On extended family living
Someone came up with a better name for this a few years ago and I can’t remember what it was, but I’m pretty sure I blogged it at the time. OK, it’s 3G living - I touched on it by that name in this post, and in a bit more detail and in a bit of a rant back in 2007 here.
Well so far we’re still just 2G living here, although the second G is spread out across an 18-year age range. And instead of parents moving back in with their children, we’ve got adult children who might never move out – and indeed, who might raise their own children here. Tom will be 22 next month, so we’re essentially four years into this particular experiment and, although the real test (when someone moves a partner in, which might never happen, or might result in one or both of them moving out again very quickly!) hasn’t happened yet, we’ve at least got some experience to write about beyond the theoretical.
First, why are we doing this? Mainly because we can. We’ve got enough space here and enough resources to ensure that everyone can have their own private space, plus enough shared space in the middle for us to comfortably enjoy together.
How did we manage that? Very creative use of space. Very careful husbandry – we hardly ever buy anything non-essential, have very cheap, short camping holidays very close to home, drive an old car and never buy in labour. Taking a few very carefully calculated risks and being lucky enough to be able to secure a mortgage to buy the right place at the right time (1997). (Although it didn’t feel like the right time in terms of house prices etc. at the time! We had friends who’d bought a 5-bedroomed house for £15K in the mid-1980s. Five times that ten years later seemed like a frighteningly astronomical sum.) Firmly refusing all offers of further debt, no matter how tempting or necessary they might have seemed at the time.
Fear of debt was one of my main motivations in deciding not to ask the children to leave home when each one grows up. (Note: I’m not asking them to stay either – they all have to make that decision for themselves in as free and unfettered a way as possible. But I want them to know that not ever leaving home is one of the choices that will always be open to them, as will coming back to live here if they do move away. Although I won’t be able to guarantee that no-one will have pinched their bedroom!)
By the time my mortgage is paid off, I’ll have endured the standard 25 years in debt. I don’t want to put my children through the same thing, if I’ve got a choice in the matter. I’ve done everything I can to make sure I do have a choice in the matter, so that they can have one too. I consider it to be one of my responsibilities to them: ensuring they’ve always got somewhere to live, some means of making money, and a sufficiently good education to be able to stay completely debt-free. Being without debt and sharing living costs means they don’t have to seek full time contracted employment if they don’t want to, which has meant they’ve had more choices than usual in wider respects. I’m planning to write more about self employment with low initial capital outlay in a future post.
Benefits of extended family living we’ve enjoyed are as follows:
· Pooling of skills, strengths, talents and preferences: one person can do plumbing, another likes to vac the carpet, there are four adult childcarers and educational facilitators; one likes growing food – another likes buying it! And so on.
· Pooling of funds and sharing of resources: Tom’s business can afford a slack period because there’s other family income to fall back on; in turn it offers some protection in the event of a failure of other sources of income; one electricity/gas/water/TV licence/ council tax/ mortgage account is cheaper than many. Even things like shoes, coats, clothes etc can be swapped around and borrowed/lent easily meaning there’s more choice available for less cost per person.
· There’s good company available without needing to leave the house! Some people like to play and discuss games, others like to talk politics, do crosswords together, cook and eat together or just mess around. There’s usually someone available and willing to share fun time with.
· Increased security. This is the house that never sleeps: someone is always awake, someone is always in.
· We are each other’s nurses and sickness cover. In the event of a crisis, we are each other’s crisis management team!
But there are a few drawbacks:
· It’s not without conflict. Two of the adult siblings in particular struggle to live in the same house peacefully; everyone knows everyone else’s weak points and people wind each other up – although they’re the same old arguments we’ve always had and everyone’s got used to it, so it’s not really much of a problem.
· Taking friends home always involves the whole family, straight away. This can be good and bad. It’s a bit more difficult to have a private life though – although possible. All four adults have managed it.
