Their Children Are Their Retirement Plans(nytimes.com) |
Their Children Are Their Retirement Plans(nytimes.com) |
Wouldn't you rather live away from your parents, from people who care about you, and instead spend more time at work, so you can earn enough money to pay strangers to look after your aging family?
That's the dream, right? Visit your parents in the retirement home every other week for a few hours. Or once a month. Or every other month. At least for Christmas and Thanksgiving, anyway. Don't worry, they'll be around for plenty more years.
My father-in-law recently moved in with me and my wife, and we have a baby due later this year. We both work from home and need offices. My wife's family has several members in tenuous situations, so we also need a guest room (we have hosted family members for months at a time, numerous times).
Few houses are really set up for our three or more adults, a child, pets, and offices. Even the million-plus dollar mansions we checked out tended towards exotic finishes and entertainment rooms rather than multigenerational practicality.
An ideal house for us would have been a large central area with kitchen & living space, with smaller wings dividing into private areas for different people. The closest we found, and bought, was essentially a 3/2 house with a finished basement-turned 2/1 airbnb.
I love the idea of multigenerational living, and it's been positive overall to have our family members stay with us, but we have been constrained by the architectural options in our city. They presume a nuclear family that commutes to work.
Then I learned that in that space used to live my great grandmother, my grandmother, a single great aunt, another great aunt with her husband, 3 kids, and in the stairs kitchen there was a bed where my father used to sleep. They were not poor, it was just some life events like my grandma’s divorce made them go temporarily to that house, and they ended up staying because families stick together. The stories I know about multigenerational homes are somewhat like that, with a few outliers that were really rich and had big homes.
So I don’t think the challenge is really architectural but the mindset. I certainly don’t feel comfortable more than a few days living with my parents when I come back to visit and they have a bigger home than my great grandmother.
(Could be the same with lots of other cultures but I can't speak to them)
However, during my time living in Europe, I got to see several friends' family houses, and the ones in Germany and Spain especially were well-suited for multigenerational families in a way that the houses here are not.