The science of physics governs the integrity of all structures in the known Universe, including family structures.

From a very young age, most of us learned an important lesson about how physics govern structural integrity through the folk tale of the Three Little Pigs.  You might recall that the Three Little Pigs lived initially with their mother (and, it may be reasonably conjectured, with their father for some time) in a comfortable brick home safe from the evils that faced them out in that Big Bad World.  Of course, Mother Pig eventually told her sons that it was time for them to leave home to become the pigs they were meant to be.  All in agreement, the Three Little Pigs confidently left the safety of their childhood home and set their sights on building homes of their own.

We all know where the story takes us from there.  Each Little Pig built himself a house.  But while the first Two Little Pigs chose to indulge their passing fancies with merriment rather than focus on the fundamentals of home building, their brother, the one unselfish Little Pig, made the arduous sacrifice necessary to build a home like the one he left behind.  When their neighboring Big Bad Wolf came huffing and puffing, only the house built like the old family structure withstood the torrent of abuse leveled against it.  Clearly, the structures of the other two houses were ill-prepared for what awaited them in the Big Bad World.

Naturally, people who form families are challenged to turn houses into homes.  Some parents choose to build houses made of straw—structures easily destroyed by challenges of the Big Bad World.  Other parents, perhaps parents with a little more self-control and focus, or even the added help of that second parent, build themselves houses made of sticks—structures a bit more sturdy, a tad more protective, but ultimately not much more resistant than straw homes to the world’s destructive forces.  Still other parents build houses made of brick, safe havens wherein individual family members can be nurtured successfully and successfully resist the universal, common, tragic and often devastating abuses of a turbulent world. 

Anyone can throw together sticks and straw.  Building with sticks is easy and quick.  It doesn’t require much self-sacrifice.  And as the First Little Pig demonstrated, a straw house allows even more time to pursue worldly interests.  Fluff it, snip it here and there, and voila!  It looks like a real house.  It has a roof and a doorway and window openings.  The façade is reassuringly familiar.  But without a solid foundation and lacking substantive building materials, this house will end up inside out beneath the gusts of the first good strong wind.  The Little Pigs should have known this, for the home in which they were reared was a sturdy one, resistant to even strong gales.  But the First Two Little Pigs chose to create cheap imitations of the structures in which they had been reared and which they could have recreated if they had just made home building their highest priority.

Building Real Homes  

The brick house of the Third Little Pig was irrefutable evidence of his commitment to the safety and security of family.  It took much more work than the houses of straw and sticks.  Bricks are rough, hard, and heavy to handle.  Bricklaying is back-breaking work that requires endurance, precision, and planning.  It takes time and real personal commitment.  Because of his sacrifice and preparation, the Third Little Pig built himself and the rest of his siblings a safe haven to last a lifetime.

As the experience of the Little Pigs illustrates, there are natural reasons why structures fall down or stay standing.  Every physical structure is governed by laws of nature, and its existence can be explained through the science of physics.  Family structures are no exception to any of these laws or science.  There are scientific reasons—quantifiable and empirical—why certain types of family structures fall down while others stay standing.

To be sure, when we think of families, we rarely think in terms of their physical makeup or how they are structured.  All of us simply do what we can to survive day to day.  Human relationships are so heartfelt and emotional that to consider them in terms of structure seems to dehumanize them.  So when families fail, and society is left to pick up the pieces and clear the rubble, we don’t often analyze what has happened by applying scientific reasoning to the structures of the failed families.  Nor do we often apply such scientific logic when analyzing the success of other families.  In our generally unscientific perspective on family failure and success, we are perhaps not so different from medieval masons, carpenters, and shipwrights who saw in physical structures that remained intact the mysterious hand of God, keeping their work standing or afloat.  Such sentiments led to ceremonies, sometimes celebratory, sometimes superstitious, such as the christening of a ship with a bottle of champagne or the laying of a cornerstone by the chief citizen of a community.

