OKAY SO my thoughts on family structures! This applies primarily to Earth, where uncurped population growth would really impact (and is currently really impacting) global warming and most other global environmental issues.
Basically I imagine that at some really grim point in Earth's past legal limits would have been placed on childbearing in many countries, something like China's One Child Policy, but more widespread. This would have been a pretty brutal period of Earth's history, but life always adapts, and so does culture. (Also, at some point between now and the end of Hate Plus, Earth appears to either have a unified government with continents as the equivalent of provinces, or is split into continents rather than countries.) Anyway, I think polygamy would have been encouraged partly because it would reduce the number of household units overall (assuming most married people end up living together) per capita, and if one child is allowed per household that really tamps down on the population even more.
Living space is also a big issue, and space exploration/colonization was probably one way of relieving the pressure, but not everyone can become a colonist, nor do they want to, so packing people in more densely would also be encouraged.
Some things that might follow is: a. parents perhaps wanting their kids to have siblings like they grew up with, or really worrying about their kids not having as many peers to play with b. the increasing cost of rent and/or real estate c. polyamory suddenly being considered respectable because it also means you are conserving resources
So I'm thinking probably they would have consolidated households even more, so that you could get 2-4 marital groups under one roof, each marriage comprising of 2-4 adults and 1 child.
I was calling this "householding" in my fic; it would have equivalents to divorce ("decoupling") and terms for adults who a child's parents are not married to but are householded with (demiparents) and those adults' children (demisibs). Many of the individual adults in the households would be having relationships primarily based on childrearing, but not uncommon for romantic relationships to also happen there too.
Anyway, at some point the environmental disasters would have abated somewhat, the worst would be over, restrictions would start to loosen up. But cultural values would have slanted very far towards multiple partners in childrearing (and probably also romance), few children, and large extended family groups who were not necessarily technically related. Living alone or with only one's spouse(s) would be considered somewhat selfish, and probably much more expensive; young single people either would be living with their families or would join a household made of other single people and young married couples/triads/quartets who didn't yet have children.
(To some extent I guess this would actually be pretty familiar to *Mute, in that huge extended families are a fairly big deal and they are willing to pitch in to help each other and isolating yourself is considered kind of weird, but the free-for-all nature and the equality of it all would baffle her. How do you decide who the heir to the household is if there are seven potential fathers and all of them claim to be of equal rank and maybe the kid is actually the biological child of two women??? SOCIETY SURELY CANNOT HANDLE THESE PEOPLE NOT ONLY NOT KNOWING THEIR PLACE BUT NOT APPEARING TO HAVE ONE TO BEGIN WITH.)
Anyway, that's kind of as far as I got, I guess. If you really want to know how divorce and decoupling works in this society it's pretty boring, but I thought of that because IRL I work for a divorce lawyer! (tl;didn't write: basically the same as divorce nowadays but with more moving parts.)
As for the AIs... you will notice that all the above is hyperfocused on biological people. AIs don't eat and may or may not take up less space, but I'm assuming that for a while they weren't really considered, like, real people, and I'm not sure how long you want that to last in terms of legality and cultural assumptions.
Anyway, Analogue suggests that AIs do still have safeguards to keep themselves from making multiple copies, and I think the cultural taboo and the value of individuality you're saying is a big part of this culture would actually work well with my idea that possibly many AIs were not permitted to reproduce AT ALL, or only reproducing by fission (therefore they would stop existing and two "children" possessed of their different skills and personality aspects would survive) because of a general mistrust that an AI who wanted a child wouldn't just copy themselves wholly or mostly, and a perception that it's easier to do that with digital data than with biological data (which it is nowadays, of course, but I imagine biotech would be much more advanced and it would not be that much harder). So AIs wishing to act as parents would require either biological surrogates or at least one biological partner/co-householder, or they could take in the resulting children of another AI who split into "child" AIs. (Developmentally, these "children" would be more along the lines of adolescents or pre-adolescents; vulnerable and not possessed of great judgment but having some skills and knowledge and being able to communicate.)
OKAY SO THAT'S A LOT. Sorry, I feel like I just rambled for paragraphs and paragraphs about faaaamily and made it sound very prescriptive, which, bleah. Obviously there are lots of variations according to specific cultural backgrounds, and also this is a great way for little pockets of horribleness to exist under the guise of Really Close Households!!!1! and a recipe for all kinds of interpersonal conflict. (And personally I'd hate it because I really like living alone.) But yeah, those are my rambly ideas, feel free to incorporate or disregard!
