This holiday time brought our entire family together for much of the week, with all five young grandchildren together for the first time. It brought a lot of joy, even with crying babies and occasional commotion. Such times make all of the effort, the emotional challenges, and the expense of raising a family much more than worth it. That is an important role of family, the sharing of good times and making memories, but that is not what makes the family truly important.

Family is the oldest of all social institutions. It was required for survival of the species. The division of labor in the family arose from the necessity of providing food, shelter, clothing, and all other needs of the individuals since it takes so many years to nurture a child to maturity. With many other species, the young are able to quickly get up and become mobile in the search for food and to move with the protection of the herd. Human babies can’t stand for many months, and it takes years for the brain to develop to the point where they can survive without the help of adults.

Other institutions have developed over the millennia that allow human societies to thrive and prosper at a much higher level. Early on, family members discovered that they could be more efficient if they cooperated in food gathering, defense, and other functions. A large kill might be far too much for one family or even one tribe to eat before it spoiled, but if they invited neighbors to share in the feast, the neighbors would reciprocate, which meant that the job of hunting and gathering was made more efficient for everyone.

Modern societies are huge, complicated networks of cooperation that multiply productive efficiency. Division of labor is extended over the entire globe, and absolute costs have declined steadily, as evidenced by the reduction in average number of hours of work needed to purchase basic goods to a fraction of what they were one hundred or a thousand years ago. Technology extends not just the efficiency of production, but also the capability for creating new solutions to ever-more-complex problems.

Some people now question the importance of family. Social change has already brought about a situation where a large number of children grow up with one parent, either because of out-of-wedlock pregnancies or because of the high rate of divorce and separation after marriage. While it is possible for children to thrive under such circumstances, single parent households have a much more difficult time that often follows into teenage years and adulthood.

It is theoretically possible for social institutions to provide for all of the needs of children, mitigating the need for families, and various collectivized societies have tried such a thing, but families provide more than just physical needs. Children are more than just blobs of cells or automatons that need food and proper programming to grow into functional, creative, happy adults. They need the gentleness and emotional linkage with a mother, they need the strength and security of a father. Immediate and extended families provide the care and help that those theoretically possible social institutions could, but do it much more effectively and efficiently.

Beyond that, and beyond the joy that they provide, functional families, immediate and extended, provide emotional support in difficult times or disasters. Because they are made of humans, they sometimes fail, but a family can provide one thing that society cannot. They can furnish steady, trusting relationships built on love, something very different from social obligation. Families are needed now at least as much as they were needed in times past to heal a society damaged by widespread lack of that familial love.

Follow Dan McLaughlin at daniel-mclaughlin.com.