as small as a world and as large as alone

3:33pm August 23, 2014

arctic-hands:

youneedacat:

wyattsalazar:

the “you live with your parents” insult is really flaccid because a metric shitton of cultures don’t see “leave the house forever” as some grandiose moment of liberation that’s so important to the development of a person that it has to happen as fast as possible. until i came to the USA i didn’t know a single person who was pressured by their parents to leave the house because they’re “too old to stay there” or whatever. in puerto rico it is really common to stay with your parents until they and you are both stable enough that you can leave. whaddaya know, there are cultures that don’t place a stigma on being poor or wanting to care for your family or needing your family to care for you for some other reason.

And even mainstream American culture has a lot of people who do it this way.

One of my caregivers is an old white man who lives with his wife, their daughter, their son-in-law, and all their grandkids.  It works out really well for them because he can watch the grandkids when the parents are busy doing things (he says they’re an amazing group of kids who help each other out all the time and rarely fight over anything important, and the oldest ones take care of the youngest and make sure he’s not doing anything unsafe).  And in general they just seem to love this living arrangement, even though it’s kind of crowded.  They just moved to a house big enough for all of them, sort of in the country, and they’re really excited about that.  They certainly don’t see their daughter and her husband as a failure for living with them, they just see multigenerational families as the way they do things, and it works out with benefits for all of them.

Don’t quote me on this, but I remember reading somewhere that it had to do with the Great Depression, where families didn’t have enough to provide for everyone so they would kick out the oldest  to fend for themselves (or to find work away from home so they could send money back) so there would be more for the younger children and parents.  Since the Depression affected the rest of the world differently, this tradition didn’t spring up elsewhere.

Hmm.  I’m not sure how that works… In families like mine in the Great Depression you were supposed to have more kids at home, to work on the farm.  At least that’s what I always heard.  But then not all people during the Depression were farmers.

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