Ceremony and sentiment do not explain science.  Buildings stand, ships float, and airplanes fly for specific reasons accessible to science.  So, too, do family structures survive or fail for reasons that science can again identify.  As difficult as it might be for non-scientists to study physics, that part of physics dealing with structures has proven essential in erecting the vast cities in which we live and in which most of the world’s relationships are transacted.  Yet for emotional reasons, we prefer not to think of families in the honest and objective terms so important to the structural engineers who build our cities.  In any case, analyzing the structures of our families objectively is an often tiring and painful exercise.  It requires introspection when families fail and humility when they survive.  It requires learning from our mistakes and honesty in our reflections about the natural human experience.  And just as ceremony and sentiment do not explain the survival of physical structures, neither do ideologies explain (or excuse) the physics of natural family structures.

Because it can cause damage to buildings and bridges, we might wish away gravity.  Indeed, we might create a whole political movement toward that end.  But such an effort would be a futile rebellion against the laws of nature and science.  Ideology is defenseless against truth, and ideologies denying the strength and durability of the natural family structure are as delusional and arrogant as the Babylonian effort to build a tower to heaven.

To understand the physics of the natural family we begin by understanding the scientific intersection of both structure and material.  We cannot talk about the one without talking about the other, and we can limn no clear-cut dividing boundary between the two, though we know that both must be considered.  Remembering the Three Little Pigs, we recall how the integrity of the structures they built was largely determined by the materials—the straw, stick, and brick—they used.  The same is true in families.  Even the best family structures can fail to sustain the load of life when its materials (its family members) are too weak.  On the other hand, we know of problematic family structures that defy the odds primarily because they incorporate exceptional human material.  Still, if an unconventional family structure does survive, it will do so only within certain bounds and limitations and, probably, only up to a certain point of duress.  So whether assessing a skyscraper or a family, we must look at both material and structure—the two go hand in hand.

The next thing we must understand is that structures, such as the natural family, are never indestructible—that is, no structure can possibly withstand all the forces that might be unleashed against it.  Nature at times manifests forces that can topple, spill, or break any structure.  When we speak about structures—their strength, integrity, or endurance—we must be very careful to specify that we are not speaking of attributes that make failure impossible.  We are, in fact, speaking about such structures’ relative ability to carry a load, handle stress and strain, maintain resiliency under pressure, and bend, but not break.  The power of the natural family is just this: it is not impervious to all the forces set against it, natural and man-made, but it resists those forces better than can any other family structure of which we have knowledge. 

The Truths of Physical Law  

The analogies between physical structures and family structures are numerous and often exact.  We tap into the power of such analogies when we begin to ask questions, such as, Why don’t people fall through floors?  But before enumerating answers to this question by drawing on our family structure analogy, perhaps we should reflect on the meaning of physical law.  All engineers recognize the law of physics that explains why a speaker standing at the lectern does not suddenly drop through the floor.  The structural strength of the floor exerts an upward force that is equal and opposite to the downward force of the speaker’s weight.  It is no small point of fact that the floor would give way to the speaker’s weight if the downward pressure that that weight applied to the floor were even one pound of force more than that with which the floor pushes up in return.  If a speaker weighs 200 pounds and the floor can push upward with only 199 pounds of force, then the speaker will disappear through the floor!

In other words, for a speaker to stand at a lectern comfortably and continue to address an audience, he must be sustained by a complementarity between the downward force of his weight and the upward force of the floor.  Natural family structures share a similar complementarity between a man and a woman within the bonds of marriage.  The successful outcome of this complementarity, or balance, in marriage—it must be remembered—requires many things, including the right combination of human material within the marital structure.  But what if a conjugal structure comprised not a man and a woman, but instead two men or two women?  Without the requisite complementarity of human material in the marital structure, we can hardly expect it to stand up to the external forces applying pressure to it.

In the absence of the requisite complementarities, not only would a speaker fall through the floor behind his lectern, but an alternative family structure would also fall victim to the full load of pressure against it.  The complementary nature of the natural family structure, assuming the best materials, provides a stronger, more durable structure than does an alternative family structure lacking such complementarity.

