As I mentioned, we moved to the San Francisco area a little over two months ago, and we are currently living with our son, Amit, and his partner, Brett.<\/p>\n
When we first started planning the move, I assumed that living with them would be temporary. We would settle in, find our own place, and eventually establish our own household. It seemed like the natural thing to do.<\/p>\n
After all, that is what many of us in America have been brought up to believe.<\/p>\n
Parents raise their children, children grow up, go to college or find a job, and eventually establish a home of their own. Parents continue living independently, and adult children do the same. When circumstances bring the two generations under one roof, it is often assumed that there must be a reason \u2014 financial difficulties, illness, divorce, or perhaps the need for someone to provide care.<\/p>\n
But what if none of those things applies?<\/p>\n
What if two generations simply want to live together?<\/p>\n
That question has made me think much more deeply about something I had previously taken for granted: why do we associate independence with living separately from our families?<\/p>\n
Is living together really so unusual?<\/p>\n
In the United States, and in some other Western societies, multigenerational living has traditionally not been the norm. There can even be a subtle sense that an adult child who continues to live with parents has somehow not become fully independent \u2014 and that parents who move in with their adult children have become dependent on them.<\/p>\n
But this is far from being a universal way of looking at family life.<\/p>\n
In many parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Southern and Eastern Europe, several generations living together has traditionally been quite normal. The family home is not necessarily something that parents leave once their children become adults, nor is it necessarily something children leave simply because they have reached a particular age.<\/p>\n
In India, where I grew up, the expectation was traditionally quite different. Parents raised their children with the understanding that family responsibilities went in both directions. Children eventually had responsibilities toward their parents, particularly as they grew older.<\/p>\n
The idea of putting an aging parent into an old-age home simply because they had become old could once have been regarded as a serious failure of family responsibility. That attitude is changing, particularly in urban India, but the underlying idea of family obligation remains much stronger than it has traditionally been in America.<\/p>\n
So I began wondering: why did we develop such different ideas about what constitutes a successful family?<\/p>\n
Part of the answer, I think, has to do with something older than industrialization: historians have traced the practice of newlyweds forming their own separate household back to at least fifteenth-century England, well before anything we’d call industrial \u2014 which suggests the pattern is a specifically old English inheritance that industrialization later spread, rather than one industrialization created.<\/p>\n
Industrialization, urbanization, geographic mobility and increasing economic prosperity all made it easier for individuals to live independently. People moved away from their hometowns for jobs. Young adults went to college far from home. Housing became organized around nuclear families rather than extended families. After the Second World War, rising prosperity made it increasingly possible for a young couple to buy or rent a home of their own.<\/p>\n
The shift is easy to underestimate until you see the numbers. According to the Pew Research Center, only 7 percent of the U.S. population lived in a multigenerational household in 1971 \u2014 the year, as it happens, that I first arrived in this country. By 2021, that figure had risen to 18 percent, or nearly 60 million Americans, with the increase sharpest among young adults in their twenties and early thirties. What looks like a fixed cultural value turns out, on closer inspection, to be a fairly recent and still-shifting one.<\/p>\n
Over time, something that was originally an economic and social development became a cultural ideal.<\/p>\n
Independence came to mean having your own income, your own home, your own decisions \u2014 and, to some extent, your own life separate from your parents and children.<\/p>\n
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Independence has enormous value. It gives people freedom, privacy and the ability to make their own choices.<\/p>\n
But perhaps we have sometimes taken the next step without questioning it: that independence requires physical separation from family.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t necessarily.<\/p>\n
You can be financially independent and still choose to live with your children. You can have your own opinions, your own interests, your own friends and your own financial resources while sharing a household with another generation.<\/p>\n
Perhaps independence and separation are not the same thing.<\/p>\n
What d<\/span><\/strong>o religions<\/span><\/strong> actually say?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n This is where my curiosity took me in another direction.<\/p>\n Many of the societies that developed strong traditions of separate households are historically Christian societies. Yet when I looked at the teachings of Christianity, I found considerably more emphasis on family responsibility than I had expected.<\/p>\n The Bible says, “Honor your father and mother.” The New Testament goes further in several places. In 1 Timothy, there is an explicit expectation that children and grandchildren should provide for their family, and that failing to care for one’s relatives is a serious matter.<\/p>\n Jesus himself criticized the use of religious rules as an excuse for avoiding one’s responsibility to aging parents. And while the Bible certainly recognizes the importance of a husband and wife establishing their own household, that is not the same thing as saying that children should separate themselves from their parents or that parents should not live with their children.<\/p>\n The interesting thing is that this emphasis on family responsibility isn’t unique to Christianity.<\/p>\n Traditional Hindu thought has a particularly strong reverence for parents. The Taittiriya Upanishad contains the famous instruction, “M\u0101t\u1e5b devo bhava, Pit\u1e5b devo bhava” \u2014 essentially, regard your mother and father as deserving the highest reverence.