AIBU to say that the future should include multi generational living?

[Cluborange666]

You always see comments on Mumsnet about the failure of older kids still living at home and adult kids being annoying if they are home but I just don’t get it.

Firstly because I actually like my kids and don’t have any issue with them living with us for as long as they want. I don’t want to see them living in some horrible little flat that sucks up all their money. I lived in a freezing flat when I was 18 and it was grim. It didn’t motivate me. It just made me jealous of my friends who were still living with their parents. Poverty isn’t a rite of passage. It’s just depressing.

Secondly, the young ones are going to find things really hard in the future. They aren’t going to be able to follow the same script that our parents did. I see Asian families looking after each other, their married kids with decent lives because they live with their parents (often no need for childcare) and having much more money as a result. The parents benefit too as they have company and support as they age.

This idea that we must all live separately seems counterintuitive to me. Our cave people ancestors would never have lived in separate caves. I think multigenerational living would be better for (most) people - excluding people like me who got away from abusive parents - better for the environment and better for young people as there would be far less pressure on them to pay hundreds of thousands for tiny homes.

With Asian families the top of the food chain, the oldest get all the say. I can't imagine for a single minute liberal British society would cope. There is a reason in traditional Chinese wedding ceremonies the bride and groom prostrate on the floor in a full kowtow though it’s rare now.

I loved my Dad but he absolutely had final say always, I didn’t even tell my Dad I dated in my twenties. There are some aspects of Asian culture that are really good but the dominance of the senior members of the household isn’t one of them.

I’ve voted your being unreasonable based on the fact that there’s nothing actually stopping anyone who wants to do this from doing it. Those of us that live separately and pay hundreds of thousands for a tiny home are doing it because we choose to. I’m not doing it because sharing homes goes against the cultural norms I’m doing it to keep my peace and sanity. Besides the only way for everyone’s lives to be significantly better off financially is to share said tiny home with another set of relatives. If you buy a property big enough to house everyone comfortably your mortgage and bill are then more expensive surely.

Guess some of us value the meaning of family and don't rush to chuck out the kids.

i have no issues with either or both of my DC coming back to live with us. But realistically? the rooms they had were small and they have acquired things. We have done our Swedish Death Cleaning (not ancient, not retired but looking forward to that) and don't really want more stuff in the house.

Then if one wanted to add a partner to the mix? In theory, if there were no other options, of course. Practically? it wouldn't work.

Given a bigger house, with more rooms and a couple of ensuites? it doesn't look awful but not ideal. Again, the DC any time any place, partners, and (urgh) grandchildren? not so much

And one or both of my parents or in-laws? NOPE. Having said that. My very elderly widowed mum, if it came to it, and it was the safest option? i'd get her in here like a shot. (but thanks to Brexit? not really feasable)

ETA: did not appreciate the pass agg suggestion in my highlighted sentence that not wanting to live cheek-by-jowel with relatives means i don't love them. Head. Wobble.

Yeah, no.

my mum hates my daughter.

”no such thing as autism she’s making it up”.

my daughter hates my mum
(my mum gets drunk each night and rants about immigrants)

i don’t like my mum much - she kicked my cat once.

no fucking way.

No. Our housing-unaffordability problem is the result of a gradual return to a sort of feudalism where the flow of wealth to the super-wealthy from everyone else will only increase. Once we'd all been forced to live together like this, the squeeze would get even tighter. It would solve nothing. In fact, our acceptance of ever deteriorating conditions makes it easier for policy to become more oppressive. The greatest achievement of the new 'establishment' is not just to steal our wealth but to convince us to accede to it.

Most young adult children live with their families.

That's entirely different to living with your children once they have partners and children. Especially, as many on this thread have said, there physically isn't space for them all in your house without you literally being on top of each other.

I do wonder if some people like their kids staying at home because they don’t really love or like their partners anymore. Lots of marriages end when the kids leave home. Plus if someone no longer has a partner it’s company for them.

I have a good relationship with my parents, but living with them day-to-day would be challenging. And I don’t even want to think about living with my PIL.

Are you serious ? Have you not seen how many women hate their mother in laws on this forum ? Lol . Anyway , no thank you . I had my son and his family live with me for a while and I was run ragged. Would not work for me .

It’s almost like all children and people in general are different? Great for you if your kids are respectful and not destructive. I’ve just been in my sons (19) room who has only been home for 2 nights and already found something smeared all over his bed (paid for by me) an empty can, empty sweet wrappers, an empty bottle of milk from yesterday not rinsed out and dirty, smelly clothes on the floor despite talking about this, warning him about it and threatening that he would need to leave if he didn’t improve. I don’t want to live with someone who has no respect for the things I paid for.

I don’t disagree in principal but the notion that we don’t like our kids is insane. I birthed him, loved him, poured love into him and tell him I love him every time I see him. He is a scruff that doesn’t respect my boundaries and doesn’t ever ask if I need a hand with a single thing.

I read a lot on here which gives me the impression that many (not all) multi-generational Asian households are very controlling and sexist. So I'm not sure it is the positive model you think it is.

Multi generational living also stifles the free will of each future generation who have to follow the location choices of their parents. Not so bad if you live somewhere with a large selection of career choices, not so good if you live somewhere remote where job options and career progression are restrictive.

What really needs to happen is for the retired generation to move out of the large family homes they occupy and free them up for the families and the use they were intended for, simultaneously moving older people to live in homes more suitable for there changing needs (no stairs, smaller gardens). But for this we have to move away from the 'forever home' mentality.

YANBU. I like my children, too. A lot of people don’t, however much they protest otherwise.

I presume this is off the back of the OP that lives with her parents, is spending all of her money on travelling and has no savings for the future.

