Question prompted by this article in the NYTimes, which says that such households are on the upswing…in New York City anyway.
You can expand or interpret my question any way you like, however, I’m not so much thinking of grown kids who still live with their parents or who have moved back home due to economic conditions. That’s a slightly different topic.
Unless those grown kids HAVE kids, so there are three generations. I’m asking about what it’s like to have people who were born in the 1920s living under the same roof with people born in the 1950s, '70s, '90s, etc. I’m thinking of households with grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, married/unmarried aunts/uncles, and/or other people who just wound up living with you.
Do you endorse this arrangement or do you deplore it for yourself/others?
Where I live, there is a large Hispanic component in the population and multi-generational involvement and cohabitation is commonplace. I also knew a family in a big city in the midwest many years ago that lived in an upper/lower duplex. Parents and kids lived in one flat, grandma and an aunt lived in the other. Worked great for them. Tragically, both parents died when the oldest child (my peer) was a teen, but the living arrangement did not have to change.
What are your stories, experiences, opinions re the upsides/downsides of this subject? Also, do you live in the US or outside of it?
My paternal grandmother lived with us until she died when I was about 11 or so. The thing I remember the most about her was her telling me that she knew Wyatt Earp when she was a little girl.
When I was very young, my maternal grandmother lived under the same roof with us, in a third floor semi-independent apartment. (The house had been a triplex at some time, with the first and second floors renovated so that the first floor was mostly living space and the second floor mostly bedrooms.)
I think I was eleven when she moved out, first living in an ordinary apartment of her own, then a typical group home environment.
I think the arrangement worked out pretty well; not sure what I have to compare it to.
I respect it as a strategy against poverty. It’s hard enough raising children when you are middle class. If you are poor and all alone, it’s very difficult. Having grandparents, aunts, and uncles all under the same roof would be good way to buffer children (and adults, too) from the disadvantages of poverty or unstable income. Power in numbers.
Personally, I don’t think I’d like the arrangement. I’m very independent. I really like having my own space, my own schedule, and my own routine. My own identity. I’m fine with helping people out, but I’d prefer to do so from a distance. I love my family members, and I get along with them quite well. But I don’t think I’d be able to like them as much if we had to live together.
One disadvantage that I can see is that family dysfunctionality becomes magnified if the family is too close. If your immediate family is dysfunctional and you have grandparents that are not entangled in it, at least you have a refuge to escape to. Not all families are good. Sometimes getting away from a bad family is the solution.
I lived with my parents the first year and a half of my daughter’s life. It was awful. I can see where it would be a good thing for some people, but living with my mom as an adult (or as a teenager, my entire teenage years were bad and I was actually only 19 when I moved out) is really really hard. It was 12 years ago that I moved out and I STILL often think how great it is to have my own place. I’m a person who needs a lot of privacy and my mom DOES NOT respect privacy AT ALL. She regularly searched through my room. Not because she suspected anything, but just because. This was even when I was paying rent. Also when I stayed there for a few months while apartment-searching in my mid-20s. I think she was going through menopause then. Fun times!
When I first moved out I was paying literally about 90% of my income towards rent and utilities. It was worth it.
When I was 17 my maternal grandfather died and my grandmother moved in with us. Since I was about to start college (as a commuter) it didn’t have much effect on me, but for my mother, brother, and sister it was a disaster. My grandmother took on, or tried to, the role of matriarch. She felt that when she was in my mother’s house, my mother had to assume the role of dutiful daughter. My mother had other ideas and they fought incessantly, mostly over the raising of the younger kids (who were 12 and 6 in 1954 when this started). I feel they were both scarred for life by this contention.
Obviously, there was a real generational shift. My grandmother came to the US as a teenager and grew up with whatever attitudes were around in eastern Europe then. My mother was US born and had entirely different ideas. My mother had her problems, but I will say that when she visited us, she never questioned our child-raising.
I’m currently the grandma living with my daughter, her partner and two grandchildren. However, I’m in a ‘granny flat’ at the rear of their home: it’s detached and totally self-contained.