<\/p>\n Buddhism is remarkably explicit about reciprocal responsibilities. The Sigalovada Sutta describes parents as one of the directions that children should honor and lays out duties on both sides: children should support their parents, perform their duties toward them and preserve the family tradition, while parents are expected to guide, educate and care for their children.<\/p>\n Islam is equally direct. The Qur’an repeatedly emphasizes the obligation to honor one’s parents. One passage specifically refers to parents reaching old age while in one’s care and instructs believers to treat them with respect and compassion. Another speaks of gratitude to God alongside gratitude to one’s parents.<\/p>\n The details differ enormously among these religions, and none of them simply says that parents and adult children must live under the same roof.<\/p>\n But there is a common thread.<\/p>\n The relationship between generations carries obligations.<\/p>\n The question, then, is not so much whether one religion has the “right” answer. It is why modern Western society came to place such a strong emphasis on individual autonomy and separate households when its own religious tradition, like those of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, has historically placed considerable importance on responsibilities between generations.<\/p>\n That seems to me an interesting question worth asking.<\/p>\n The colonial influence<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n There is another dimension to this that I find particularly interesting because of where I grew up.<\/p>\n For much of the modern period, people in countries that were colonized by European powers were often encouraged \u2014 explicitly or implicitly \u2014 to see Western institutions and Western ways of doing things as more advanced.<\/p>\n And in many respects, there were very good reasons for that perception. The West made extraordinary contributions in science, medicine, technology, education, industrialization and political institutions. There is much that the rest of the world learned \u2014 and continues to learn \u2014 from Western societies.<\/p>\n But there is a danger in taking the next step and assuming that because one society is more advanced in one area, its social customs must also be superior.<\/p>\n They aren’t necessarily.<\/p>\n Perhaps the flow of learning should go in both directions.<\/p>\n India and other societies may have much to learn from the West about individual rights, institutions, technology and economic development. But perhaps the West has something to learn from India and other cultures about family, intergenerational relationships and the value of having several generations remain connected in everyday life.<\/p>\n Progress in one area does not require abandoning everything that came before.<\/p>\n And then there is our own situation<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n This is not just an abstract or historical question for our family. My younger brother, Peter, emigrated from India in 1990, and after I sponsored him under the immigration rules, he lived with us in Virginia for almost two years while he found his footing, before we moved to California. We didn’t think of that as unusual \u2014 he was working toward becoming financially self-sufficient so that he could eventually bring his wife and children over as well, and he had a job almost from the day he arrived. What I remember most clearly, though, is that several of my American colleagues assumed the opposite: that he didn’t have a job and was being supported by us. I explained the actual situation more than once, but the assumption didn’t move much – they could not accept that someone who was financially self-sufficient would not have his own residence. It was an early lesson in how deeply that particular cultural script runs \u2014 even a temporary living arrangement built around someone else’s independence got read as dependence.<\/p>\n Which brings me back to Amit, Brett and us.<\/p>\n There is one point I want to make very clearly because it changes the nature of the discussion.<\/p>\n We are not living with our son because we need his financial support.<\/p>\n We are financially independent. We have the means to maintain our own household and could comfortably afford our own home and our own living expenses. If we wanted to live separately, we could.<\/p>\n So this isn’t a story about aging parents having no choice but to move in with their children.<\/p>\n It is a choice.<\/p>\n In fact, when we were planning our move, I assumed that the normal course of events would be for us to get our own place. Amit, however, was quite keen that we stay with him and Brett.<\/p>\n What struck me was that Amit, despite having grown up entirely in the United States, didn’t really understand why we would feel that we should move out.<\/p>\n His perspective was remarkably simple.<\/p>\n If we get along, if there is enough room, if everyone is comfortable and if we enjoy being together, why should the generations necessarily live apart?<\/p>\n I had no easy answer.<\/p>\n My initial reaction was based more on what I had come to regard as normal than on any compelling practical reason.<\/p>\n And that, perhaps, is the most interesting part of all.<\/p>\n Maybe we have confused independence with distance<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n There are obviously situations where separate households are better. Privacy matters. Couples need their own space. Families don’t always get along. Different generations can have very different lifestyles. Living together is not automatically better simply because it is traditional in some cultures.<\/p>\n But neither is living separately automatictally better simply because it has become the norm in America and some parts of the west.<\/p>\n Perhaps the real measure should be whether the arrangement works for the people involved \u2014 whether they respect one another, share responsibilities fairly, and genuinely enjoy each other’s company. And perhaps most importantly, whether everyone is there because they want to be.<\/p>\n In our case, the answer, at least for now, is yes.<\/p>\n We have the financial freedom to live separately. We have the ability to establish our own household. We are not being forced by circumstances to depend on our son.<\/p>\n We simply have another option.<\/p>\n We can live together.<\/p>\n And perhaps that is what I have come to appreciate most about this experience.<\/p>\n Independence gives you the ability to choose. It doesn’t dictate what you must choose.