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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This strikes quite true to me. When we were between one apartment lease and buying a house, my wife, daughter, and I moved in with my parents. My mom stayed home with our daughter for almost a year, and my wife’s mom did the same for another year. We are also considering having a third child, in large part because my parents live 5 minutes away and provide a lot of free child care.

But I question whether this is “new.” None of this would be unusual in the least in Bangladesh, where my family is from. I strongly suspect that it’s not new in the US either, or at least was only unusual compared to a status quo that existed only for a blip of time during the 20th century.

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>I strongly suspect that it’s not new in the US either, or at least was only unusual compared to a status quo that existed only for a blip of time during the 20th century.

You're entirely correct. I'll go a step further and say it never even went away--at least in my experience as a child of lower middle class White baby boomer parents in the South.

I have a great uncle on my mom's side who stayed at home while he finished college and then him and his wife lived with his parents for a while after he graduated.

My dad's oldest brother and his wife lived with their parents for a while.

My dad's youngest brother lived with his parents for years.

My grandparents eventually moved in with my dad and his wife--partially because they were getting too old to maintain a house, but also to help him afford a new house after he'd gone through a bankruptcy.

Both sets of grandparents also provided my parents with free childcare, and my parents and aunts and uncles all borrowed plenty of money from my grandparents over the years.

I have many friends who've had similar experiences.

I think the solid, seemingly disconnected "nuclear family" is an interesting mythic tale in the American Dream that is an accident of consumer marketing more than anything else. It sold more homes, it sold more goods, so it became a useful myth to marketers. In reality it never existed, not even in the mythic 50s where it got so ensconced in television sitcoms and advertising.

Depends:

> Historians Alan Macfarlane and Peter Laslett postulated that nuclear families have been a primary arrangement in England since the 13th century. This primary arrangement was different than the normal arrangements in Southern Europe, in parts of Asia, and the Middle East where it was common for young adults to remain in or marry into the family home. In England multi-generational households were uncommon because young adults would save enough money to move out, into their own household once they married. [...]

> Critics of the term "traditional family" point out that in most cultures and at most times, the extended family model has been most common, not the nuclear family,[26] though it has had a longer tradition in England[27] than in other parts of Europe and Asia which contributed large numbers of immigrants to the Americas. The nuclear family became the most common form in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s.[28]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family

Be careful about what research you look at when looking into the history of the Nuclear family. It's a very politically charged topic, and a lot of what you'll find is more of an agenda driven defense of the nuclear family (or the opposite) than an explorative scholarly work.

It's difficult to find a trustworthy source on the matter if you're just doing a quick google search.

Probably the primary reason that multi-generational households were less common in England people married much later there than in the rest of Europe (Laslett does mention this in The World We Have Lost).

The "nuclear family" is more mobile than the "extended family". If you want your workforce capable of moving about the country to follow the demand for labor, the "nuclear family" can be a desirable thing for that reason alone.

To be clear I'm not talking about seasonal migrant farm labor, more like (for example) the decline of the rust belt & coal belt, and the rise of tech hubs.

My parents are also Bengali. It's given me a different perspective about the topic. The nuclear family is kind of a unique thing on a world stage. At least in Bangladesh, it's hard for people to place trust in wealth they can't hold themselves (this includes pensions given by the government), so they'll spend their money on gold, property or land (assets in general). Having and raising children becomes a give and take, where you can only expect to be taken care of in old age if you take care of and invest in your children. This an incredibly old system, and it's because it's been proven to be effective regardless of location or time.

it's because it's been proven to be effective regardless of location or time

It's not very effective if kids move away to find work. Then it fails both the grandparents & the parents. That might be its greatest shortcoming.

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