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ninetydegrees
(no subject)
Basically I imagine that at some really grim point in Earth's past legal limits would have been placed on childbearing in many countries, something like China's One Child Policy, but more widespread. This would have been a pretty brutal period of Earth's history, but life always adapts, and so does culture. (Also, at some point between now and the end of Hate Plus, Earth appears to either have a unified government with continents as the equivalent of provinces, or is split into continents rather than countries.) Anyway, I think polygamy would have been encouraged partly because it would reduce the number of household units overall (assuming most married people end up living together) per capita, and if one child is allowed per household that really tamps down on the population even more.
Living space is also a big issue, and space exploration/colonization was probably one way of relieving the pressure, but not everyone can become a colonist, nor do they want to, so packing people in more densely would also be encouraged.
Some things that might follow is:
a. parents perhaps wanting their kids to have siblings like they grew up with, or really worrying about their kids not having as many peers to play with
b. the increasing cost of rent and/or real estate
c. polyamory suddenly being considered respectable because it also means you are conserving resources
So I'm thinking probably they would have consolidated households even more, so that you could get 2-4 marital groups under one roof, each marriage comprising of 2-4 adults and 1 child.
I was calling this "householding" in my fic; it would have equivalents to divorce ("decoupling") and terms for adults who a child's parents are not married to but are householded with (demiparents) and those adults' children (demisibs). Many of the individual adults in the households would be having relationships primarily based on childrearing, but not uncommon for romantic relationships to also happen there too.
Anyway, at some point the environmental disasters would have abated somewhat, the worst would be over, restrictions would start to loosen up. But cultural values would have slanted very far towards multiple partners in childrearing (and probably also romance), few children, and large extended family groups who were not necessarily technically related. Living alone or with only one's spouse(s) would be considered somewhat selfish, and probably much more expensive; young single people either would be living with their families or would join a household made of other single people and young married couples/triads/quartets who didn't yet have children.
(To some extent I guess this would actually be pretty familiar to *Mute, in that huge extended families are a fairly big deal and they are willing to pitch in to help each other and isolating yourself is considered kind of weird, but the free-for-all nature and the equality of it all would baffle her. How do you decide who the heir to the household is if there are seven potential fathers and all of them claim to be of equal rank and maybe the kid is actually the biological child of two women??? SOCIETY SURELY CANNOT HANDLE THESE PEOPLE NOT ONLY NOT KNOWING THEIR PLACE BUT NOT APPEARING TO HAVE ONE TO BEGIN WITH.)
Anyway, that's kind of as far as I got, I guess. If you really want to know how divorce and decoupling works in this society it's pretty boring, but I thought of that because IRL I work for a divorce lawyer! (tl;didn't write: basically the same as divorce nowadays but with more moving parts.)
As for the AIs... you will notice that all the above is hyperfocused on biological people. AIs don't eat and may or may not take up less space, but I'm assuming that for a while they weren't really considered, like, real people, and I'm not sure how long you want that to last in terms of legality and cultural assumptions.
Anyway, Analogue suggests that AIs do still have safeguards to keep themselves from making multiple copies, and I think the cultural taboo and the value of individuality you're saying is a big part of this culture would actually work well with my idea that possibly many AIs were not permitted to reproduce AT ALL, or only reproducing by fission (therefore they would stop existing and two "children" possessed of their different skills and personality aspects would survive) because of a general mistrust that an AI who wanted a child wouldn't just copy themselves wholly or mostly, and a perception that it's easier to do that with digital data than with biological data (which it is nowadays, of course, but I imagine biotech would be much more advanced and it would not be that much harder). So AIs wishing to act as parents would require either biological surrogates or at least one biological partner/co-householder, or they could take in the resulting children of another AI who split into "child" AIs. (Developmentally, these "children" would be more along the lines of adolescents or pre-adolescents; vulnerable and not possessed of great judgment but having some skills and knowledge and being able to communicate.)
OKAY SO THAT'S A LOT. Sorry, I feel like I just rambled for paragraphs and paragraphs about faaaamily and made it sound very prescriptive, which, bleah. Obviously there are lots of variations according to specific cultural backgrounds, and also this is a great way for little pockets of horribleness to exist under the guise of Really Close Households!!!1! and a recipe for all kinds of interpersonal conflict. (And personally I'd hate it because I really like living alone.) But yeah, those are my rambly ideas, feel free to incorporate or disregard!
oh my god I wrote a novel. sorry!