A cultural choice: 3 generations in one home
When Faisal Ahmad returned to Montreal after studying and working in the United States, he moved back to his parents’ home. When he got married, his wife joined them. Soon afterward, so did their infant son.
“I wanted my young children to be close to their grandparents, and for their grandparents to be close to them,” Ahmad said. “And I wanted to be close to my parents. It was this idea of all of us being together.”
But Ahmad’s parents lived in a compact home, so Ahmad and his wife stayed in a den on the garage level instead of an actual bedroom and his infant son slept in the guest bedroom. Then another baby was on the way.
His parents said: “Look, we appreciate that you want to be close to us, we love having you close, but maybe your wife wants her own space.”
(There’s also the possibility his parents would also have enjoyed having their own space, but that never came up, Ahmad noted.)
They looked for a separate house, then found another solution. Ahmad and his parents pooled their resources and bought a larger home so the three generations could live together, but have their own space. Ahmad’s mother is “the best babysitter my two children could ever have” and the three generations have family meals together regularly.
“I love it,” said Ahmad, who is 37. “My wife and I feel very lucky.”
Ahmad’s multi-generational living arrangement is among the fastest growing household type in Canada, spurred by cultural norms imported from immigrant groups, financial necessity in a time of burgeoning house prices, and shifting values.
For Canadians hoping to grow old in the comfort of their children’s homes, however, their best bet would be to be born Punjabi, Bengali or East Indian, a new analysis of Canada’s census reveals.
While the number of multi-generational homes is growing, the cultural divide between certain ethnic groups, in particular those from South Asia, and more longstanding Canadians, is striking. The 2016 census showed that overall, 6.3 per cent of the Canadian population living in private households were residing in homes with three generations under one roof. Among those who classified themselves as Canadian, only three per cent were doing so.
But for those who identified themselves as Punjabi (coming from the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent), 72 per cent were in a household with some form of multi-generational living arrangement. They were followed by those of Bangladeshi descent at 64 per cent and Pakistanis and Sri Lankans at 59 and 58 per cent, respectively. Tamils, Albanians, Cambodians, East Indians, Afghans and Filipinos rounded out the top 10.
“On the values side of the issue, in those groups in the census lists with the highest share of multigenerational households, my sense is that the thinking is ‘Our grandmother, our grandfather, can’t be left on their own. We are not having a conversation about this,’ ” said Jack Jedwab, vice-president of the Association for Canadian Studies, who compiled the statistical data. “For the most part there is a sense of responsibility toward the grandparents that I think is a values issue in these communities. And as well there is an economic component.”
The 2016 census showed a 37.5 per cent increase in the number of multi-generational households in Canada since 2001. Statistics Canada attributed the rise to Canada’s “changing ethnocultural composition” along with “housing needs and the high cost of living in some regions of the country.”
Jedwab’s breakdown showed that among Canadians over 75 years old living in multi-generational households, the numbers were highest in Toronto (17 per cent) and Vancouver (16 per cent), two cities with high real estate costs and large numbers of immigrants from Asia. Montreal was at five per cent.
Living together was more common for recent immigrants than second- or third-generation families, in part because new arrivals might have no choice but to house their parents with them, Jedwab noted. As well, cultural standards brought from the old country often fade with time.
There are three primary reasons families choose to live in a multigenerational household, said Nora Spinks, CEO of the Vanier Institute of the Family: Choice, circumstance, or culture. There are families who can afford a larger house and want grandparents close to grandchildren, and perhaps to benefit from free daycare, or because the grandparents want to help their children buy a home. Or perhaps the husband has died, and grandma can no longer afford to live alone on a reduced pension.
In some cultures, Spinks notes, the social expectation is that elders will be cared for by their children, or grandchildren, or both. Before the Second World War it was still the case in most North American households that someone took in Mom or Dad. It was only in the 1950s and ’60s where every generation had their own household, and young adults starting moving out at 18 or 19 never to return.
Now, the norm has become: “as you age, you are responsible for your own self, then the state takes over that responsibility,” Spinks said.
That was definitely not the case in Ahmad’s family, whose parents immigrated to Canada from India. Seniors residences, he said, “are not in our DNA.” Even today, the thought of a child moving out before he or she was married “is almost sacrilegious.” The same held true for many of his Italian and Greek friends growing up. Friends and family of his generation who get married and do move out often buy homes located close to their parents.
For Meena Khan, a 42-year-old lawyer of East Indian descent born in Montreal, living at home allows her to help look after her aging parents, and brings a sense of freedom as opposed to a loss of independence.
“I don’t want my mother to take all of the responsibility for caring for my father,” Khan said. “At the same time, I’m not married, I can do whatever I want, I have my own car, my own money, I can travel when I want, so there’s no particular motivation for me to move out. Why would I want to go into poverty spending money on a crappy apartment. … And how awful would I feel if I wasn’t there to help if my father was sick?”
The interesting part will be to see how the living arrangements of some cultural communities evolve as time passes, Ahmad said, as older parents start requiring more care.
The 2016 census showed a wide shift in living arrangements that also included more people living alone (23 per cent) than ever before,
For the most part there is a sense of responsibility toward the grandparents that I think is a values issue in these communities.
and a rise in the number of young people aged 20 to 34 living with their parents (34 per cent).
Along with the benefits, multigenerational living can bring stresses, Spinks noted, be they social or financial, as well as the difficulties in untangling real estate issues.
Khan said with a laugh that stresses for her include comments from her mother about there being a lack of peace and quiet at home and her daughter treating their house like a hotel.
“She’s a classic South Asian mother — every sentence is dripping with guilt.”
As to her father, “he threatens to cut me out of the will when I won’t fix the TV remote for him the 10th time.”