After my great aunt’s funeral a few months ago, my father took me for a ride around his old neighborhood. Newark’s North Ward was a lively Italian enclave until the majority of the residents “flew” to the suburbs in the 1970s. Next to my father’s childhood home was a twin home where his mother’s parents and her sister’s family lived. A block away he pointed out a tall white house where his paternal grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins lived. He reminisced about playing with his sisters and cousins in the street under the watchful eye of his grandparents and aunts, who also cooked for them and told them stories about the old country. Though I did not grow up with extended family members in my house, nearly all of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins lived less than ten minutes away.
Household size dropped in the mass exodus to the suburbs, even as square footage grew. But recent polls indicate that after Covid, multigenerational living is on the rise. Daunted by a competitive job market and the skyrocketing cost of housing, many young Americans are opting to move back home, and even to start their own families while living with their parents. But others are doing so because they recognize the emotional and moral benefits of living with one’s extended family.
Typically, social conservatives have made it their business to defend the nuclear family—a mother, father, and their children—from threats posed by progressives, who would have us believe it is the fruit of an oppressive capitalist system and that it perpetuates “heteronormativity” and confining gender roles. According to Shina Shayesteh, the nuclear household model is fairly novel, becoming normative only after “the rise of the suburban development pattern in the latter half of the twentieth century.” Camille Paglia, in Vamps & Tramps, pins the excesses of identitarianism and lifestyle progressivism on the nuclear household model. The lack of historical precedent for the nuclear family and the renewed interest in multigenerational living ought to provoke conservatives to reevaluate their priorities in the culture wars.
In addition to saving money, multigenerational living allows parents to rely on relatives for childcare, and it guarantees elderly family members will be cared for. It is also healthier for children to grow up among numerous relatives spanning multiple generations. They’re able to draw from a deeper well of wisdom and experience, and feel more rooted to a particular culture and patrimony. They are thus more likely to develop a stable sense of identity. They acquire knowledge and life skills unavailable through formal schooling or extracurricular activities, let alone social media.
Paglia, who grew up in a tight-knit Italian family in upstate New York, laments the “sense of displacement and loneliness” that plagues most assimilated, upper-middle-class kids growing up in the suburbs with just their parents. “Two parents alone cannot possibly help you to understand the world,” she claims. She observes that her students from working-class backgrounds tend to have “stronger personalities” because “they have a sense of their place in the universe,” thanks to their extended family members who prized family bonds over upward mobility.
The multigenerational household also diffuses certain psychological tensions. Parents worn down from disciplining their kids can count on their own parents for advice. Kids who are annoyed by their parents can turn to their more lenient grandpa. Spouses who are getting on each other’s nerves can blow off steam with other adults in the house. The “isolated unit” of the nuclear household, however, “is claustrophobic and psychologically unstable,” says Paglia. It is “seething with frustrations and tensions.” The nuclear household is a “crucible for Freudian neurosis” that inculcates children into solipsism.
It is typically her students from more affluent, nuclear households that are “taking antidepressants and throwing themselves out of windows,” or who struggle with “all kinds of sexual issues.” It was such students “who most spout the party line” of progressive platitudes, their “grisly hyperemotionalism” satisfying their “hunger for meaningful experience outside their eventless upbringing. In the absence of war, invent one.”
On my first day of orientation as a college freshman, I was initiated into the sacred rite of checking my white privilege at the door. It was startling because I had always thought of “white people” as the “medigans” who weren’t “cultured” like the Greeks and Italians in my family were. If anything, my most tangible privilege—more so than my perceived race—was growing up in a financially stable family. But I’ve come to realize that my greatest privilege was growing up in close proximity to extended family members.
This not only shaped my sense of identity; it made me excited to live life. Learning from my grandparents’ stories, taking them out and about, and eventually caring for them at the end of their lives became a source of pride for me. It was fulfilling in a way that occasionally visiting one’s grandparents could never be.
The photojournalist Chris Arnade once wrote about meeting a young Mexican-American woman in Los Angeles who decided to attend her local community college instead of pursuing a more prestigious education: “I need to stay here because I’m my mother’s translator.” Arnade notes that those living on America’s “front row” tend to value measurable virtues like resume-building and have few qualms about leaving their family to pursue work opportunities. Many on America’s “back row,” on the other hand, are less inclined to “give up the non-material forms of meaning like place, family, and faith.”
Indeed, many see foregoing career opportunities in the name of living near family members as a mark of immaturity or selfishness. A fully formed adult ought to be prepared to sacrifice in order to live a successful, independent life. While the specter of the emotionally underdeveloped man-child mooching off his parents looms large, we should reject the idea that valuing proximity to one’s family is merely a sign of one’s failure to launch. In a culture that has severed nearly all tradition, conservatives would do better to set their eyes on defending the dignity of the multigenerational family.