All structures and materials change shape to deflect forces when they are called upon to bear a load.  When an apple tree is laden with fruit, or with heavy, wet snow, its limbs bend.  In physics, this effect—called elasticity —accounts for the way structures deflect forces that could destroy it.  The apple tree deflects the force of the weight of its fruit or snow by bending—and by bending it goes on to live and produce fruit for another season.

The natural family structure is highly elastic.  Single-parent homes are not very elastic.  That is, the natural family structure can bear tremendous loads of force by bending, but not breaking.  A single-parent family structure is not equipped for the heavy loads of force life will impose upon it.  And we can discern the effects of elasticity (or its absence) not only in individual family structures, but also in entire communities of families.  The materials that constitute structures are stretched or contracted constantly.  Larger, more tightly knit families reaching across generations are able to bear heavier loads.  A community of such families will be stronger than a community of families comprised of alternative structural materials and non-complementary structures.  On a much larger scale, this same science of elasticity works as well for nations or civilizations.  Highly elastic family structures will endure the ages; less elastic family structures will die off over time.

Elasticity is important in the physics of structures.  A highly elastic structure will recover its original shape after bearing a heavy load.  This is a highly desirable, if not essential, characteristic for a family structure.  We want to be able to bear the burden of the loss of a loved one, or of a serious illness or financial hardship.  We want to be able to withstand the adverse forces to which any successful enterprise will be exposed, and then we want to be able to reclaim the balance and stability of our original family structure.  Of course, some natural materials such as plastic or putty have innate properties that do not allow them to return to their original form after exposure to pressures.  Likewise, the character of some people is like putty under pressure: they never recover from the pressures of hardship, thereby threatening the integrity of the whole family structure to which they belong.

The vulnerability of some individuals to hardship may remind us that we can analyze structures not only by looking at the whole, but at discrete points within that whole. So, rather than surveying the entire structure, we can look at specific points of stress and strain in the materials constituting the structure.

Stress & Strain  

Stress is a very human experience.  The pressures of the day can create so much stress within us that we can actually become sick as a result.  Those who study structures and materials measure a stress by measuring how hard a material is pushed together or pulled apart by external forces.  It is interesting to note that stress actually can bring structural elements closer together—of course, it is not always love that brings us together in response to stress, but such union under stress can still ultimately be constructive.

Like stress, the phenomenon of strain requires attention from structural analysts.  To assess strain we determine how far things are pulled apart or how close they are pushed together.  We can see both stress and strain in a piece of chewing gum.  If we pull the gum from both ends, the material will stretch.  If we pull hard enough, the material will break.  The amount of force we apply in stretching the gum is called stress; the distance we pull the gum without breaking is called strain.  For us humans, stress results from the daily forces that stretch us, while strain manifests the inner strength we have to stretch without snapping.  Though related, stress and strain are two different phenomena.  The former is external to us; the latter is internal to us.  What is most relevant for our analogy to family structures is that the good structures are those constituted of materials that can handle the most stress and bear the most strain of daily living.  Families deal with many stresses.  They might face financial stress when a member of the family loses his job.  Families often cope with stress created by modern cultures that subvert the values being inculcated within our homes.  And then we strain as families to counter these stresses by trying to reinforce our family structures.

When we speak of the strength of any structure, we are simply describing the load it can bear.  On the other hand, the strength of any material is equivalent to the stress required to break it.  What we learn from the science of structures is that the best ones will be flexible and strong.  They will bend, but not break, and they will return to their true form after being tested or stretched.  The human experience tracks closely with the analogies offered by this science.

But why discuss family structures using such analogies?   We discuss stress and strain, elasticity and strength, as a means of reaching a much-desired end: understanding how to make successful structures.  Just as we study the principles that ensure success in constructing buildings, ships, and airplanes, we study family structures because we seek the safest and most effective families we can design.  Champions of the natural family conclude that nature is a much better engineer than man or the state because nature provides more give, more latitude, within its structures than do any of the substitutes devised by man or the state. It is thus within the natural family that we can live our lives in the best manner possible.  It is nature, not man or the state, that builds elasticity into structures and flexibility into materials.  Nature is the best architect.  It routinely works to maximize the ability of structures to carry the biggest loads.

