The Family Tested by Time

By Louis Perez y Cid
The family doesn't disappear; it ceases to be taken for granted.

We talk a lot about the family. About its fragility, its predicted end, its irreversible transformation. The subject recurs like a deep-seated anxiety, almost a refrain. And yet, behind the words, there is more than just a contemporary debate; there is an attachment. A loyalty.

For, after all, if the family had truly become obsolete, why would we continue to invoke it everywhere? In businesses, in military units, in associations, as soon as cohesion and loyalty emerge, the word returns: "a family." We never compare it to something worthless. The family still provides reassurance. It remains a benchmark.
So perhaps the question isn't whether it's disappearing, but what within it is changing.
The Shift into the Ephemeral

“Life has changed,” we say. It’s become a bland, almost lazy truism. Yet, we must take this statement seriously.
For a long time, human societies were built on longevity. Things were made to be passed down. A house, a trade, even a word, were meant to last. The world changed little, and humankind patiently found its place within it.

First the industrial age, then the globalized era, replaced the logic of permanence with a logic of renewal. We no longer repair, we replace. Not out of whim, but because it has become rational. Objects are designed to be obsolete. And what holds true for things always ends up affecting people.
We now live in a society of the ephemeral. Objects pass away, places pass away, and little by little, relationships themselves seem subject to this same brevity. Not through a lack of sincerity, but through adaptation. Humans learn not to become too attached to what, in any case, will not last.

This shift is crucial. For the family, on the other hand, was based precisely on the opposite: continuity.

The problem isn't so much change itself, but its pace.
In the past, a lifetime was barely enough to witness the evolution of a profession. Today, it encompasses several. Career paths are discontinuous, reference points unstable. Individuals must constantly adapt, often without having the time to understand what they are already leaving behind.
In this movement, the family played a simple yet essential role: that of a fixed point. It was that silent "bumper" to which one returned after exertion, after failure, after the world.

But when everything accelerates, even this fixed point begins to falter.

The family doesn't disappear. It becomes lighter.

The large family of yesteryear, this "smala" made up of intertwined generations, belonged to a slow, rooted, and relatively immobile world. Industrialization rendered it unsuitable. People had to move around, specialize, and respond quickly. The family contracted, focusing on the couple and their children.

Then the trend continued. Fewer children, more mobility, parallel careers, lives sometimes separated. An even smaller family emerges, sometimes reduced to two individuals, sometimes suspended between two cities, two rhythms, two lives.
This isn't always an ideological choice. It's often a consequence.

The forms themselves are multiplying: blended families, cohabitation, single parenthood, extended families, new models, or reinvented old ones. Diversity is becoming a reality.

But as forms diversify, one question remains: what still constitutes a family?

Because the most profound upheaval may not be visible.

It touches on the very definition of kinship.
Scientific advances have opened up unprecedented possibilities: the dissociation between biological motherhood and gestation, the multiplication of those involved in conception, deferred, even planned, choices. What was once self-evident is now a matter of decision.
Parentage, too, is shifting. It tends to become less a natural given than a legal, sometimes even contractual, construct.

At the same time, another, even more troubling idea is emerging: that of "parental professionalism." As if raising a child could one day be a matter of certified competence rather than a lived bond.
Nothing is yet fully established, but everything is already conceivable.

And this is perhaps where the essential lies, not in what exists, but in what becomes possible.

Faced with this, it would be easy to succumb either to nostalgia or to naive enthusiasm. Both are forms of refusal.
Nostalgia forgets that the old ways were not always right. Enthusiasm forgets that all freedom comes at a price.

For that is precisely what it is about: freedom.
The world to come offers a familial freedom a new kind of family. Freedom of form, choice, and timing. In theory, everyone can construct their own definition of family.

But in exchange, something is becoming fragile.

For centuries, the cycle of family life—birth, growth, transmission—gave everyone a place in time. It offered continuity, almost self-evidence. People knew where they came from and roughly where they were going.

Today, this cycle is accelerating, becoming distorted, sometimes breaking down. The unpredictable is taking hold.

And with it, a new uncertainty.

So, is the family disappearing? No.

It endures because it fulfills a need that nothing has replaced: the need for a place where people are not interchangeable.

But its nature is changing. It is no longer a given; it is becoming chosen, constructed, sometimes negotiated.

And that is precisely where the risk lies.

By trying to choose everything, we risk losing what wasn't chosen, what imposed itself as a silent truth, and what held everything else together.
Family has never been merely a form.

It was a boundary.
Family is no longer given to us; it is now entrusted to us.