Tag Archives: grandparents

“We’re at peak multigenerational” housing?

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Pew recently reported on the increase of Americans living in multigenerational households:

In 2014, more young people were living with their parents than with a romantic partner. And a lot of these millennials’ parents were cohabiting with their own parents.

A new Pew Research Center analysis finds that a record-high number of Americans—60.6 million, to be exact—were living with with grandma and grandpa that year. In terms of share of the U.S. population, these people made up 19 percent in 2014. That’s almost as high as back in 1950, when 21 percent of the population, or 32 million people, lived in such an arrangement.

Money—or lack thereof—helps explain why this housing arrangement is back in style. The economic woes of the late-2000s brought millions of young adults boomeranging back to their childhood homes. But the trend also has to do with immigration and diversification of the U.S. population.

Two quick thoughts:

  1. If indeed money is a motivating factor, we might expect these numbers to drop when the economy improves or when younger adults do better in the job market and move out of such arrangements. Or, does this uptick herald a long-term interest in living in multigenerational settings regardless of financial imperatives?
  2. As noted later in the article, whites are the least likely (15%) to live in such settings. Will such differences persist in the future or will such arrangements decline in non-white groups as (1) their financial prospects increase and (2) more recent immigrants spend more time in the United States?

In other words, how exactly do we know that this is a peak? There is certainly a trend upward of more households with multiple generations and a higher percentage of such households overall. If the discussed causal factors remain fairly static – sluggish economy, high levels of immigration – then the rise may continue. However, circumstances could change and the trend line in the next few years could rise, plateau, or fall. And, these factors don’t account for changing cultural values where multigenerational or communal living may just become more popular regardless of those two factors. (In other words, perhaps we could see a reaction to the long-term trend from the 1950s to the early 2000s of wanting to get away and own one’s own single-family home.)

Stay tuned for another peak that may not be one.

British grandparents believe their grandkids would rather get advice from Google

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British grandparents thinks Google has replaced them as sources for advice:

Almost nine out of every 10 UK grandparents claimed their grandchildren failed to ask them for advice for simple tasks, instead turning to online channels such as Google, YouTube and Wikipedia for information.

Answers on how to boil an egg, iron a shirt and even details on their own family history are now easily found by younger generations glued to their smartphones, tablet computers or laptops, according to research commissioned by cleaning products firm Dr Beckmann.

“Grandparents believe they are being sidelined by Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and the huge resource of advice available on the internet,” spokeswoman Susan Fermor said in a statement…

The survey of 1,500 grandparents also found that children chose to research what life was like for their elderly relatives in their youth rather than asking the grandparents themselves, with just 33 percent of grandparents having been asked: ‘What was it like when you were young?’.

Almost two-thirds of grandparents felt their traditional roles were becoming less and less important in modern family life, with 96 percent claiming that they asked far more questions of their own grandparents when they were young.

I’m not sure how valid this survey is but assuming the results are good, I think the key is in the last paragraph of the story. It is isn’t necessarily the Internet or Google or another website that is causing trouble. These new technologies are part of a larger society that grandparents believe doesn’t have much room for them. On one hand, this may be a common complaint of grandparents: people in the newer generations aren’t paying enough attention to them. This could be backed up by 96% saying they were more likely to question their grandparents. On the other hand, perhaps this is evidence of significant shift away from learning from one’s elders and turning to digitized information sources. Why go through the trouble of asking a human being when you can just watch a YouTube video or type a sentence into Google? Either way, grandparents still have these perceptions.