Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation.

Mead is criticizing the modern Western expectation that a married couple and their children should function as a self-sufficient unit, physically and socially separated from extended kin and community. Drawing on anthropological comparison, she implies this arrangement is historically unusual: many societies distribute childrearing, eldercare, and daily survival across wider networks of relatives and neighbors. The “box” evokes both suburban housing and social isolation. The quote’s significance lies in reframing “family problems” (stress, burnout, loneliness) as structural outcomes of an imposed social design rather than individual failure, and in arguing for rebuilding interdependence—through extended family ties, communal supports, or social policy.