![]() And I kind of wanted him to move in before Mom - my mother - moved in, but anyway - and so what happened is, sure enough, unfortunately, my mother passed away in 2001 and I said, Pops, you know, if you want to move in with us - you know, I didn't want him to be alone. I was like, if anything ever happens to Betty, I want you to move in with us. And I'd always say, hey, Pops - that's what I call him, Pops. We were living in Los Angeles and my father-in-law would come and visit with my mother-in-law and I just adored him because, you know, every time I'd leave for work, I'd come back and here's this huge lasagna dinner and I'm thinking, I need this man in my life.Īnd so we would take these long walks. How did that arrangement come about?ĪGUILAR: Well, we kind of started talking about it a long time ago when I married my husband. ![]() Rebecca Aguilar, how about you? You have a teenager and an 84 year old in the same house. It just - you know, we were able to share the costs of renovating the house somewhat so everyone had some privacy and we were bonded with the grandchildren by then and all of the benefits were starting to come. Was it really that smooth?įOX: It was a pretty smooth transition there. MARTIN: And there was no - it sounds so smooth. And after a few months, we said, you don't really need to look for a house way out there in the burbs where you could afford it. They were 15 years out in California, but our daughter and her family, when they had children, basically, decided to come east and started with us. ![]() How was it decided that your daughter and her family would move back in with you?įOX: Well, unlike some of what Katherine mentioned, both our children got as far away as they could after college. MARTIN: Elizabeth Fox, you actually call your home project intergenerational living. So we see young people who complete college and move back in with their parents in order to shelter those costs of the master's degree or experience with an internship where they're not earning any money at all in the hopes of launching at a higher level when they get a bit older. As well in the middle class, where we see ambitions for professional futures, it takes longer and longer and more and more money to achieve the kind of educational credentials needed to launch a middle class professional life. ![]() But, really, ever since about the early 1980s, we've seen a pretty steady increase in the proportion of young people of this age group that have been either moving back with their parents or who don't leave in the first place.Īnd that's mainly because the economy has been changing in ways that make it difficult for young people to find entry level employment that really pays enough for them to be independent. Now, that said, it's actually a trend that's been in play for some time now, so it's not unique to the recession we've been mired in. It's just - this is relatively recent because of the economy, which seems to be hitting younger people, younger workers very hard. with the economic difficulties that young people find themselves in. It would have been the norm before the Second World War, but it really hasn't been for some time now. And, actually, that has not been the norm in the middle class for some time. NEWMAN: Well, it hasn't been normal for quite some time, but basically, an accordion family is a multigenerational household in which you have adult children over the age of 21 living with their parents. What is an accordion family? I mean, for a lot of people, that's just normal, isn't it? MARTIN: Well, Katherine Newman, let's start with you. Her father-in-law has lived with her family for the past 10 years. MARTIN: And Rebecca Aguilar is the mom of one teenaged son. Her daughter's family moved in with her six years ago. She's the mother of two and grandmother of two. She's also the mom of a 22-year-old son who's living at home. It's just out today called "The Accordion Family." She's a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University. So, today, we thought we would like to talk about the blessings and the challenges of these multigenerational living arrangements. That's more than a 10 percent increase since 2007. Well, according to the Pew Research Center, one in six Americans now lives in a household like that. Now, you might have heard stories about adult children moving back in with their parents or grandparents coming to stay with their children. Every week, we check in with a diverse group of parents for their common sense and savvy parenting advice. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but maybe you just need a few moms in your corner. I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News.
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