Kids still at home? Nothing wrong with that
Amom, a dad, 2.4 children and an energetic but well-behaved dog compose what we long have recognized as the classic American household: a nuclear family nestled in a suburban bungalow, living on a street with similar houses that contain similar households. Grandma and Grandpa live on their own matching street somewhere over the river. When the kids reach adulthood, they will establish their own independent nuclear habitations.
We tend to see any deviation from that pattern as an unfortunate aberration, whether it’s the cohabitation of elderly grandparents who can no longer live independently or young-adult children experiencing a “failure to launch,” stuck in the basement. A Wall Street Journal headline recently rued that the “Percentage of Young Americans Living With Parents Rises to 75-Year High.” The New York Times fretted, “It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave.” And the Fiscal Times warned: “The Kids Aren’t Alright.” When House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., wanted to summon a worst-case scenario that could follow a repeal of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, she asked her fellow Americans: “You want Grandma living in the guest room?”
But is living in a household with grandparents, parents and kids really so terrible? Judging by the numbers, it can’t be all bad: More than 60 million Americans currently live in multigenerational households, the highest proportion since the Korean War. Demographic patterns indicate that share should continue to rise in the years ahead. And historical data suggest that the wholly independent nuclear-family household may be the aberration — that patterns of close familial support are the more natural arrangement.
Why are we so down on a practice that has been so common? Those sentiments flow from the peculiar history of postwar America, when nuclear-family households became the norm in spite of, well, everything.
Throughout the 20th century, several scholars claimed that nuclear households had been the historical standard, pre-dating postwar America. Indeed, according to University of Minnesota historian Steven Ruggles, “by the mid-1970s, the theory of long-run [nuclear] stability in Western family structure had found its way into every one of the basic sociology textbooks.”
But these days, that theory doesn’t seem to wash. Ruggles has found that multigenerational households were a nearly universal experience in mid-19th-century America and that “the great majority of families went through a multigenerational phase if the parents lived long enough.” It turns out that lifespans and large broods, not preferences, might explain why nuclear-family households appeared widespread before the postwar years: A parent of seven can, of course, reside in the home of only one adult child at a time; some of the adult children’s households would have been purely nuclear, but not necessarily by choice. And the demise of multigenerational households appears to have been less about shifting preferences than historical and political changes.
Most of the collapse in multigenerational arrangements took place in the four decades after World War II when unique circumstances combined to transform the patterns of everyday American life. The tremendous demographic pressure built up by a generation raised during the Great Depression and then sent overseas to wage war was suddenly released, as servicemen returned home to settle down and seek quiet stability. The GI Bill sent many vets to college and provided housing subsidies that spuured construction of vast quantities of housing, quickly. The construction industry, which had been constrained by wartime supply rationing, was now encouraged by Federal Housing Administration programs and others that offered unprecedented subsidies and new, government-guaranteed 30-year fixed mortgages for single-family homes.
With a booming economy, Social Security in place and Medicare soon to come, Americans had incentives to follow an unusual pattern of generational segregation. The elderly became more financially independent and less reliant on their children as filial retirement accounts, while the young-adult generation took the plentiful jobs available outside any family business. The wealth transfers that once kept children close to their inheritance were reversed, and families were quickly spread across fresh suburbs that offered cheap access to new wealth. Multigenerational living reached its nadir in 1980, when only 15 percent of older Americans lived with their children, and only 12 percent of households overall contained multiple adult generations.
In the postwar years, new local ordinances also reinforced nuclear-family households. These laws didn’t intentionally target multigenerational arrangements, but the growth of rules built around one model of living crowded out others. Zoning codes initially written to keep industrial factories out of residential areas increasingly dictated what residences could be built in a neighborhood and grew the distances between houses and between activities. This made neighborhoods less walkable — and thus less friendly to the youngest and oldest — and moved families farther apart.
Today, those same legal frameworks constrain families seeking homes for their multigenerational households primarily by forbidding the construction of houses with dedicated spaces for live-in relatives.
And that’s a shame. There are good reasons to live multigenerationally, from the mundanity of sharing costs and chores to the sublimity of shared witness to each milestone of a child’s growth. At a time when parents are working longer hours and grandparents are seeing their retirement extend, the oldest sharing economy offers benefits to both. But thanks to our postwar legal and cultural heritage, many people still seem to fear Granny or Junior sticking around. They shouldn’t: Living with your parents, it seems, isn’t an aberration. It’s downright natural.