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Comment by finid | Hacker News Reader

In many societies, living with your parents is nothing unusual, especially if they own their own home.

The whole concept of living "with your parents" is modern. Across many societies, and thousands of years, it's been normal for relatives to share the same houses and pass them down through generations.

Not that I care that some cultures do it, but the whole concept of living with your parents as an adult is pretty much unique to humans. Across nature - you get the boot when you can take care of yourself.

Offspring in the animal kingdom get booted out because they pose a threat or are an unwanted competition for resources.

Both of your points still apply to humans.

1) Having your children around after they are grown up is a threat to the health of your marriage and often your own sanity and financial well-being.

2) "Unwanted competition for resources" also applies where the children take advantage of the parents limited resources without contributing their fair share.

Not saying it can't work for some cultures, but in the US and other countries, it hasn't. For the most part, parents simply don't want their children living with them and it significantly limits the available pool of potential spouses/significant others/mates/etc.

In the US, it's synonymous with momma's boys, socially awkward males and those with financially unstable situations.

It is especially common in the rural parts of undeveloped or developing countries.

Name 3 please.

I think its only very recently that Nuclear families, living alone as a single etc. became economically viable and socially acceptable. Throughout most of history, generations have lived and died in the same houses. Building homes has always been a very very expensive proposition for most people through most of humanity.

Three!

Let's do it the other way. I'll name only one where living with your parents is considered not kosher - the USA. In practically every traditional society, living in the family home is just fine, especially for those members of the family that don't have their own homes.

In fact if the family home is sizable, raising your own family inside the family home is OK too. I've seen it everywhere I've traveled - much of Africa and South America.

>raising your own family inside the family home is OK too

Sure, is OK, but is not ideal, and is done mostly by necessity, for economic reasons.

It's actually very ideal. The support system is far superior to what you'll find at a day care or elderly care facility.

There can be big benefits to being near your family, including health and mental health benefits, besides the economic benefits. Recent parents being able to lean on the grandparents, rather than sending kids to expensive daycares that frankly don't really care about the child as much as a grandparent will, for example.

I would tend to disagree with this. Grandparent may value your child more than worker in daycare, but socialization of your child will suffer a lot, so will its development, child need to be with peers and not home with 2 old people. Same goes for playing and learning, there justisn't enough stimulation at home compared to daycare.

Who says children need constant stimulation? They've historically had no trouble filling the gaps with their imagination. If anything, I think that attention span has suffered greatly because children are never allowed to be bored anymore.

Most former Soviet republics.

This would be the case for pretty much any society where land and housing was not easily available. As housing is becoming increasingly unavailable in the United States, and population is still increasing, expect to see it here.

There's plenty of housing available in the U.S. The lack of housing availability is more localized to specific heavily-urbanized areas (like the coasts); as you move inland, property costs drop significantly.

As do employment prospects. When you need a job to survive, a house without a job is just as pointless as a job without a house.

That housing may as well be on the moon for all the good it does.

Except:

1. There's often cheaper property within manageable commuting distance from those expensive areas.

2. Those able to work from home are unaffected

3. If you can afford lunar real estate, money's probably the least of your concerns ;)

1. What is managable, at this point? Two hours of commuting a day? Three? How much of the savings does the cost of the commute offset? I hope your non-tech job doesn't require you to work downtown, because parking there will run you a small fortune.

2. Yeah, and neither are rich people. The well-connected in the USSR weren't affected by shortages of apartments and automobiles, either.

3. On the Moon, I think possession is nine tenths of the law.

To use the Bay Area as an example, one can look at Sacramento. Plenty of Sacramento residents make that commute every day (my dad was one of them, and he was a non-tech worker), taking advantage of the dramatically lower cost of living. Parking is not a huge problem if you're taking the train from, say, Davis. Commute costs are a factor, but negligible compared to the increased property costs. Commute time is right around 1-2 hours if I correctly recall the last time I made that drive; that probably varies if you are indeed taking public transit.

Spain, Japan, Vietnam and Italy. They vary a lot on the why and style and I'm just saying the ones I know for certain. I've also read about Portugal, Greece and India being similar in this regard but I haven't lived there or talked with natives about this.

It is normal until you either get married, move due to university/job or move with your partner. Why else would you want to live alone? (;

Paraguay, the Philippines and apparently Japan

Portugal, Spain, Greece and Italy have roughly three times the rate of adult children living at home with their parents, as what the US does.

though majority of them not by choice, but out of necessity, those are like poorest countries with low purchasing power and with highest unemployment of young people

yes, they might been more traditional even in better times, but let's not lie to ourselves that most of the children would not move out if they could afford it

Myanmar as well. But again, I think if they can choose, they'd rather choose to live away (not too far away to pay a visit like once a month/year) from their parents. There's no hard and fast rule/expectation about that nor anybody is looked down by the society for living with his/her parents.

China for one.

I would add many parts of India to the list as well.

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