History > 2006 > USA > Family

Families Add 3rd Generation

to Households

May 25, 2006
The New York Times
By MIREYA NAVARRO

Tess Crescini keeps trying to limit her roommates to her fiancé and her dog, but so far she has failed miserably.

At the moment, Ms. Crescini, 51, and her fiancé are sharing her four-bedroom house in San Jose, Calif., with two of her three adult sons, a daughter-in-law, a 3-year-old granddaughter and a brother who comes and goes. Exorbitant housing costs, layoffs and children who yearn for family togetherness have coalesced to make her the head of a multigenerational household.

In a society where the most common type of household is led by those who live alone and where the scattered family is almost a cultural institution, many grandparents, adult children and grandchildren are gathering to live under the same roof.

The last census showed these "multigenerational households" — defined as those of three or more generations — growing faster than any other type of housing arrangement.

The number of multigenerational households is still relatively small: 4.2 million, or 4 percent of all types. But they grew by 38 percent from 1990 to 2000, and professionals in real estate and the building industry say the trend has accelerated since then.

Architects, developers and others in the industry are responding with home designs and planned communities that offer features suited for the different generations. At builder trade shows this year, model homes with names like Reality House have for the first time specifically catered to multigenerational living. Bedroom suites are designed with private entrances and porches, halls are wider to accommodate wheelchairs, and light switches are lower so they can be reached both by those in the wheelchairs and by children.

There are also bigger kitchens for social networking, as well as extra storage space for belongings that now range from toys to grandma's china.

"You see a lot more people dedicating a portion of their homes to loved ones," said Carlos Elenes of EBTA Architects in Irvine, Calif., who specializes in high-end homes and has worked on projects for adult children housing their parents and for grandparents sharing their home with children and grandchildren.

But fancy, multimillion-dollar homes are not the norm when generations choose to live together. Census officials say multigenerational families are most common in states like California, where the high cost of housing forces families to double up, and in states where high rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing lead to home sharing by the mother, her children and her parents.

A variety of cultural factors also draw and keep relatives together. Multigenerational living, especially those in which grandparents care for their grandchildren, have long been common in Asian and Hispanic countries, and the arrangement is popular among immigrants from those nations. Also driving the trend are — who else? — active baby boomers who want to be involved in the lives of their offspring and who see little appeal in flying off to a Sun Belt retirement in isolation.

"There's a financial aspect, but also people are realizing the importance of staying connected to their roots," said Donna M. Butts, executive director of Generations United, which promotes interaction among generations. "Families have been scattered for so many years, and there's a reversal of that trend."

Sixty-two percent of multigenerational households are led by the first generation — that is, the grandparents.

At a time when she would otherwise have been downsizing, Ann Bristow, 66, bought a two-bedroom condo in downtown Seattle in 2004 so she could share it with her 36-year-old daughter and 20-month-old granddaughter.

Ms. Bristow, who is divorced, said she had been retiring from her job as a university librarian in Indiana just as her youngest daughter became a single mother. They moved to Seattle, where Ms. Bristow's other daughter lives with her own family. Ending up together in one apartment, the multigen grandmother said, "was just a very natural move for me."

Ms. Bristow takes care of the baby part of the week while her daughter works as a teacher. "I love small children," she said. "I absolutely enjoy taking care of her. It's not a sacrifice."

The arrangement is also driven by finances: she is helping her daughter, who has gone back to school for a second master's degree and is saving money to settle down on her own.

Ms. Bristow said many of her contemporaries did not seem to understand. They view retirement as a time to pamper themselves, not to take on new responsibilities.

"Playing golf was not my vision," she said. "I envisioned myself very involved with family."

For those who have decided to regroup, family togetherness can create strains, prompting a need to navigate old relationships in a new way. It means establishing ground rules for cooking and cleaning, adapting to one another's tastes in movies and music, and being mindful not to usurp roles. In Ms. Bristow's case, mother and daughter seem to have fallen into their routines smoothly, and Ms. Bristow says her main concern is that her granddaughter knows who her mother is.

"That's a very important thing, that the emotional attachments and the authority are as clear as one can make them," she said.

Each household has its own tensions and rewards. Ms. Crescini, a real estate agent in San Jose, said she had forfeited two bedrooms, including one she had planned to use as a workout room, to her sons. And she misses "alone time" to write poetry and enjoy privacy with her fiancé, whom she plans to marry next month. "Try having a wild night with a house full of people," she said.

On the plus side, Ms. Crescini said, the family eats meals and watches movies together, her daughter-in-law is helping her coordinate her wedding, and her sons and brother have been busy building her a gazebo, a deck and an island grill station in the backyard.

"I go to Curves in the mornings," she said, "and I tell the ladies about my daily grind, and they say: 'You should count your blessings. Some children don't even visit for Thanksgiving' "

But "ideally," she said, "I'd like my sons to be independent."

Her oldest son, Michael Hovland, 29, has a slightly different wish. "Ideally," he said, "I'd like to buy a house right next to hers."

Mr. Hovland said he was glad that his daughter was growing up with her extended family and that he could benefit from the wisdom of "an elder who's been there and done that" in day-to-day matters.

"Family is, like, everything," he said. "If I had millions and millions of dollars, I'd buy land and have everybody live on it."

That would be a return to the custom of the 19th century, before the decline of farming and the exodus of adult children from their parents' homes to follow jobs, said Steven Ruggles, a historian who studies changes in the American family and directs the Minnesota Population Center, a research organization at the University of Minnesota.

