“Whatever is strong and healthy in families, whatever meets real human needs, enhances and enriches life, cannot and will not be threatened by what I propose here. Any institution that really works is immune to attack, however severe. Reality has its own strength. … Happily married couples who after many years get great strength and joy from each other’s company simply smile and go on with their life when they hear that marriage is nothing but a device for the exploitation of women, or whatever it may be. Their experience tells them better.” (P.
46)

In this, I think Holt is talking in terms of ideas or philosophies. Obviously, a family can be torn asunder by war, famine, etc. The main idea he presents in this chapter is that in our society to a
significant degree the family is broken. And the way our society tries to fix it typically does not work. The things in individual families that do work would continue to work even if the current social controls were eliminated.

The illustration he is leaning on is a marriage which works. Andrea and I may have looked at our marriage license a couple times in the last 10 years. It is not the license which keeps us married but the fact that overall, our marriage works. We rarely say to each other that such and such is your responsibility in the marriage. And the following quote does a nice job of summing up how this chapter applies to children.

“This notion that a child cannot grow up healthy unless he is at every moment under the eye of some adult who has nothing to do but watch over him is very modern.” (P. 49)

This I know to be true from personal experience. Beginning as young as 9, I often spent Saturday afternoons away from my family, in the woodland around home. In the summer I would also have chores to do which would last most of the day so I would only see my parents at mid morning/afternoon breaks and meals. Ironically, this book was written when I was about that age. Books written generations ago often involved children being on their own.