Remember The Waltons? John-Boy, his umpteen siblings, Ma, Pa, Grandma and Grandpa famously shared a rambling Depression farmhouse in TV Land. More recently, multiple generations have lived together on The Conners and One Day at a Time. Turns out that extended family living has never gone away. It’s just constantly shape-shifting.
In fact, a record 64 million Americans—one in five of us—live in a multigenerational home, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s 1950s levels, way up from just 12 percent in 1980. (“Multigenerational” is defined as including two or more adult generations—not counting college students—or a household with both grandparents and grandkids under 25.) Also on the rise: four generations living together.
“We’re shifting from an age-segregated world to an age-integrated world,” says longevity expert Bill Thomas, M.D.
Necessity is partly the mother of this trend. More young adults are finding it harder to make ends meet on their own. Longer lifespans also mean sick, frail or disabled parents are moving in with their grown children (or vice versa). And the opioid and mental-health epidemics are contributing to an uptick in “grandfamilies”—grandparents raising grandchildren. (Though even George and Martha Washington did it, raising her grandkids at Mount Vernon, points out Donna Butts, executive director of the advocacy nonprofit Generations United.)
There’s happiness too. Beyond saving money or solving care problems, we learn from one another, pass on traditions and share companionship. We like to be together.
“Families often come together by need but stay together by choice,” says Butts.
Just ask these folks.
Married for 54 years, Gary and Jeanne Peterson lived happily with horses and a dog on five acres in Weed, California. When Jeanne died in 2016, Gary, frail from an earlier stroke and using a walker, knew he couldn’t stay on alone.
The answer lay across the country in Dubois, Pennsylvania, nearer to his daughter and son-in-law, Kimberly and Don Robertson. But where, exactly?
All in the same house felt too close for comfort. The basement needed too much work. So Peterson, 80, settled into an assisted-living high-rise 20 miles away. Used to wide open spaces and being around people he knew, the former rancher and rodeo rider found it lonely. So did his dog, Whitey.
“One day Gary asked if he could live in my fifth wheel [RV] in my yard,” Don Robertson says. “I worried someone would report me for locking up an old man in a trailer, so I checked with a friend in the Clearfield County Area Agency on Aging [CCAAA].”
The agency had a better idea: its very first ECHO cottage, short for Elder Cottage Housing Opportunity, an 800-square-foot temporary home set up right in the Robertsons’ backyard. They share utilities and an address. “Basically it’s umbilical-ed to my house,” Robertson says. Click here to continue reading.
