

The Return of the Multi-Generational Family Household - tokenadult
http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/752/the-return-of-the-multi-generational-family-household

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quant18
Well, I have very mixed feelings about this. (I grew up in a multi-
generational household.)

A multi-generational home environment means your dinners and weekends are
spent with gossiping great-aunts and competing cousins. That tends to push
people towards career, social, and consumption choices aimed at
placating/impressing the shallowest, most materialistic of their relatives.
Doctor, pharmacist, engineer at a big company, etc. You're forever being
compared to Auntie So-and-so's son who is already married to a nice girl and
drives a bimmer. And what kind of "entrepreneur" do you think you are, you sit
alone tinkering with computers after you come home from work, don't you play
with computers enough at the office, why don't you open an import company like
Uncle So-and-so and under-declare the customs value and make lots of money
like that!

Cherry-picked bonus link: Living in intergenerational households triples
Japanese womens' risk of heart disease.
[http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-12/bmj-
lim121008...](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-12/bmj-
lim121008.php)

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DaniFong
Don't overgeneralize: my guess is that multigenerational households simply
amplify the cultural values of the family relative to the cultural values of
the nation and city and neighborhood you're in. This could be a good thing or
bad thing...

~~~
quant18
If unusual characteristic "X" is important to you, you probably gravitate
towards coworkers and friends who are good at X, or striving to improve
themselves in X, or at least respect X --- basically, people who can damp the
broader culture's relative indifference or hostility to X rather than amplify
it.

In contrast, people do not get to filter their extended family network for X.
A given person's extended family is likely to be pretty average (for whatever
country/city/neighbourhood they're from) in terms of X, respect for X, etc.
Perhaps some cousin somewhere is also an outlier on X, but that cousin will
have only a little influence on the signal being sent by your extended family
as a whole, and you might not even figure out who that cousin is.

If you were born into a whole clan of people who are above average on whatever
X you find most important, well then by definition you're _not_ in an average
situation --- you hit the jackpot when you were born, and many people envy
you.

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bilbo0s
Those of us who are traveled enough can tell you that outside of North America
and most of Europe, the Multi-Generational Family never went away. I am unsure
whether that is culture or economics, 'good' or 'bad'. But there it is.

