If so, Mom’s sewing a pair of pants or a dress. Would you like your children to read? If so, some household adult is going to have to make time to teach letters.
Would you like a burger, fries and a milkshake? Well, I suppose you could do it… but it wouldn’t be a case of staving off a late night hunger. In most places, the pre-modern drive thru window would’ve required months of planning, harvesting and work to pull off.
A Family Of Individuals
Today, we’re broadly liberated from the pressure of that life and we can easily consume tables, clothing and many, many burgers, fries and milkshakes. But it comes at a cost: nothing happens at home, we have nothing to do at home; this is especially true of children. Being 5 years old means munching on goldfish and watching Bluey. Being 10 years old means playing video games and being 15 means doing nothing at all.
With nothing productive to do inside the household, we now prioritize two different things about home life. First is sufficient physical space in our houses for every member of the family to consume privately and in their preferred ways: a peaceful and unobtrusive coexistence. Secondly, we prioritize consumption itself; even over the pursuit of marriage and having children because a large family is burdensome in a consumer household setting.
Strangers might rightly ask a parent “how can you keep up with the complexity of so many consuming individuals?” And surely, if parents of large families are not careful, consumption itself does become a tremendous burden. Not only financially but also in time and energy; an endless juggling act of many divergent priorities, activities and “investments” into each child’s development. And the larger the family, the more balls fly into the air. Our family time is sliced and diced into fractional bits so that we can feel as if we’re providing our children with “well-rounded” childhood experiences quite nearly deprived of household connection.
And the ideal family life quickly morphs into no family life at all.
This outsourcing of task, meaning and purpose to groups, goods and services outside the home looms over many of the conflicts found in the modern household: is the purpose of home and family life to produce and build something or is it to provide a space to individually consume our preferences? Are we are a family of individuals or a family on a mission?
What Does a 21st Century Productive Household Do?
Barring a nuclear exchange, you and I are not going to recreate the pre-industrial productive household in the 21st century.
But it’s important to understand what it was and what we lost in our progress away from it so we can recreate its essentials for a modern era.
The great strength of the productive household was not in the family making everything by and for themselves; it was everyone working to the same united end with the home as the center of the each person’s source of peace and order, no matter their age or stage of life.
That unity of purpose, the centrality of family life and the crucial importance of the happenings at home are what modern parents need to recreate. This doesn’t necessarily have to involve raising chickens and canning food. It lies in making forward thinking choices that no one will ever ask us to make and may even discourage us from making.
The 21st century productive household will be a powerful engine, producing 1) meaningful work, 2) distinct culture and 3) tight community. In a way, these are the only things it can produce; everything else can be bought on Amazon.
Work: Pre-industrial families used work to create many practical goods. But precisely because we can now give work away and have someone else do it, precisely because our lives don’t depend on it, the most important and lasting product of work within the modern productive household is not going to be a tangible good but the character, ability and determination of the children who do the work.
Culture: Pre-industrial families sang their own songs, planned their own dances, told their own stories, teased out their own rhymes. There is very little stopping us from doing these same things today even though practically none of us choose to do it. It requires a forward thinking mindset to turn off the screen, put down the headphones, not buy the tickets, to stop being a fan and instead make something your family can own. Because everything you identify with but don’t own will be forgotten or cringeworthy within a few years.
Community: Pre-industrial relationships obviously were not all sunshine and lollipops but they enjoyed a deep and true interdependence. No one will ask you for such a relationship today, not even your kids after a certain age. The modern productive household will choose to be a respite from fracturing involvement with things and activities. It will say no and let go of some of the optimization and customization of our lives which distance us from others whom we could help and who could help us.
All of these build on each other. The more a family works together, the stronger their relationships. The closer they are, the more meaningful their cultural creations will be. The more they create together, the more they’ll be invested in the work to maintain those creations.
The operating belief behind much of what I write here is that broader society has changed so much over the last few generations that most traditions we inherited have been hollowed out and are no longer sufficient for the times. No one is truly “conservative” in any social or family context if they live a normal life in a rapidly changing world. The best we can probably do is understand what is essential and from that understanding build new ways of doing those essential things as the world reshapes around us. I just so happened to write a book on this topic.
I try to teach this concept to my children by telling them that our home is like an exploring ship sailing across a vast, uncharted ocean. We brought on board all that we could, all that was useful, but we can never go back.
We don’t know when exactly we’ll get to our destination, so we’ll need to work together in harmony to maintain and guide our ship (our home) and do our duties soberly.
The sea we travel on is a treacherous companion; while we must ride its waves, we can never forget we don’t control them. What we can control is what we do onboard and what make and keep from our travels (our culture and creativity).
The journey may be long and difficult, but we will find strength and peace not only from the loving and trusting relationships on our boat but also amongst those other ships (of church and community) going our same way.
What an insightful perspective on the loss of productivity and purpose within the modern household. You're absolutely right that we've outsourced nearly everything that used to happen within the home - from making clothing and furniture, to teaching our children basic skills, to even creating our own entertainment and culture. In exchanging the productive household for a consumer lifestyle, we've sacrificed so much meaning and connection.
The pre-industrial household was centered on a shared mission, with every family member contributing purposeful work to provide for collective needs and cultivate tight-knit relationships. While we may not want to return to that harsh reality, we're wise to reincorporate some of those core elements into 21st century family life.
As you poignantly put it, the heart of this is reclaiming meaningful work, distinct culture-making, and an ethos of interdependence within our homes. When children engage in creative labors alongside their parents, it instills diligence, grit and a sense of stewardship. Families that make their own songs, stories and traditions bind themselves together through shared identities. And households oriented around mutual support and reciprocal needs naturally resist the isolating individualism of our age.
This resonates deeply with the biblical vision of households as little societies tasked with cultivating shalom - the Hebrew concept of universal flourishing. Proverbs 14:1 says "The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down." The productive home is built intentionally through the handiwork of its inhabitants, not merely consumed.
Re-establishing the household as a vibrant center of culture, labor and community anchors our identity and purpose. It's a radical idea today, but one that may be key to human flourishing. Let's rebuild households that produce not just stuff, but families of character, creativity and commitment.
As you might recall from my last comment, I am neither a subsistence nor a commercial farmer -- not a farmer of any kind. We get significant amounts of food (and heat) from the use of our few acres, but not nearly enough to survive on.
If I were to evaluate these things in strictly economic terms, in spreadsheets with dollar amounts, I doubt that they could be justified, at least at present. A few years or a few decades hence, when the magic of the printing press has faded, they may well be the difference between meat or no meat, protein or no protein, on any given day. But that is hard to foresee, and neither of these things is the point. This way of life is better and more real.
It's not easier or advantageous, narrowly defined. It's a hell of a lot of unnecessary trouble -- you should have asked me last night, when I was rushing to set up the new paddock, move the livestock, and feed everybody before the rain started.
While it might be "productive" in your sense, this word has been so debased by the sense it has in our larger culture that I rarely use it. The same is true for "educational," but that's how I prefer to think of it, in the sense of that word's etymology: it leads you out. Out of our gleaming, convenient, fake world. Out of myself, to a place where I can see how life is and who it belongs to. I want my son to grow up seeing this, not being told about it.
The hardest question is that which you separate in two: church and community. Ourselves, we have not found this. As I wrote about in "Moved by Another" and "Age of the Age," the real religion of the vast majority of Americans, including the vast majority of churchgoers, is liberal modernity. Once we get past verbal formulas and club meetings, what shapes our lives and worldviews? Where are the people who are actually "weird," as you once put it, without being simultaneously bent?