So far it’s working out well for all concerned. I love being on hand for the kids which frees my daughter up for doing stuff like Xmas shopping without them! Yet I can still maintain a level of privacy that suits me, and I don’t invade their home without invitation: even then it’s only for a few minutes at a time, either to borrow something, share a freshly baked cake, or to help fold washing etc. I remember too well what it was like to try to manage a semblance of order in the household with little kids underfoot. My own mother was never available, and I’m only too happy to give a hand when needed.
In return, I get to do all the stuff with my grandsons that I never had time to do with my own children. Sort of like a second-chance to atone for past parenting sins.
Apparently the trend is also on the up in Australia. I wonder whether it is due to the number of immigrant families from cultures where the extended family living together is the norm, or perhaps a growing dissatisfaction with the traditional nuclear family unit. And I think kids are the net winners, having so many adults around to provide care, modelling and cuddles.
US (TX) here. I have no opinion on what others do, but personally I dislike the idea. We have young-adult kids and finally have an empty nest, so it would be a difficult sell to get me to give that up. In our extended family, a multi-generational home would be seen as a failure* of sorts. Kids are generally expected to be on their own by 21, and moving back home (with or without their own family) is frowned on.
It’s probably the personalities involved, but having multiple sets of adults in a household doesn’t seem to work out well. I know of two cases in our extended bunch, and neither seems to be pleasant for those involved. One is an entire family (parents and kids) that moved back home with mom and dad after losing their house. They’re (literally) living in the basement, and this occurred within months of the parent’s retirement. Another case is a 60 year old profligate spender winding up unemployed with no savings and living in his kid’s house (while they’re trying to raise toddlers). Both arrangements seem to be pretty stressful for everyone involved.
Our own kids come back frequently for a week or so, and while we’re glad to see them, we’re both relieved when the house is ours again. In the latter case above, there were a few hints about us helping out, eyeing the 3 empty BRs in our house, but we’ve made it clear the answer is no. (If you can afford to smoke, you can afford rent, imo)
Short answer is “great, if it works out for everyone, but it’s not for us.”
*at least the kids-moving-back-home version. Aging grandparents are another story.
That reminds me, as a teenager I used to babysit for a family and then the grandpa moved into the basement (I don’t know why). He seemed physically and mentally healthy, but apparently they still didn’t trust him to watch his grandsons. So he would constantly be coming upstairs to interfere with me taking care of the kids (“why is the baby crying?”, “has Daniel had dinner yet?”, etc.). After a while I had to start saying no about babysitting those boys. I can’t imagine that the parents really enjoyed the arrangement either. And how awkward that he seemed to want to watch the kids and they wouldn’t let him. But did let some 15-year-old.
I am very against it for me, and in too many cases I’ve seen, it doesn’t work well and leaves lasting scars and hurts everyone involved. If all people just cooperate and are mature it might work but I have never, ever seen it working, and I come from a culture that places higfh value on it.
When my Stepfather died in June, my daughter and I moved in with my Mother. My daughter is now pregnant with twins, so we will soon have 4 generations in this house. Except for the obvious lack of privacy issues, it’s been nice so far. I have been able to help mom when needed and my new Grandsons will be surrounded by love.
Mom is nearly 80 and in excellent health, so hopefully this can last for several years. Or, until my 22 year old daughter decides it’s finally time for her to live on her own.
When I was tiny my elderly paternal Great Aunt moved in with us. Up until then, she’d lived with her mother her whole life- I remember her saying she’d never spent a night alone in a house, ever.
It was fine for me, she was patient with kids, and clearly liked having us round the place (apparently she told my mother when she was dying that those years had been the happiest of her life, which is pretty depressing, considering). She drove my mother up the wall though. My Great Aunt’s mother had been a terrifying old matriach with Views, and she had very firm ideas on How Things Were To Be Done.