· People think we’re weird! Other relatives have really struggled to come to terms with what we’re doing: they think it’s just wrong and we’ve been shunned and criticised by them. But for us, this is just another continuation of our experiences of home educating. They were just the same about that. Some people get really disturbed by breaches of social norms, even ones that have obvious benefits and few drawbacks.
Overall, I’d add that it’s because we’re closely related family who have always lived and spent our time together that this works so well for us. We really respect, know and love each other and this is a bond that can’t really be replicated, I don’t think, in any other way.
Well so far we’re still just 2G living here, although the second G is spread out across an 18-year age range. And instead of parents moving back in with their children, we’ve got adult children who might never move out – and indeed, who might raise their own children here. Tom will be 22 next month, so we’re essentially four years into this particular experiment and, although the real test (when someone moves a partner in, which might never happen, or might result in one or both of them moving out again very quickly!) hasn’t happened yet, we’ve at least got some experience to write about beyond the theoretical.
First, why are we doing this? Mainly because we can. We’ve got enough space here and enough resources to ensure that everyone can have their own private space, plus enough shared space in the middle for us to comfortably enjoy together.
How did we manage that? Very creative use of space. Very careful husbandry – we hardly ever buy anything non-essential, have very cheap, short camping holidays very close to home, drive an old car and never buy in labour. Taking a few very carefully calculated risks and being lucky enough to be able to secure a mortgage to buy the right place at the right time (1997). (Although it didn’t feel like the right time in terms of house prices etc. at the time! We had friends who’d bought a 5-bedroomed house for £15K in the mid-1980s. Five times that ten years later seemed like a frighteningly astronomical sum.) Firmly refusing all offers of further debt, no matter how tempting or necessary they might have seemed at the time.
Fear of debt was one of my main motivations in deciding not to ask the children to leave home when each one grows up. (Note: I’m not asking them to stay either – they all have to make that decision for themselves in as free and unfettered a way as possible. But I want them to know that not ever leaving home is one of the choices that will always be open to them, as will coming back to live here if they do move away. Although I won’t be able to guarantee that no-one will have pinched their bedroom!)
By the time my mortgage is paid off, I’ll have endured the standard 25 years in debt. I don’t want to put my children through the same thing, if I’ve got a choice in the matter. I’ve done everything I can to make sure I do have a choice in the matter, so that they can have one too. I consider it to be one of my responsibilities to them: ensuring they’ve always got somewhere to live, some means of making money, and a sufficiently good education to be able to stay completely debt-free. Being without debt and sharing living costs means they don’t have to seek full time contracted employment if they don’t want to, which has meant they’ve had more choices than usual in wider respects. I’m planning to write more about self employment with low initial capital outlay in a future post.
Benefits of extended family living we’ve enjoyed are as follows:
· Pooling of skills, strengths, talents and preferences: one person can do plumbing, another likes to vac the carpet, there are four adult childcarers and educational facilitators; one likes growing food – another likes buying it! And so on.
· Pooling of funds and sharing of resources: Tom’s business can afford a slack period because there’s other family income to fall back on; in turn it offers some protection in the event of a failure of other sources of income; one electricity/gas/water/TV licence/ council tax/ mortgage account is cheaper than many. Even things like shoes, coats, clothes etc can be swapped around and borrowed/lent easily meaning there’s more choice available for less cost per person.
· There’s good company available without needing to leave the house! Some people like to play and discuss games, others like to talk politics, do crosswords together, cook and eat together or just mess around. There’s usually someone available and willing to share fun time with.
· Increased security. This is the house that never sleeps: someone is always awake, someone is always in.
· We are each other’s nurses and sickness cover. In the event of a crisis, we are each other’s crisis management team!
But there are a few drawbacks:
· It’s not without conflict. Two of the adult siblings in particular struggle to live in the same house peacefully; everyone knows everyone else’s weak points and people wind each other up – although they’re the same old arguments we’ve always had and everyone’s got used to it, so it’s not really much of a problem.
· Taking friends home always involves the whole family, straight away. This can be good and bad. It’s a bit more difficult to have a private life though – although possible. All four adults have managed it.
