It is still normal in many parts of the world.
Your mileage may vary depending on your parents.
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Also why so many areas are zoned single-family housing and don’t allow apartments or other “missing middle” types of housing. Houses require a lot more resources to maintain, including utilities and increased car dependency.
My mother’s family was similar to this a few generations ago, 4-5 generations used to live in one house in Midwest USA. Their home spread from one city block to another. That said, I cannot imagine living in a <2500 sqft home with my parents and my significant other. My SO would go Thunderdome on my Mom and my dad would be freaking out on the sidelines.
I have a coworker who is engaged, he lives at his parent’s place and his fiance lives at her parents place. As someone who lived without my parents (even if it meant having roommates) since 18, I cannot at all understand long term living with parents.
Communal family living was a thing in the past because modesty, temperance, and christian values were expected norms. If you want to be a puritan, or don’t have familial shame, then do whatever you want. For me, I’m gonna have my privacy and peace.
PS: My coworker can’t spend the night with his fiance because her parents are mega religious. He can either sleep on the couch or go to his parent’s place. Likewise, his parent’s won’t let her stay overnight at all because they aren’t married.
I think the space you’re referring to is a big point. We don’t build generational family homes. We build single family homes.
As with so many things, we can’t have nice things not because “people are doing it wrong”, but because we don’t have the infrastructure for it. -walkable cities -public spaces
- reliable public transportation
- climate change
Exactly, I don’t know how big that place was in modern context, but from what my mom said the home had doors on opposite sides of the city block and upwards of 20 people lived there from ages 1-90.
Anything is better than living with my parents. I’d rather sleep under a bridge.
As someone who literally slept under a bridge to escape a horrible home, I can confirm!
boy do i know how that goes.
You’re overthinking it.
Parents just want their lives back. Plain and simple.
When your kids are 18+ they shouldn’t be impacting your life that much, assuming you spent the time doing things like chores, boundaries, etc as they were growing up. I moved out at 25. I bought groceries, did yard work, helped clean the house, did my own laundry, etc. I don’t care if my kids choose to stay with me past 18.
The key term is delayed adolescence. Having a 19 year old that has a job, does their own laundry, pays their own bills, etc is different from someone who is still on mom and dad’s insurance and phone plans, not paying rent, and not buying groceries.
As an example, at 25 I was working full time and my boss was 10 years older than me. My car insurance went up and I was complaining about it to my boss. Overall he didn’t think it was a big deal, but the next day he came in and told me that our conversation had got him thinking. Turns out his parents were still paying for his phone bill and car insurance. A 35 year old man living on his own and his parents were still paying his fucking bills and, icing on the cake, he wasn’t aware of it.
We don’t fit in our house I don’t need all three to leave, but I need one of them to. I don’t have an office/personal space.
I also don’t have an office space and worked covid from my basement. I think modern homes are too big, but I also totally get the desire for a home office. Unfortunately, for me at least, most homes that have an office also come with things like a formal dining room which seem like a waste of square footage.
I don’t have a basement or an attic. My oldest sleeps in part of what once was a one car garage garage. It now is a laundry room and a small bedroom. There are many nights when the only place we don’t have someone sleeping is the kitchen, the laundry room and the two bathrooms. I really could use an office space tho. I’ve been working from home more in 2025 than any other year and my PC is in the living room but there are often teenagers sleeping in there and I like to start working around 5am because my wife gets up for work at 4. I’m just waiting it out at this point, one of these kids will move out someday. Right?
Right?
That does sound pretty tight. We’re very fortunate to have a basement, which is pretty common in the Midwest but not universal. Without it the covid years would have been very tough, especially since our kids were very young at the time and wouldn’t have understood “parent working”. We wound up having to put a lock on our basement door.
The way your post reads, it seems like you’re doing the best you can. I’m sure a kid will move out someday and wish you the best both before and after that occurs!
Yeah they’re 20, 17 and 15. It could still be a few more years but we’re making changes to keep the living room more free. It’s also been extra challenging because for the last six months my job has been going through big changes and I haven’t had an office at work either, which is why I’ve been working at home more. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve worked standing in my kitchen, sitting at a conference table alone at work, or working from my car or a cafe or something. It’s actually been really cool, but sometimes really challenging.
That’s the difference between having an “adult child” and a “responsible adult” living with their parents.
Not every parent has the latter 😂
There are horror stories of adult children abusing their parents and basically taking over to house.
But honestly, even with a responsible adult child in the home, it’s not the same as having an empty nest. And I’m sure it works both ways with the adults living at home, feeling like they want their own space and not just shared living quarters.
We want to have loud, animalistic sex on my kitchen counter at 3pm.
Great graphical description…Feel free to use your pet as the third partner and have a threesome…The true essence of animalistic sex !! 😂😂😂
I’ve just spent six days on holiday with some of my extended family, all adults, staying in a hotel with my own room and en suite bathroom. It was great and we had a lot of fun but after less than a week I’m VERY happy to be back in my own home with the knowledge that it’ll just be me and my cat in the morning. Maybe some people would prefer to keep living with family into adulthood, maybe I would if I’d been used to it but as it stands I love my parents and siblings though the idea of living with them fills me with dread.
