Is the Mutual Adoption Club a good idea?

We all know that family is important, but what if the traditional family as we know it is flawed? In the book, Island by Aldous Huxley, the people of Pala think so. In the book, Susila talks about how traditional families feel to the child, “In your predestined and exclusive families, children, as you say, serve a long prison term under a single set of parental jailers.”(109) She says how this can be a good thing if the parents are educated enough to take care of their children correctly, but she says the majority of the parents are not educated enough and the children suffer through their “prison” sentence. So, how does Pala deal with this? They do it by the Mutual Adoption Club or MAC.

So, you are probably wondering what the MAC is? Well, according to the book, the MAC is a group of fifteen to twenty-five couples who, with their own children, share the responsibility of raising the children.(106) The way it works that if the child of a certain couple feels like they need a break from their birth parents, they can choose to spend time with a different couple in their MAC. While they are with the family, they as well as their birth parents get a chance to talk to a consular to work out why they need a break and figure out what went wrong between them and their birth parents. For Pala, this seems to work better than the traditional family, stating that “the children grow up in a world that’s a working model of society at large.”(109) So, is the MAC a good idea? Yes, but I do not know if it would work in the real world.

Work Cited:

Huxley, Aldous. Island. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1962. Print.