· People think we’re weird! Other relatives have really struggled to come to terms with what we’re doing: they think it’s just wrong and we’ve been shunned and criticised by them. But for us, this is just another continuation of our experiences of home educating. They were just the same about that. Some people get really disturbed by breaches of social norms, even ones that have obvious benefits and few drawbacks.
Overall, I’d add that it’s because we’re closely related family who have always lived and spent our time together that this works so well for us. We really respect, know and love each other and this is a bond that can’t really be replicated, I don’t think, in any other way.
posted by Gill at
9:10 PM
9 Comments:
Me, my mum and my brother all lived together in a tiny house with my grandparents until I was 8. It made perfect sense as my mum was a single parent.
My grandad was a farm labourer, there wasn't much money to go around. There was an awful lot of love though. Your arrangement seems a very sensible one to me.
That sounds like a nice early childhood :-) (And I'd take love over money any day!)
I *love* the way your family live and work. Hope to be able to offer similar security and options to my girls as they grow up.
I can't make the first few links work ... is it me?
No Lucy, it's me. I wrote the post in html on Word first and didn't check the links properly when I transfered it. Thanks for letting me know :)
(And wow, you'll be able to house about 5G without much of a squeeze at your place, lucky things! We'd need to buy more land for that. Sigh. One day, maybe!)
Hi Gill <>. I agree that its a fantastic thing to be able to offer your family, and well done you for your all-round self-sufficiency. I aspire to that, but not there yet by several decades!
We live 3G, and I certainly recognise many of the same benefits and, er.. challenges you describe. Of particular resonance for me right now is the new people thing; I'm just at the start of what I hope will be a significant relationship, but you never know, right? But she'd already met my Mum, my Dad, my child and my dog, within a week of meeting each other.. And I would kind of like a little more privacy to be able to take my time.
But, on balance, living like this works really well for everybody. Me and G have our own flat, and all three adults in the house are fairly "low maintenance". Lots of benefits practically, emotionally and financially, and plenty of space - which I agree is key, we would get on far worse if we didn't have lots of that. All in all I consider myself extremely lucky really :-)
Hi Kate. We haven't got all-round self-sufficiency in its absolute sense yet, and according to some of the expressed preferences here, we never will! (They like their car journeys and their pizzas etc.. ;-)
But it's a life ambition of mine to try to achieve that for myself at some point, probably when none of them need me to lead their kind of life with them any more. I might take myself off to a little house in a distant bit of the field, surround myself with veg plots and see how it goes! Will probs last about 2 weeks.. ;-)
Your living arrangement sounds great, but I can relate to you completely on the privacy thing, which can be a real problem. Hope you manage to solve it well enough to meet your needs. (And would appreciate some pointers if you do!)
Well I'd never kick my kids out of their home and I grew up with that same certainty. My siblings and I moved out at different points - most of us to university but one in a back and forth way over several years. Never making my children leave doesn't really feel like anything to do with other aspects of our lives (like home ed) more a basic understanding of the need for everyone to have a home and place to belong.
I suspect that the partners issue is the really challenging thing. In my teens one of my siblings had a partner move in after she was kicked out of her home. My mum was hugely accommodating but I don't know if I have would have the patience...
In our case, I think home ed is a relevant factor, but we've done ours together in the home a bit more than you have, I think. You've been out and about and more socially active HErs, so I can see why you don't see the link and I do.
I'm thinking back to my own childhood and that of my friends at the time. Because of school, our parents were semi-strangers to us by the time we were 14/15+ and the circle of friends acted as 'family' instead - dysfunctional as it was! There were other things affecting this of course, and lots of variables with our situation now - it's not clear cut or particularly easy to define such things, is it?
I agree about partners. I'm planning to be accommodating, but planning is one thing, and actually sustaining it is another. (Plus, as a 'mother-in-law' I don't expect to be popular, no matter how hard I try to be! Am really nervous about taking on that role actually.. )
Gill, I think you'd be a great mother-in-law because you don't have a whole set of rules about how things should be done. I think that's where a lot of flash points occur in in-law relationships.
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