I've railed against the family as institution often enough. Here is another formulation of the case for the prosecution.

I say that many of the problems of the world that come from humans one to the other - i.e. excluding all the natural problems such as disease, so called acts of god etc - arise from a corruption of the emotions. This concurs again with Maslow who argued that evil resulted from the frustration of deficiency needs. In other words when a person was unable to receive these basic and necessary requirements then their emotional make-up suffered which over a period would lead to a delinquency of feeling. He suggested that people were morally good at heart and that it was a distorting of that basic design that caused many psychological problems and as a direct consequence poor relationships.

The reason I blame the culture of family is because I think it acts as a harbour for sickness in the emotional make-up. All the weaknesses, frustrations, corruptions and distortions that have been passed down the generations are allowed to proliferate just as in 19thC medical science it was discovered germs did in the physical realm. Of this everyone was ignorant until it was identified. Similarly with emotional problems: eventually it will come to be realised that family is the biggest culprit, in fact the very antithesis of what it is held up to be by conservatives and the sentimentalists who cleave to it romanticising its ills as if that is what love is all about.

Family bonding is a primitive form like clan-bonding. It is born of subjugation of the natural impulses of people to connect with each other in healthier more open ways. It is a retarded, stunted kind of person who takes all their cues from family life. This applies equally to 'good' families who toe the line and play by the good rules as it does to when children are badly treated. Both are a distortion. Those well treated are given a false impression of how indifferent the world can be. Kids abused are likely to go forth and multiply.

You rarely hear talk of family these days without the dreadful sentimentality associated especially toward children who are increasingly idolised as some kind of perfection. Actually children as a model for how we should relate to each other and how the world should be is a disaster. Children are undeveloped. They are not fully formed and need to have their development properly counselled in a way that doesn't result in the frustrations that family almost by default seems to foster.

Social evolution needs to move away from this primacy and try to identify as accurately as possible the kinds of psychological conditions that make for better people, people who are nurtured and accomplished emotionally and as a result don't pass on the 'germs'. Quality relationships would grow from such an environment, one to one, through communities and into the wider world. This is the single most important issue I believe that faces future generations (assuming of course that material life continues to uphold). When you listen to the discourse though it doesn't seem to be remotely close to being grasped. But I guess all the great movements that have been of benefit, from scientific discovery to social and political progress, have all been conspicuously absent in the majority mind set, and then as if from nowhere become all apparent. The arrival of emotional intelligence will be no different.