Let’s help each other.

The other day, I was reading a discussion on a friend’s Facebook wall. The original post supported a proposed rollback of an Obama-era rule extending the age limit children can remain on their parents’ health insurance. It had been 19, or 23 for full-time college students, but is now 26. Many of the follow-up comments agreed that this was too much, and couldn’t understand why such an extension was needed in the first place. This was, they argued, a sign of a generation of entitled, lazy, “failed adults.”

Why have so many of us bought into the myth that to need help, to be struggling, is evidence of moral failure?

Put aside the fact that recent years have seen young people graduating saddled with enormous student debt, and into an economy yet to truly recover from the Great Recession. Ignore the reality of many employers simply not offering insurance coverage at all, or plans with spotty coverage and high deductibles. Disregard the fact that students had been taking unneeded/wanted college courses simply as a workaround to stay on their parent’s insurance, because it was easier to get loans than it was to find employment that included good (or any) coverage — something that wreaked havoc on course completion rates, pass rates and graduation rates, among other things.

What I really want to ask, and what’s central to this whole line of thinking, is this: What’s so wrong with the idea that a family might want to band together to help provide basic support for one another? Regardless of a person’s age or even whether or not they’re your blood relation, I’d argue that we should be able to enter into legal contracts of mutual support with anyone we so choose. This goes for health care to child care to elder care.

Instead, we have people marrying in order to access affordable health care, when maybe marriage isn’t the right option generally. We have parents unable to afford child care but also unable to afford having one or the other stay home with the kids, leaving households stressed and poorly managed. We have elders left without access to quality care or companionship.

How did we end up here, so in love with the myth of total selfreliance? What happened to our village ethic?

Part of the argument against parents being able to help their kids access needed care also had to do with this notion that to be a “successful adult,” one needed to hit the trifecta of marriage, kids and home ownership. The nuclear family ideal. Lack of any or all of those milestones is seen as failure, but what this really illustrates is a dangerously narrow view of the ways in which a person might live a fulfilling life. It’s rooted in a seriously classist ideology, too.

You see, it’s easy enough to trumpet the virtues of the husband/wife/two kids model when you’re rich enough to afford child care, or to keep one of the parents at home (and let’s be real, in this vision it’s almost always the woman), as well as the home itself and reliable transportation.

The nuclear family separates us from our villages, though, forcing parents into isolation and without necessary support from extended family and friends. It’s expensive, unsustainable and downright depressing. Yet this is what we’re supposed to strive for?

I think not. Better to live in a world where we help each other out. Until such time as our broken health care, child care and elder care systems are massively overhauled into something that’s actually affordable and accessible for everyone, we have no choice but to get creative.

That’s hardly failure. I’d call it being better humans.