Is this family’s arrangement for living and aging at home a lesson for other boomers?
The first baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1965 — turned 75 last year. How will this demographic that makes up a quarter of Canada’s population adapt to aging? An excerpt from Gillian Ranson’s “Front-Wave Boomers: Growing (Very) Old, Staying Connected, and Reimagining Aging.”
We know that front-wave boomers come with a history — partly, from the life course perspective described in the previous chapter, the result of their passage through a particular historical period, partly based on the individual choices they made and the particular paths they followed along the way.
But we also need to take their present circumstances into account by acknowledging the relationships in which they are embedded, the lives to which theirs are linked — in short, the social convoys they are travelling with.
For most people, families are places where social convoys start to be built. We carry them with us as we (and the people in them) age. Over time, these convoys change, and they usually grow. Of all the people I spoke with, few illustrated this growth and change more clearly than Larry and Jennifer.
Thirty-some years ago, when they were looking to settle down and buy a home not too far from Toronto, Larry’s father and stepmother had a suggestion. They were snowbirds who spent half their time in the United States. They wanted a Canadian home base, and they also wanted to support Larry and Jennifer. A duplex arrangement in which Larry’s father and stepmother would be paying tenants seemed like a good option.
Larry and Jennifer agreed. They bought a two-level duplex in Burlington and moved into the groundfloor unit. Larry’s parents, when they were around, lived upstairs. In time, two generations became three when Larry and Jennifer’s two children arrived.
The most remarkable thing about this arrangement was how long it lasted.
With some modifications, it was still in place in October 2019, when Larry, Jennifer and I got in touch. In the early years, the grandparents gave loving attention to the grandchildren (who also spent time with them at their U.S. home during the summer). The joint homes became a family hub for close-knit siblings on both sides of the family.
Over time, things changed. Bill, the grandfather, 90 at the time of that first conversation, was in generally good health and spirits but slowly losing his short-term memory. He needed more care, and Larry and Jennifer were working with his 80-year-old wife, Helen, to provide it. Five years earlier, Larry had renovated the downstairs unit to make it more age-friendly; Bill and Helen moved downstairs, and Larry and Jennifer moved upstairs. Larry did all the chores and a lot of the cooking. The plan was to care for Bill and Helen at home for as long as possible.
Larry and Jennifer were then 63 and 65. The multigenerational model they established had enduring effects. Their daughter, married with a new baby, lived in the same community. She announced that she and her husband would “have dibs on” the care of Larry and Jennifer when they got older. Their son lived in Vancouver but said he’d be happy to move back to the neighbourhood in the future.
Though this multigenerational model of family life and care is common in immigrant and Indigenous communities, among Canadian families overall, it is rare. As Larry and Jennifer described it, it was an unusual but very happy situation. “It may seem special to other people, but we’ve been living this for 30 years now,” Larry said.
It was not just the living arrangements that made this a special story. Other family members lived in close geographic proximity, and the siblings, as well as children and grandchildren, were close emotionally.
Jennifer remarked: “I’m always astounded when I hear people that don’t speak to their siblings. It’s so foreign to me. I don’t get it.” Finally, although it was Larry’s second marriage, he and Jennifer had been together for more than 30 years.
Their situation was noteworthy because it was no longer representative of family life for many older baby boomers. Though a high proportion of Canadians in this age group had children, there was no guarantee that their children would be close at hand as adults.
The realities of a globalizing economy made it likely that they would move to work and establish families elsewhere. That’s assuming, of course, that they established families in the first place. As the previous chapter also noted, the millennial offspring of the baby boomer cohort are delaying having children, if they have them at all.
If they have them, they are having fewer than their forebears did. Grandparenthood for many boomers might be delayed, or off the table. Then there was the significant minority of front-wave boomers who had neither children nor grandchildren — and the number, with or without children, who didn’t have partners.
All of this suggested a huge diversity of family contexts. There might or might not be children, or grandchildren, who might or might not live close at hand. Multi-generational connections, partner relationships, and other family ties were similarly varied. And all this said nothing of the quality of the relationships.
So the question of who counted as family for this group was a big one. It was exactly the question sociologist Ingrid Connidis, an eminent Canadian scholar of aging, has also asked.
Connidis suggests that count could be understood in three ways. It could be a tally — literally, the number of people in the family group (however family was understood). It could refer to who mattered, which relationships were meaningful to people. It could also mean people who could be counted on.
Connidis writes: “Asking who can be counted on raises the issue of which family members older people can rely on when they need support — who will help when help is needed. For old and young alike, the corollary to the question, Who can I count on? is the question, Will someone need to count on me?”
Diverse family contexts and differences in who counted appeared in the many family stories I heard, and in others I learned about along the way. I pursued these stories because — when you want to know, as I did, who was in people’s lives and, ultimately, who could be counted on — families were a good place to start. I began with the stories closest to home.
Though this multigenerational model of family life and care is common in immigrant and Indigenous communities, among Canadian families overall, it is rare