> Never were families discourages from isolating together.
False - at least in the UK different households were not permitted to mix. So if grandparents/aunts/uncles/cousins/etc lived in a different residence, well that is different households and no mixing was allowed. There goes a huge source of a lot of people's adhoc/emergency childcare options.
No mixing of groups of any size was allowed either.
There was some relaxing of this, but now we are seeing a second spike as obviously nothing has changed so people are back to infecting each other.
It most certainly was for quite a while where I am (Ontario, Canada). For months we were told to only be in close proximity to those we already lived with. IIRC it was 2 steps on the "start to relax recommendations" path before a group of 10 was permissible.
Visiting with friends (groups under 10 people) while following safe interaction guidelines was also not discouraged.
EDIT: This is from the point of view of someone in the US; international laws vary as pointed out by replies.