Man, ironically, often forfeits the real advantages of the natural family because of his mad penchant for perfectibility.  It is no small coincidence that in the social sciences we refer to these mad visionaries as “social engineers.”  It is interesting to note that the ability of a structure to carry a load is largely dependent on two factors: the uses made of it and the forces it has resisted over its lifetime.  A tendency among some engineers seeking to maximize efficiencies is to tamper with the very characteristics of structures that keep them safe and strong over the long run.  Curiously, these engineers may begin stripping structures and materials of the very qualities that make them strong because they believe that they can devise perfect structures, completely unbending and immoveable.  Structural disasters can frequently be attributed to engineers seeking theoretical perfectibility while ignoring the empirical science of structures derived from nature.

Those who use nature’s laws to assess the integrity of all structures and materials are not surprised by the flaws in unnatural man-made structures and materials. Of course, humans do love to drill holes to tie materials together—and, if they are men, the more holes the better!  The only problem is that holes and creases and cracks come at a price—they can create irregularities.  All building materials have what are called “stress trajectories,” lines of strength that pass stress from one molecule on to the next to enable a structure to bear a load.  It does not require great imagination to understand what happens to a stress trajectory when a builder punches holes in a building material.

Families have their stress trajectories as well.  Punch a hole in a family—that is, take one family member out of the natural family structure, or preclude intergenerational bonds or the complementary constructs of supportive public institutions—and that structure will be weakened.  We can attempt to patch up our familial holes, but as physics informs us, adding materials to weak points can actually concentrate stress.  In other words, an artificial patch can be very dangerous, because it gives the appearance of safety without remedying the original structural weakness.  The operating rule is that “partial strength produces general weakness.”  This is because a patch does not relieve the breach in a stress trajectory nor does it solve the problem caused when stress concentrates. In other words, a patch is never as strong as the original material.

This survey of the science of structures will not be complete, however, until we attend to one last aspect of this science, an aspect called “strain energy.”  It is not enough to know how and to what effect structures and materials are exposed to stress and external forces.  We need to know how to manage and withstand that stress and those forces.  As was mentioned earlier, analysts measure strain by determining the amount of pressure a structural element can sustain before it fails. Yet engineers have identified strategies for successfully managing the energy that produces strain, strategies that prevent a structural element from cracking or even exploding.  As part of our own family structures, we want to dissipate the energy that produces strain in our structures before it, too, breaks us.

We know that a certain amount of stress can break us, but it can only do so if we let it by allowing strain energy to build uncontrolled.  Consider, for example, the way a bow can be broken without ever shooting an arrow.   An archer can actually break a bow by not putting it to good use.  A bow stores kinetic energy, energy typically released every time the bow shoots an arrow.  When a bow sits idle, some of its stored kinetic energy is released over time through small cracks within the material of the bow itself.  Left idle long enough, the bow will be rendered useless.

The fate of the unused bow offers a lesson applicable to all elastic substances.  Humans are elastic, yet when we do not fill the measure of our creation or act according to our nature, we, too, can crack or break without the application of any external force.  Thus, the sometimes stressful exercise of building a natural family enables individuals to avoid the self-destructive influences of unused energy.  In the culture of individualism, we see a narcissism that is as destructive to humans as disuse is to non-human elastic structures.  If a person is not striving to create a natural family structure, that person may well become self-destructive.  In Utah, a popular saying has it that an unmarried man over the age of 30 is a menace to society.  This local saying translates into human significance the lesson of the unused bow.

The Overlap of Joints  

Nature has offered us a solution to strain energy: if we transfer energy throughout a material, we keep stress from concentrating at a single point.  In the architecture of our physical structures we can do this by creating joints to transmit load from one part of a structure to another.  For us humans, joints seem to do their job best when their bonds at the point of contact are substantial.  The “overlap” of the joints is not as significant as the point of contact between the joints.  Humans establish stress-dissipating points of contact within the institutions of civil society, such as churches, local neighborhoods, voluntary charitable organizations, and the free market.  The fact that families overlap with these other civil institutions is not quite so important as is the bond that families form with each of them.  If the bonds (or joints) are significant enough, these civil institutions can help families share the load of daily stresses thrust upon them.

