The Covid pandemic has shown us how dangerously shallow are our community connections.

Several decades ago, Americans transformed from generational living to the nuclear family: mother, father, and minor children.

In the more recent past, community often disappeared altogether, becoming a collection of one-person units or single parent families. Singles and studio apartments and temporary live-in romantic relationships proliferated. Some apartment dwellers didn’t know the name of a single neighbor.

The pandemic saw many single Americans working from home with few ways to connect, given the danger of catching Covid from physical proximity.

Parents, especially single parents, may have lacked grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins to help them through the pinch of forced home schooling.

Obviously, a family doesn’t automatically make for healthy living. Some families, unfortunately, are toxic. However, closer connections require overcoming our propensity of the past few decades to equate freedom with singleness. Families, it seems, are actually necessary.

While avoiding too much dependency for young people who need space and time to spread their wings, rebuilding family and community relationships is a task for our times.