It’s culturally dependent. It is not taboo to still live with your parents in some countries. And considering the housing market difficulties, it is actually becoming more acceptable in places where the practice has been previously taboo.
I would need dramatically more distractions and mental health if I had to live with my parents still
jokes on them, our generation can’t afford to live alone anymore
10 extra… How many fucking kids did you have, and then you’d want them to all stay after they are 18???
I believe they were going for 10 extended family members. e.g. 4 grandparents, 2 “adults”, 4 kids. Kinda like this:
Here’s the thing.
It shouldn’t be stigmatized, and it shouldn’t be something that’s any of anyone else’s business beyond being an interesting fact about a person. Just one more nugget to find.
There’s no single right answer for everyone.
Families are fucking complicated. Some of them, you could happily live together your entire life. Others, you might need a giant house and you’d still have friction. Some, you don’t even want to be in the same state, much less share a house.
It is, however, true that as the number of people in a group increases, the work required to maintain healthy relationships increases exponentially.
If there is not parity between those relationships, it multiplies the effect. Which means that everyone involved has to be willing to adapt and change over time for things to stay hair and healthy. When that isn’t the case, the household is going to split in some way or another, and that usually means someone leaving is essentially necessary.
Think about it. Two people that love each other have work to do to maintain their relationship, be it romantic, friendship, parent/child, siblings, whatever. You add a third person to that, and instead of one relationship you have 4, not three. Because each individual relationship exists, and now the three way one does.
Now, think about two people starting a family. Say they only have one kid. The kid becomes an adult, with adult needs, responsibilities, wants, and habits. If the parents keep treating them like a child, dissonance will occur in most situations.
Now, have that child get married too. You’ve now got 4 individual relationships to maintain, the original triplet, the new triplet with the spouse and parents, plus a triplet with each parent, the child, and the child’s spouse, then the quartet.
That’s a shit ton of work. You’ve got all those people having to compromise, adjust their habits and remember boundaries. That’s not something where everyone is going to major the optimum decision every single time. It’s impossible almost, though if everyone puts in the effort roughly equally, it can be maintained for a lifetime.
Now, the second couple have a kid. Map out those connections and the level of difficulty spikes hard.
But, as hard as it is, if you find someone that’s living in shared space, people still assume there’s something wrong with the younger adults involved. And there may be, but it isn’t a certainty the way people assume it will be.
There’s benefits and drawbacks to every option when it comes to how a family lives, be it centralized, spread out, or fully disconnected.
Now, I’ve done all of that. At various points, I’ve lived with my sibling and parents as an adult; we’ve all lived apart as individuals, we’ve lived as duos (though not in every combination), and I’ve had two partners that lived with me during all of that, and a best friend that was there through damn near all of it, and his husband for a while, plus my kid in the mix.
At various points, different people owned the house, even though it’s been the same house that I grew up in for most of that. It was originally my dad as owner, with my mom having her share of that as a spouse. Then they divorced, and my dad got the house and my mom got a big check. She still lived here, but that’s a separate thing. Then my dad fucked up, and me and my best friend bought it. Now, I’m the only one on the mortgage.
The dynamics of that meant that the “power” shifted as ownership did because at the end of the day, whoever is on the mortgage/deed has final legal responsibility, financial responsibility, and that means having final say on some matters, no matter how democratic everything else is. That creates an extra dynamic on top of all the others.
I can tell you for sure that it takes work, hard emotional work, to navigate every iteration of that. When that work isn’t being done by everyone, shit can get bad fast.
But it’s also amazing. The amount of good in it is mind boggling if you take each family unit being apart as the goal that is the only measure of success. When everyone is clicking along, and there’s equity between everyone, gods it’s beautiful.
Just on a practical level, everyone with income had more left over than they otherwise would have, and none of us have ever had to face the bad times alone. We’ve had each others back more times than I can even count (I tried, and I kept remembering more until I gave up, and I was creeping on triple digits where the level of support was part of at least one of us making it through).
And on the emotional level? It can be chaotic, yeah, but if you don’t know the goodness of being able to just hug your dad any time you want to because he’s just in the other room, I’m sorry. Right now, I can go hug my dad, and don’t have to leave the house. He’ll laugh, and ask what’s up. I’ll say “nothing, I just love you”, and then we’ll get teary eyed and he’ll say it back, and then we go about our days.
It isn’t for everyone. But gods damn, it sure as hell isn’t a bad thing to try either
Wow, what a write-up, this is lovely.
I’ve also been in a lot of the situations you’re describing and ultimately became the person providing shelter and stability for others, too (of course it’s far more complex than such a simple statement, as you know).
We’ve never made those arrangements permanent, it’s always been phases of some years where people who’ve needed it most have come and then gone when they’re ready. To be clear we’ve never kicked anyone out, nor (many years earlier) have I been kicked out, nothing like that. I just suspect the genetics in my family make it very difficult for us to be told how to live by another for long, no matter how reasonably or gently, lol.