In this context, it is worth noting that governments—unlike voluntary civic organizations—are about as helpful to families as they are to those trying to build good structural joints in physical structures.  Author James Gordon shares a story of government involvement in ship making:

The great skill of the old shipwrights and millwrights lay in somehow combining sufficient strength for safety with the modicum of flexibility needed to allow for the ‘working’ of timber.  The older shipwrights erred on the side of flexibility, and, though their ships were often excessively leaky, they seldom actually broke at sea.  It required the administrative abilities of modern war-time governments to produce wooden ships which really did fall to pieces.

Troubles with joints in ships and aircraft were a fairly prominent feature of both the World Wars.  During the first war the Americans built a large number of wooden ships, both steam and sail, frequently by unorthodox methods; and many of these ships broke up.  In the second war they produced even greater numbers of welded steel steamers, of which an even higher proportion broke, either at sea or in harbor. (J.E Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down [New York, New York: De Capo, 1978], 135.)

Yes, our natural family structures can be as “leaky” as the product of old shipwrights, but they have proven to hold together on the open seas.  Government ship projects, built “frequently by unorthodox methods,” rarely hold together when needed most.

But whether looking at ships or at families, we find that flexible joints are not the only solution to the problem of strain energy.  A second way to transfer energy throughout a material, thereby mitigating its stress concentration—is through relying on that material’s “resiliency.”  A fascinating principle of structural science reveals that the same force that can break a short piece of string can break a long piece of string, despite our intuition that the longer piece of string is stronger.  But the longer piece of string does have one advantage: a longer piece of string has greater elasticity, greater resiliency, and so can stretch further under a load, thereby reducing the stress of a sudden pull.  In other words, the longer piece of string is better able to disperse strain energy under a load.

The Resilience Factor  

The resiliency in natural family structures works the same way.  We might call this resiliency our “intergenerational bonds.”  Maintaining intergenerational bonds turns our families into a long piece of string.  It enables a family to share the load of daily stress.  Every young mother appreciates the extra set of hands from her mother to grandmother to great-grandmother, and every young father can appreciate the wisdom, counsel, and even financial assistance of dad, grandfather, and great-grandfather.  Weave aunts, uncles, and cousins into the fiber and that long piece of string becomes truly resilient.

In focusing chiefly on structures, this analysis has said little about the nature and quality of particular building materials, such as steel, wood, iron, nylon, or plastic.  To be sure, each material has its distinctive strengths and its weaknesses.  So, too, do individual members of a family structure.  We may even explore an interesting relationship between human muscles and human tendons.  Muscle mass is a soft tissue.  Its value lies in its ability to shorten itself, so creating tensile force by pulling actively.  But it is not an inherently strong material.  Yet we see muscles become strong when they are tied to solid bones by tough and inflexible tendons.  There exists an ecology of strength within the human body that human structures must also emulate.  Lasting family structures require exceptional material strength, and this material strength among family members derives from moral character, from virtue, and from reliable behavior.  Each part of the family structure must be able to rely confidently upon the other parts to comfortably bear the stresses of life.

Though it may seem surprising, those of us who want to make our own families strong must do so by assuming the material make-up of a child.  The bones of a child are not terribly brittle; they are strong and tough, but not stiff.  Yet young children, on the whole, bounce, but don’t break.  They represent the archetypal material of a durable family.  Jesus Christ once counseled his disciples to humble themselves and become as little children (Matt. 18: 3-4). Following this counsel requires a man to become “submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.” (Mosiah 3:18-19, Book of Mormon)

As we thus become childlike, we recognize more fully how the natural family structure represents the best familial structure science and the laws of nature can offer.  It is flexible and resilient.  Its component members are complementary and form an efficient ecology of service and support.  Its “long piece of string”—its intergenerational bonds—spreads the load of daily life across the connections of an extended family.  We know scientifically and empirically that the natural family is the best structure in support of personal development, educational attainment, physical safety for women and children, emotional well-being, and temporal prosperity.

As Allan Carlson and I have written in The Natural Family: A Manifesto, “Science, after all, is the study of the natural order.”