Their Children Are Their Retirement Plans | Hacker News Reader

Their Children Are Their Retirement Plans

nytimes.com

17 pointsnon_sequitur12 comments

> Hispanic and Latino families often live in multigenerational households where family members pitch in to care for elderly relatives.

Wouldn't you rather live away from your parents, from people who care about you, and instead spend more time at work, so you can earn enough money to pay strangers to look after your aging family?

That's the dream, right? Visit your parents in the retirement home every other week for a few hours. Or once a month. Or every other month. At least for Christmas and Thanksgiving, anyway. Don't worry, they'll be around for plenty more years.

In the US at least, I've found that housing a multigenerational family has been challenging.

My father-in-law recently moved in with me and my wife, and we have a baby due later this year. We both work from home and need offices. My wife's family has several members in tenuous situations, so we also need a guest room (we have hosted family members for months at a time, numerous times).

Few houses are really set up for our three or more adults, a child, pets, and offices. Even the million-plus dollar mansions we checked out tended towards exotic finishes and entertainment rooms rather than multigenerational practicality.

An ideal house for us would have been a large central area with kitchen & living space, with smaller wings dividing into private areas for different people. The closest we found, and bought, was essentially a 3/2 house with a finished basement-turned 2/1 airbnb.

I love the idea of multigenerational living, and it's been positive overall to have our family members stay with us, but we have been constrained by the architectural options in our city. They presume a nuclear family that commutes to work.

When I was young, I remember thinking that my grandma’s house was kinda wrong. I mean, it was not that big but maybe a litte big for 2 people, her and my great aunt; and even weirder, why would they want 4 bedrooms and 2 kitchens, one of them in a small room where there were stairs?

Then I learned that in that space used to live my great grandmother, my grandmother, a single great aunt, another great aunt with her husband, 3 kids, and in the stairs kitchen there was a bed where my father used to sleep. They were not poor, it was just some life events like my grandma’s divorce made them go temporarily to that house, and they ended up staying because families stick together. The stories I know about multigenerational homes are somewhat like that, with a few outliers that were really rich and had big homes.

So I don’t think the challenge is really architectural but the mindset. I certainly don’t feel comfortable more than a few days living with my parents when I come back to visit and they have a bigger home than my great grandmother.

I don't disagree that it's possible to stuff a large family into a house that isn't designed to give more than a couple of people privacy and personal space.

However, during my time living in Europe, I got to see several friends' family houses, and the ones in Germany and Spain especially were well-suited for multigenerational families in a way that the houses here are not.

I love my parents and I would do anything I could for them but I will not be able to take care of them when they will be too old to be independent

Downside is they do so because this is forced upon them. I believe anyone who has means to move on his own does so.

Everyone's children is their retirement plan - just some societies have socialized/obfuscated this to varying degrees. All retirement financial mechanisms and social programs are funded by younger people paying taxes, and putting money (buying) into things like 401ks, IRAs, Stocks, housing, etc. Retirement is when you "withdraw" (sell) these things for cash to live on without having to work.

You can take it farther than that. In truth, the laws of the universe prevent any real “saving” at all. We will always depend on others at some point to grow our food, cut our hair, etc. That we have fancy accounting gimmicks to track how much of this help we are entitled to only masks this.

Exactly. And large scale pension systems and the financial vehicles are essentially the family unit scaled up to the size of a country. I do think there are advantages to doing it the social security way, as it puts less pressure on the individual to take care of their elderly parents. Many people aren't equipped with the time and know-how to run an assisted living facility in their living room, so specialized facilities for that purpose and social programs can help fill in the gaps.

Many elderly Eastern European migrants - at least in Australia - refuse assistance programs like home help, where someone will come and clean their house, a nurse will help bathe them, etc. Instead they insist their own children do it.

(Could be the same with lots of other cultures but I can't speak to them)

To be fair, there are a lot of stories about hired elder help stealing stuff, beating the person up, or taking advantage of a mental decline to trick them into changing their will.

http://web.archive.org/web/20230125094233/https://www.nytime...

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