My parents had to pretend to be taking the dog for a walk when they felt like going to the pub for a nice evening out, because Nice People Didn’t Drink, and she’d follow my mother around the house, telling her how to do stuff Properly. She was also a very picky eater, and expected to be fully catered for.
When I was 8, my parents decided to move, to start their own business. This meant moving to a 3-storey house, where my mother would no longer be at home most days. Auntie was having trouble with her mobility by then, and it clearly wasn’t going to work. Luckily, the social worker who visited her persuaded her that she really couldn’t come with us before it turned into a full on family row, and she found somewhere else acceptable to move to.
It could have worked better with someone more flexible; one of my Great Uncles lived with his nephew for much longer, up until his death, with no problems I ever heard of, but my Great Uncle was the kind of person who was terrified of being any trouble to anyone. As an example, my mother once went to visit him in hospital, after he’d nearly lost a leg; the tea lady showed up, and gave him a coffee, which he politely accepted. My mother was surprised, he’d always said he didn’t like coffee, and asked him if his tastes had changed. It turned out he’d accidently said ‘yes’ to coffee when still woozy from the surgery, so they’d kept giving it him, and he hadn’t wanted to make a fuss by asking for some of the tea on the trolley instead. He’d been there a week.
My parents got married in 1949 and bought a house and had their first child in 1950. My mother’s parents and youngest brother shared the house with them from the beginning. My uncle moved out in 1954 when I was born. My grandmother died in 1963. My grandfather lived with my parents until he died in 1999. Having my grandfather around was great. My parents never needed to hire a babysitter. He helped them afford the house in the early years, and he got a nicer place to live than he could have afforded in his older years. He did chores to lighten the load on my mother. He was a huge positive in the household.
For a few years there, both my uncle and my mom lived with their parents. I left my dad’s house and moved in with mom & grandparents while I was in college, so we had three generations in the house at times.
My grandparents seemed to really dig it for the most part. My mom is an RN, so they had round-the-clock nursing care available. She also paid rent and covered the utilities and contributed to groceries, so their SS checks stretched a bit further. I helped Gramma with chores that were difficult for her, like getting on my knees to scrub out the bathtub. I also helped Grampa haul water back to the garden, and other heavy lifting/landscaping chores.
I think my mom is probably the only one who suffered with it but there were issues related to her past history that made Grampa a little bit controlling toward her. For the most part, both mom and I were treated like adults who had responsibilities and obligations. For example, I was 18 when I moved in, but I could come and go as I pleased. I had several jobs and dated, but this house was 30 minutes from anywhere/anyone/anything. So if I went out, I might not come home until 3 a.m. This was perfectly fine with the Old Folks, who never said one peep to me about my comings and goings. I even had booty-call guests from time to time – we just stayed downstairs after my grandparents went to bed.
Depression-era Grampa used to say that times were hard, and in the old days, multi-generational households were pretty common. He thought there was no shame in all of us living with them. We each contributed something to the household, pulled our own weight, and they didn’t have to be lonely and bitter with just each other: we brought life and exuberance and fun into the house that they might not have otherwise had around.
Almost the same for me- my grandparents lived on the first floor and we were on the second (and my aunt and uncle lived next door). This arrangement is very common in NYC and in my experience, it’s very different from a single-family house (or apartment) that contains a three-generation single household. It’s more similar to an adult child living next door or down the block - both households are geographically close enough so that they can easily help each other out ( I might ask my mother downstairs or down the block to babysit for 30 minutes while I go to the supermarket, or I might go downstairs to mop her floor.No one would have driven an hour round-trip for those things to happen.) but they often actually live as separate households and don’t have have same amount of friction that often comes with a single household.
And… it was mostly great. My Nana was like my co-Mom. She was the one who taught me all my first dirty jokes, and who taught me how to ride the subways. I was lucky to have my grandparents so close.
My wife is less thrilled about the idea- she was an only child, and my family is just a bit too big and loud to suit her.
It’s nice to hear that your experience was positive. I’m an only child and so was my late husband, and I would love for my partner to be from a big family.