<\/p>\n We are not living together because we have to.<\/p>\n We are living together because we can \u2014 and because, for now, we want to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I mentioned, we moved to the San Francisco area a little over two months ago, and we are currently living with our son, Amit, and his partner, Brett. When we first started planning the move, I assumed that living with them would be temporary. We would settle in, find our own place, and eventually establish our own household. It seemed like the natural thing to do. After all, that is what many of us in America have been brought up to believe. Parents raise their children, children grow up, go to college or find a job, and eventually establish a home of their own. Parents continue living independently, and adult children do the same. When circumstances bring the two generations under one roof, it is often assumed that there must be a reason \u2014 financial difficulties, illness, divorce, or perhaps the need for someone to provide care. But what if none of those things applies? What if two generations simply want to live together? That question has made me think much more deeply about something I had previously taken for granted: why do we associate independence with living separately from our families? Is living together really so unusual? In the United States, and in some other Western societies, multigenerational living has traditionally not been the norm. There can even be a subtle sense that an adult child who continues to live with parents has somehow not become fully independent \u2014 and that parents who move in with their adult children have become dependent on them. But this is far from being a universal way of looking at family life. In many parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Southern and Eastern Europe, several generations living together has traditionally been quite normal. The family home is not necessarily something that parents leave once their children become adults, nor is it necessarily something children leave simply because they have reached a particular age. In India, where I grew up, the expectation was traditionally quite different. Parents raised their children with the understanding that family responsibilities went in both directions. Children eventually had responsibilities toward their parents, particularly as they grew older. The idea of putting an aging parent into an old-age home simply because they had become old could once have been regarded as a serious failure of family responsibility. That attitude is changing, particularly in urban India, but the underlying idea of family obligation remains much stronger than it has traditionally been in America. So I began wondering: why did we develop such different ideas about what constitutes a successful family? Part of the answer, I think, has to do with something older than industrialization: historians have traced the practice of newlyweds forming their own separate household back to at least fifteenth-century England, well before anything we’d call industrial \u2014 which suggests the pattern is a specifically old English inheritance that industrialization later spread, rather than one industrialization created. Industrialization, urbanization, geographic mobility and increasing economic prosperity all made it easier for individuals to live independently. People moved away from their hometowns for jobs. Young adults went to college far from home. Housing became organized around nuclear families rather than extended families. After the Second World War, rising prosperity made it increasingly possible for a young couple to buy or rent a home of their own. The shift is easy to underestimate until you see the numbers. According to the Pew Research Center, only 7 percent of the U.S. population lived in a multigenerational household in 1971 \u2014 the year, as it happens, that I first arrived in this country. By 2021, that figure had risen to 18 percent, or nearly 60 million Americans, with the increase sharpest among young adults in their twenties and early thirties. What looks like a fixed cultural value turns out, on closer inspection, to be a fairly recent and still-shifting one. Over time, something that was originally an economic and social development became a cultural ideal. Independence came to mean having your own income, your own home, your own decisions \u2014 and, to some extent, your own life separate from your parents and children. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Independence has enormous value. It gives people freedom, privacy and the ability to make their own choices. But perhaps we have sometimes taken the next step without questioning it: that independence requires physical separation from family. It doesn’t necessarily. You can be financially independent and still choose to live with your children. You can have your own opinions, your own interests, your own friends and your own financial resources while sharing a household with another generation. Perhaps independence and separation are not the same thing. What do religions actually say? This is where my curiosity took me in another direction. Many of the societies that developed strong traditions of separate households are historically Christian societies. Yet when I looked at the teachings of Christianity, I found considerably more emphasis on family responsibility than I had expected. The Bible says, “Honor your father and mother.” The New Testament goes further in several places. In 1 Timothy, there is an explicit expectation that children and grandchildren should provide for their family, and that failing to care for one’s relatives is a serious matter. Jesus himself criticized the use of religious rules as an excuse for avoiding one’s responsibility to aging parents. And while the Bible certainly recognizes the importance of a husband and wife establishing their own household, that is not the same thing as saying that children should separate themselves from their parents or that parents should not live with their children. The interesting thing is that this emphasis on family responsibility isn’t unique to Christianity. Traditional Hindu thought has a particularly strong reverence for parents. The Taittiriya Upanishad contains the famous instruction, “M\u0101t\u1e5b devo bhava, Pit\u1e5b devo bhava” \u2014 essentially, regard your mother and father as deserving the highest reverence. Buddhism is remarkably explicit about reciprocal responsibilities. The Sigalovada Sutta