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70 Va. L. Rev. 879 (1984)
Rethinking Parenthood As an Exclusive Status: The Need for Legal Alternatives when the Premise of the Nuclear Family Has Failed

handle is hein.journals/valr70 and id is 889 raw text is: RETHINKING PARENTHOOD AS AN EXCLUSIVE STATUS: THE NEED FOR LEGAL ALTERNATIVES WHEN THE PREMISE OF THE NUCLEAR FAMILY HAS FAILED Katharine T. Bartlett* P ARENTHOOD, with few exceptions, is an exclusive status. The law recognizes only one set of parents for a child at any one time, and these parents are autonomous, possessing compre- hensive privileges and duties that they share with no one else. A fundamental premise of the law of exclusive parenthood is that parents raise their own children in nuclear families. The nu- clear family, which is the preferred social unit in our society, is itself an exclusive unit, its membership reserved to a married couple and their dependent children. Exclusivity gives the family much of its moral power over the lives of its members, for it forges in them a sense of common destiny and mutual commitment.2 Pa- * Associate Clinical Professor of Law, Duke University. I am grateful to Sara Beale, Herma Hill Kay, David Lange, Millie Mishkin, Chris Schroeder, and Sally Sharp for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. I thank also Amy Flick, Pamela Gerr, Lori Larson, Mindy McNichols, Cindy Rerucha, Howard Vingan, and William Werner, law students at Duke University who provided useful research assistance. I The term nuclear family in this paper refers to the conjugal household consisting of a husband, wife, and their dependent children. The term family has implied different living arrangements throughout history and among different social classes. See P. Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962); J. Dempsey, The Family and Public Policy 9-10 (1981); M. Glendon, The New Family and the New Property 11-17 (1981); M. Poster, A Critical Theory of the Family 168-205 (1978); E. Shorter, The Making of the Mod- em Family (1975); Gordon, Introduction, in The Nuclear Family in Crisis: The Search for an Alternative 2-10 (M. Gordon ed. 1972); Laslett, The Family as a Public and Private Institution, in Intimacy, Family, and Society 94-114 (A. Skolnick & J. Skolnick eds. 1974). Nonetheless, the private, largely self-contained, marriage-centered nuclear family has been the norm throughout most of American history. s A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments 219-20 (D. Raphael & A. Macfie eds. 1976) (1st ed. London 1759). R. Laing describes this mutual identification in terms of expectations as well as sentiment- The family is a common we, in contrast to them outside the family .... When I identify myself as one of us, I expect you to do likewise. Then there are three, you and he or she and me, each becomes one of us. In such a family we, each of us, recognize(s) not only his or her own family synthesis, but expects a comparable fam- ily synthesis to exist in you, him, or her also. R. Laing, The Family and the 'Family,' in The Politics of the Family and Other Essays 3,4-

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