I think you're believing in a false dichotomy. You can have a full family experience without doing labor, or working a farm, or a family business. Look at immigrant families from certain parts of the world. When I lived in the Midwest, I interacted with them. Most of them were well educated, and not doing business or laborious work. They were spread apart in different cities, but mostly within driving distance. Culturally, they insisted on maintaining close social ties.
A coworker of mine who is in his 30's (PhD in engineering, doing tech work) is thinking he'll move back to the Midwest where his family is after 2-3 more years here (West coast). He loves it here (especially the weather), but all the niceties in culture and weather here don't compensate for the lack of having family and cousins nearby. His kids will grow up there, just as he did.
(Just in case anyone is wondering, he's not white, and so will be moving back to a much less diverse part of the country).
Having experienced both sides, there are definitely down sides to close family ties, but I view family as a wider spectrum. If your relatives are horrible (or way out of sync with your mindset), then it's much worse than the individualist mindset. But if you get along with them, it's way better than anything you can achieve as an individualist.
On the other hand I wonder if we've prematurely jumped to this conclusion that non-immigrant Americans have this horribly individualist culture where we shun all our relatives once we have a professional job. Like, what actual evidence is pointing us to that? Is it just feelings, or is there some kind of metric we can look at?
My example of immigrants was not to imply anything about non-immigrants. I used them simply because they're easy to distinguish (yes, profiling, I guess).
I've definitely seen the same in non-immigrant families. Perhaps more likely from folks who do not come from major cities (I may be wrong). Definitely tend to see it more amongst LDS folks, but it's by no means limited to them.
I understand what you mean, I believe it was me who made that generalization first. It's hard to refrain from trying to make things follow a simple and explainable pattern.
A coworker of mine who is in his 30's (PhD in engineering, doing tech work) is thinking he'll move back to the Midwest where his family is after 2-3 more years here (West coast). He loves it here (especially the weather), but all the niceties in culture and weather here don't compensate for the lack of having family and cousins nearby. His kids will grow up there, just as he did.
(Just in case anyone is wondering, he's not white, and so will be moving back to a much less diverse part of the country).
Having experienced both sides, there are definitely down sides to close family ties, but I view family as a wider spectrum. If your relatives are horrible (or way out of sync with your mindset), then it's much worse than the individualist mindset. But if you get along with them, it's way better than anything you can achieve as an individualist.