describes parents as one of the directions that children should honor and lays out duties on both sides: children should support their parents, perform their duties toward them and preserve the family tradition, while parents are expected to guide, educate and care for their children. Islam is equally direct. The Qur’an repeatedly emphasizes the obligation to honor one’s parents. One passage specifically refers to parents reaching old age while in one’s care and instructs believers to treat them with respect and compassion. Another speaks of gratitude to God alongside gratitude to one’s parents. The details differ enormously among these religions, and none of them simply says that parents and adult children must live under the same roof. But there is a common thread. The relationship between generations carries obligations. The question, then, is not so much whether one religion has the “right” answer. It is why modern Western society came to place such a strong emphasis on individual autonomy and separate households when its own religious tradition, like those of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, has historically placed considerable importance on responsibilities between generations. That seems to me an interesting question worth asking. The colonial influence There is another dimension to this that I find particularly interesting because of where I grew up. For much of the modern period, people in countries that were colonized by European powers were often encouraged \u2014 explicitly or implicitly \u2014 to see Western institutions and Western ways of doing things as more advanced. And in many respects, there were very good reasons for that perception. The West made extraordinary contributions in science, medicine, technology, education, industrialization and political institutions. There is much that the rest of the world learned \u2014 and continues to learn \u2014 from Western societies. But there is a danger in taking the next step and assuming that because one society is more advanced in one area, its social customs must also be superior. They aren’t necessarily. Perhaps the flow of learning should go in both directions. India and other societies may have much to learn from the West about individual rights, institutions, technology and economic development. But perhaps the West has something to learn from India and other cultures about family, intergenerational relationships and the value of having several generations remain connected in everyday life. Progress in one area does not require abandoning everything that came before. And then there is our own situation This is not just an abstract or historical question for our family. My younger brother, Peter, emigrated from India in 1990, and after I sponsored him under the immigration rules, he lived with us in Virginia for almost two years while he found his footing, before we moved to California. We didn’t think of that as unusual \u2014 he was working toward becoming financially self-sufficient so that he could eventually bring his wife and children over as well, and he had a job almost from the day he arrived. What I remember most clearly, though, is that several of my American colleagues assumed the opposite: that he didn’t have a job and was being supported by us. I explained the actual situation more than once, but the assumption didn’t move much – they could not accept that someone who was financially self-sufficient would not have his own residence. It was an early lesson in how deeply that particular cultural script runs \u2014 even a temporary living arrangement built around someone else’s independence got read as dependence. Which brings me back to Amit, Brett and us. There is one point I want to make very clearly because it changes the nature of the discussion. We are not living with our son because we need his financial support. We are financially independent. We have the means to maintain our own household and could comfortably afford our own home and our own living expenses. If we wanted to live separately, we could. So this isn’t a story about aging parents having no choice but to move in with their children. It is a choice. In fact, when we were planning our move, I assumed that the normal course of events would be for us to get our own place. Amit, however, was quite keen that we stay with him and Brett. What struck me was that Amit, despite having grown up entirely in the United States, didn’t really understand why we would feel that we should move out. His perspective was remarkably simple. If we get along, if there is enough room, if everyone is comfortable and if we enjoy being together, why should the generations necessarily live apart? I had no easy answer. My initial reaction was based more on what I had come to regard as normal than on any compelling practical reason. And that, perhaps, is the most interesting part of all. Maybe we have confused independence with distance There are obviously situations where separate households are better. Privacy matters. Couples need their own space. Families don’t always get along. Different generations can have very different lifestyles. Living together is not automatically better simply because it is traditional in some cultures. But neither is living separately automatictally better simply because it has become the norm in America and some parts of the west. Perhaps the real measure should be whether the arrangement works for the people involved \u2014 whether they respect one another, share responsibilities fairly, and genuinely enjoy each other’s company. And perhaps most importantly, whether everyone is there because they want to be. In our case, the answer, at least for now, is yes. We have the financial freedom to live separately. We have the ability to establish our own household. We are not being forced by circumstances to depend on our son. We simply have another option. We can live together. And perhaps that is what I have come to appreciate most about this experience. Independence gives you the ability to choose. It doesn’t dictate what you must choose. We are not living together because we have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,14,9,24,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-religion-heritage","category-family-friends-remembrances","category-india","category-uk","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2637"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2638,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637\/revisions\/2638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}