I think that living in a multi generation household that supports your DC to be successful and have a good life is totally different to encouraging your DC to pretend to be a child because you do not want them to grow up and do not worry about what will happen to them once you are gone as you won't be here to see the fall out. That isn't love or good parenting and it doesn't benefit the child, it is selfishness.

Guess some of us value the meaning of family and don't rush to chuck out the kids

Thats a very unfair statement. No one is rushing to 'chuck out' their kids. It becomes difficult when those kids have partners and children of their own.
If you have a massive house or enjoy living on top of everyone with little privacy, then I hope it goes well for you .

Fine when they are students or starting careers, we are also an easy commute to London and would be fine if our dcs wanted to stay here for a bit as young adults when training or starting careers.

Where I would draw the line is a partner moving in. Unless it’s a short period (like when BIL &SIL moved in with PIL while their kitchen was ripped out), I don’t want to share my home with a son or daughter in law. I don’t want to walk into my kitchen and find someone else cooking a meal. I’ve trained my kids how I like the dishwasher stacked, I’m not dealing with an outsider doing it differently. Future partners of my dcs would only ever be a guest in my house, I would never feel comfortable with someone else (other than my kids &DH) having this be their home and I don’t want to go live in someone else’s home.

Which is why I don’t think I could do properly multigenerational living, I can not envision being happy to live with my dcs when they are middle aged, married with kids of their own. And I both mine and DHs parents would drive me insane within a month.

Just look at the ageism on here though @Cluborange666 The majority of posters seem to loathe and resent pensioners. There's a common theme that there is no obligation to look after your parents as they age. Not sure how that fits into a multi generational living together scenario. Then there's the number of posts about entitled offspring still living at home. Sounds a bit like a recipe for disaster.

As others have said, I think it works best in a house that has been designed / adapted /extended to accommodate the different generations but still give everyone some privacy.

I remember staying with a family in Germany on my school exchange and they had four generations at home - Granny, Mum and Dad, 3 sons of which eldest was married and had a small child. However house was large enough that Granny had her own space and the eldest son, his wife and child had a self contained flat with its own entrance built on to the main house. Child care for the little one was shared with Mum and Granny.

They all seemed happy but it was a substantial property to accommodate them all and give everyone their own space.

Perhaps if houses were bigger?

My baby is only 1, but I would always gladly have her as an adult. My home will always be her home.

But would I live with my parents? Fuck no. I'd end up killing my dad 😂 In most animal species, it's quite normal and natural for offspring to go off on their own, and I don't think humans are much different. I often don't think young people living with their parents work. Your parents will never not parent you and see you as their children. And young people naturally want their independence.

I think we glamorise it in the West. If we spoke to people from cultures where it's the norm, I'm sure young people would have plenty to say on the topic.

I am happy for my sons, currently 17 and 13, to live with me for as long as they want, but not sure how I would feel about partners/wives and grandchildren moving in. We don’t really have the space and I certainly wouldn’t want to pool resources and move into a bigger house as I value my privacy anyway. In fact, I need a lot of alone time or I get very overwhelmed. I absolutely loved my late mother and cared for her when she developed Alzheimer’s, but even before that happened I couldn’t have lived with her as she would have driven me round the bend. Also, my dad was like me and needed a lot of alone time and would have hated sharing with various generations, so I would have strongly advocated for him to keep his space. I definitely couldn’t live with PIL’s. I could fill several volumes with reasons why, but I won’t😆 SIL and BIL are in their forties and, for various reasons, have ended up living with their parents. The dynamic is an absolute disaster with MIL being exceptionally controlling and demanding. Honestly, it definitely depends what your family is like and the thing is, when you get married, you don’t know what you’re getting in this respect!

I agree with you in theory but I also agree with pps that it's likely to be women who have least to gain in the long run. I mean, who wouldn't want a permanent mother figure to do all the caring, housework tasks?

I think (hope) that it will be more and more common to live in partnerships with friends. Like a marriage but not intimate. Either legal binding so all the financial benefits of marriage or just casual but accepted by society. The widening divide between the expectations and behaviours of men and women will see far fewer conventional marriages I think - and having 2 independent women in a household will work much better from a work-life balance point of view.

Yes, this is my opinion. It works because all working age people are contributing towards the same goal and have the same interest in the property. If you have a mortgage shared by parents and all adult DC you can buy a much bigger house. It doesn't work when adult DC live at home but aren't properly contributing or genuinely in it forever. It isn't the norm I in our culture so doesn't work, as partners likely arent going to want to live with ILs forever and pool their finances with ILS.

It would suit some families but not others

I think this would be detrimental to women in the main. DH wanted us to live with his mother, I would have left. I couldn’t cope with a day under her roof and her comments.

I think maybe people need to rethink things. I worked with a woman who had got divorced in her 40s and shared a house with her mother. Upstairs was hers, downstairs her mums. They shared a kitchen only and seemed to work for them.

I often wonder if some older people would be better sharing when they were older like women did in the past. I think MIL would have been much better off sharing with his sister whom she got on with as she got older. They spent lots of time together and would have been a big saving for them both.

If the home is big enough to house several adults, I don't see any issues.

But, keep in mind what DD said when being home from uni over the summer:
It's really hard not to revert to my 15yo self! 😆

Speaking as an Asian person, it only works when everyone pulls their weight.
Not when its only one person doing everything.

My family have done this for years. (Not me). My mum lives with one son, her mum and my dad. My dads brother recently got divorced and spent a year there before getting his own flat.
She is burnt out. She does everything.

On the other hand, my aunt and uncle live with one of their parents and three daughters (all over 18). One of the girls is divorced and has a child. All the girls work full time. Everyone pulls their weight homewise and both mum and nan do the school run. It works really well for them.