For instance my pops having to ultimately be subject to my rules (I just mean in the ways you described) was eventually too much for him and he made the necessary steps to move on, and the relationship stayed healthy.
Like you said there’s lots of different ways to do things and the most important part is that everyone’s dignity is preserved, and everyone involved is prioritizing each other person as best they can in addition to their own needs, which is hard to do.
I’d be open, perhaps, to a more unconventional long-term arrangement with several of the family members in my life (including chosen family), especially as the world gets harder and harder, but I’m also content to be a temporary place of calm and respite for folks as I can.
And like you said, the mutual give and take that’s involved is everything. With the right people, anyway - I have to acknowledge there’s a broad swathe of folks I’d never want to live closely with and who I expect would be largely uninterested in compromising and prioritizing the well-being of others. Quite unfortunate for folks who grow up surrounded by too much of that.
That resonates a lot for me :)
lol yes wanting freedom and to be away from your parents at 18. A psyop. Jesus Christ.
I don’t know psyop, but a cultural norm to say “when your 18 you’re out”.
From the age of 12 on, not only did my parent say this habitually, they also stopped parenting completely.
It was a common theme of rejection in my house. I could have been the perfect kid, and tried, but I’d still here “you’re gone when your 18”. Never mind I didn’t even graduate Highschool until I had been 18 for a few months- it was habitual rejection all through my teens, and to me, sounded like, I’m done parenting you and I don’t want you in my life past the years the government madates I take care of you.
Shit hurts. My husband’s parents weren’t like that, some of my friends were, some of my friends weren’t. You can tell who’s doing better now, and it’s not the kids who were told they were out at 18.
If you don’t intend to help your young adult children through their early start, especially today when it’s so hard, don’t bother having children.
To add, I got kidnapped once by a mentally ill “friend” off their meds when I was 20 years old. At 6:00 in the morning I was able to make it to my mother’s door. When I knocked, she said I needed to deal with the consequences of my actions, And she didn’t want to deal with this. So I had to get back into this person’s car. My mother rejected me and my plea for help. I had just asked to stay at her house until the first bus ran to go home because I was in trouble. She said no and slammed the door in my face. I got back in the car, and a few hours later, I had no idea where we were. The man stopped stopping at stop signs because I kept trying to jump out. He locked me in the car. Eventually I was able to escape, and the police were called, and I couldn’t call my mother for help. I will never do that to my children. Her consequences for her actions now are 15 years now of no contact.
I mean the real psyop is that they’ll deteriorate your parents mental fortitude and strip them of ability to actually foster good nature in you. Instead being sold off to the cheapest daycare so that they do it because if they divide you, you cannot form that close bond.
Why do people still think it isnt intentional, they dropped crack to experiment on black people and discovered that division was extremely profitable. Insight violence and you indebt people, create false expectations so that reality feels deceptively depressing rather than just reality. Sell them the right to feel good.
Pain means profit, to try and end it would mean the world would have to accept an order. Want and pain are one in the same. Want your own rather than wanting to overcome the muddied mess that has become, rather than unravel and detangle the horrid clump of things unsaid, actions undone and regret unending. Then again, every person loves to be in their own world, rather than share it. It’s why games, ai, and social media are so popular. You get to share the perfect details only on social media, the perfect picture. You get your perfect world with nothing but your will in virtual escapism. Ai lets you have a friend without being likeable or having to extend yourself beyond your comfort zone.
Just remember, family is those you can truly love unbridled. Get through the mess, and clean up together, thats the only way to know who will stand with you as the dust settles. Blood family is a born luxury, however it is not your only family.
Family structure is supposed to create a division of labor with age. By uniting needs you take cost effective measures to guarantee content survival. However, the young are illusioned by the concept of freedom, while bound by mortal servitude. Like a beast confused by a mirror.
Capitalism is the idea of individual gain, over communitarian gain. C’mon man every cult, church, and benefit society like the freemasons structures like this for a reason. Your commune is supposed to be a structure you can fall back and rely upon. Thats why tithing exists. It’s to tide you over until you are no longer in need, however you must adhere to social expectations and responsibilities as it is collaborative effort. (Sadly corrupted by capitalism most places)
Ape together strong.
Jesus that’s a lot of words. I stopped reading when you brought the crack epidemic into it.
Godspeed.
I stopped reading when they used “insight” instead of “incite”
Yeah, sorry I had to raise a kid by age 8, and another by age 12, then a third by 14. Dropped out of school and only in recent years got my GED.
Then again getting raped does change life.
Most people in most of history don’t want that. Or at least not enough to make their life immeasurably worse.
I’m 42 and my parents recently moved in with me. Someone killed me.
I miss living with family. Lived with my inlaws for a few years and then with my grandmother for another few before moving out on our own. We’re selling our house soon and moving back with our inlaws. I’ve never been so burnt out and exhausted and I’m so looking forward to having extended family around to help with our kids again.
