Yesterday I had a debate with my girlfriend about the cultural views/treatment of the elderly in the US.
I predicted that if current healthcare/social security issues get progressively worse in the future, people’s family social habits will change- you’ll see more extended families in one house, and more adults taking care of their elderly parents. I didn’t have any cites (it was just a friendly debate during lunch) but mentioned that other cultural social models (Chinese families, for example) seem to be more prepared to deal with this by strongly pressing their kids toward having a good education and job, as a kind of security for their whole family and not just themselves.
My girlfriend disagreed. She claimed the (primarily Caucasian, it seems to us) tendency to more or less ignore the elderly is so strongly culturally ingrained in our minds that our generation won’t really do much to ‘adapt’ to a worsening situation.
Obviously its impossible to predict the outcome of this, since there are so many possibilities- obesity and other diseases may shorten the average american’s lifespan back far enough that not having a retirement safety net isn’t a problem because people are dropping dead while they are still of working age. Or things could turn around in the future and lead to things like socialized healthcare and the like.
“According to the latest U.S. Census data, the number of households with three or more generations living under one roof grew 38% from 1990 to 2000, vs. 8% for those with just two generations. Doubling up is most common in states where home values have soared as well as in places with large populations of immigrants from countries accustomed to multigenerational living. Extended households now account for 5.6% of California’s total, vs. almost 4% nationally. And 8.2% of Hawaii’s households are multigenerational. With the affordability of starter homes at a 15-year low, the pressure to double up is likely to remain.”
You can see that these percentages would break down differently among various socioeconomic groups, but the article doesn’t address this topic in detail.
I think it’s already happening with the trend of young adults, even older ones with spouses and children, moving back in with their parents, usually for economic reasons, either necessity or convenience. While there is a “delayed maturity/failure to launch” aspect to it, there could well be a positive side with
the multi-generational bonding. We could see more family businesses and enterprises rise out of this.
This is not something that is culkturally ingrained. It is an American (or, possibly, industrial society) phenomenon that is no older than the period immediately following WWII, with the rush to the suburbs with a house and a yard.
The whole notion of the “nuclear family” has been widely debated for decades. Certainly, there have always been people in an expanding country who moved away from their parents, thus breaking the multiple generation household, but as a common phenomenon it is little more than two generations old.
It is possible, of course, that two generations might be sufficient to destroy the memory of the situation, (although, as Enter the Flagon and FriarTed have noted, a change in the economics that permitted the entrenchment of the nuclear family could easily reverse that trend), but even if the memory has been lost, there isnothing “cultural” about either situation.
The Chinese model, if it really exists, will be put to the test mighty soon. China has nearly 200 million elderly citizens now, and the number will continue to increase for several decades. And the one-child policy that’s been in effect will ensure that there will be a generation of young men who’ll be expected to look after 2 parents and 4 grandparents.
It gets better! The gender imbalance is so out of whack that millions of these young men (especially those with the lowest incomes) will have absolutely no hope of finding wives.
“So, Chang, you’re going to spend the rest of your life working in a sweatshop, forking over 50+ percent of your income in taxes to pay for elder care. You’ll never, ever get laid, and all your spare time will be devoted to taking care of your aging relatives.”
Think that will sound appealing to young Chinese males?
tomndebb, you seem to be using some definition of “cultural” that I’m unaware of. How long does a social pattern have to be taught by a culture before it’s cultural? I might argue that it’s new, or that it’s not working, but the ideal of the nuclear family is most certainly a cultural teaching right now. That doesn’t mean we can’t or won’t change it, but that will require a cultural shift, not just a few more thousand kids not moving out or elderly parents moving in. What people do and what the culturally taught ideal is are not the same thing. There is still a social stigma attached to being 30 and living “at home”, unless your parents are ill and infirm.
In my view, I would consider something cultural if there was a strong societal compulsion to engage or inhibit beahvior within a group. For example, the exaltation of the rights, powers, and responsibilitites of the individual is cultural in the U.S. Banding together in associations to express power is not part of our culture. (I strongly suspect that this is why unions only grow in those areas dominated by immigrants to about the second generation. Once the group has been fully assimilated, the appeal of unions is offset by the cultural need to be a rugged individualist and union membership is less attractive.)
In the case of multiple generation families, had the economy and housing markets continued on the paths set in the 1950s and 1960, I would not be surprised to discover that the nuclear family had become an absolute cultural trait. However, the shocks of the early 1980 and the current shocks disrupted that steady progress. People found themselves having to “move home” or to bring their parents to live with them. When that happened, there would have been enough discussion (both around the dinner table and the office coffee machine, where people recalled that theit parents or grandparents had share homes with their grandparents and children in the 1930s and inot the 1940s, making other people (who were unaware of the tradition), cognizant of the phenomenon.
The stigma of “single over 30 living at home” has two components: that the individual has not successfully fled the nest and that the individual, not burdened by their own spouse and children, has been unable to succeed on hias or her own.
Families do not generally share in the same stigma. (And I perceive this discussion to be about multiple generations of families, not individuals.) It is more common to be sympathetic to the established couple who has to take in their ailing or pension-depleted parents given the astronomical costs of assisted living and to be somewhat sympathetic to the young family with kids who have to move in with parents because they cannot secure jobs that will get them their own place in the current job and housing markets. (The current housing slide might change that, of course. We did not return to multi-generation households as the standard during the 1977 - 1982 period.)
The nuclear family is clearly the expectation in our society, but it is not so far ingrained in culture that people will do everything in their power to avoid the multi-generational family. Most people, I suspect, would move in with family (if it is possible) before they would choose to go homeless.
I think social security could get on a serious road to recovery if they left the cap on benefits one can withdraw, but removd the cap on income. Right now the cap is at 90k. If you removed that so that overpaid CEOs had to pay 6.25% on their entire 200m salary, they’d be paying for a lot of people. We need to release our hold on the myth that all salary is earned and merit based.