Many social scientists, Dr. Ruggles said, also argue that Social Security contributed to the erosion of the multigenerational household, by enabling the elderly to afford living independently. He said the percentage of people over 65 living with their children dropped steadily from 1850 to 1990, when it began inching up.

Now, although multigenerational households are more common among low-income families, architects and builders are designing multimillion-dollar homes that cater to the more wealthy among this niche market, and owners of existing homes are adding 5,000 to 6,000 square feet to accommodate relatives.

In the market below $1 million, some real estate agents are seeing families with multiple wage-earners combining incomes and down payments to get the bigger house.

"When you show these homes, you have this large caravan" of up to 10 people, said Yvonne Rosas-Petty, a sales associate with Century 21 in Arcadia, Calif., a city with a large Asian population where multigenerational homes sell for $700,000 and up.

In some multigenerational households, the parent-child roles have been reversed.

Julie Kroloff, a 49-year-old head of household, moved her multigenerational family — a daughter, 8; a son, 7; and her 84-year-old mother — to a five-bedroom house in Four Corners, a new development in Dutchess County, N.Y., with planned amenities suited to more than one generation, including a general store, a pool, a gym and a meeting center.

Her mother helped take care of the children and opened up a whole new world to them, said Ms. Kroloff, who does management consulting for public works programs. Thanks to her, she said, they have watched old movies like "Arsenic and Old Lace" and learned to make popcorn the old-fashioned way, in corn oil in a pot.

But Ms. Kroloff also had to ask her mother to refrain from eating junk food in front of the children, to turn down the television when she watches past their bedtime and to give her space to spend time with her children and with friends who visit.

"You don't want her to tell stories about how constipated you were as a child," she said.

Since late last year, when her mother was found to have Alzheimer's disease, a home care attendant has taken care of grandmother and grandchildren alike.

Many of the arrangements are by nature temporary. Children grow up, grandparents die. In Seattle, Ms. Bristow said she and her daughter expected that they would probably part ways by the time her granddaughter begins school.

But, then again, they may end up back together.

"If I'm ill or unable to take care of myself," Ms. Bristow said, "she might invite me to move in with her."

    Families Add 3rd Generation to Households, NYT, 25.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/us/25multi.html

Families With Full Plates,

Sitting Down to Dinner

April 5, 2006
The New York Times
By LISA W. FODERARO

For Cathy and Bill Powell, finding a time when all three of their children are home for dinner can be like working a Rubik's Cube. A recent Monday was typical: Valerie, 9, got home from dance class at 6:35. Brian, 10, had to leave for Boy Scouts at 6:50. That left 15 minutes to sit down for tacos.

"I actually have to take all their schedules and make calendars and put things in different colors," said Mrs. Powell, of Wantagh, N.Y.

Still, she said, the effort is worth it. "It's crazy, but having dinner together reinforces the family unit," she said. "That's when we get to hear about their day. We ask them questions, and the other two can't butt in."

After decades of decline in the simple ritual of family dinners, there is evidence that many families are making the effort to gather at the dinner table. A random nationwide survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found a recent rise in the number of children ages 12 to 17 who said they ate dinner with their families at least five times a week, to 58 percent last year from 47 percent in 1998.

Getting everyone around the table can be a huge juggling exercise for overworked parents and overscheduled children. But many parents are marshaling their best organizational skills to arrange dinners at least once a week.

"There's definitely an awareness that was not there a few years ago," said Miriam Weinstein, author of "The Surprising Power of Family Meals: How Eating Together Makes Us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier and Happier" (Steer Forth Press, 2005). "All the factors that have been working against family dinners are still in full force, but it's very much a subject on people's minds."

Richard D. Mulieri, a spokesman for the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, agreed.

"People are really starting to understand that this is an important thing," he said. "Families that do have dinner together often are families whose parents are fully engaged with their kids. We're certainly not back to 'Leave It to Beaver' and 'Father Knows Best,' but it's heading in that direction."

The benefits of family dinners have been heralded for years by social scientists. A number of studies show that children who eat dinner with their families regularly are less likely to get involved with drugs and alcohol than those who do not. They also tend to get better grades, exhibit less stress and eat better.

The study by the Columbia center showed that compared with teenagers who have five or more family dinners a week, those who have two or less are three times as likely to try marijuana, two and half times as likely to smoke cigarettes and one and half times as likely to try alcohol.

Virtually every state in the nation has endorsed the center's initiative to encourage families to eat dinner together on the fourth Monday of September. Grass-roots efforts by individual communities to do the same — selecting a night months in advance that is free of homework, school meetings and sports practices — have also gained momentum, with Ridgewood, N.J., holding its fifth annual family night last month.

In perhaps the surest sign of a gathering movement, corporations are jumping on the family-dinner bandwagon. The maker of Crisco, J. M. Smucker Company, recently sponsored a "Family Dinner Challenge," with a $10,000 prize for the best home video showing parents and children assembled at the dinner table. The cable networks Nick at Nite and TV Land have run public service announcements urging families to break bread together.

Some parents say that for everyone to eat together, something else has to give.

Jean Tatge, vice president for development at the Municipal Art Society, a planning and preservation group in Manhattan, said she never got home before 7 p.m. Add to that her family's divergent tastes in food. Her husband, Phil Collis, senior art director at Harper Collins Publishers, is a vegetarian. She and her sons, Aidan, 12, and Jack, 13, are not.

"We try to have dinner together every night, and sometimes that means not eating until 9 o'clock," said Ms. Tatge, who lives on the Upper East Side. "But I think it's really important. We always have candlelight. It sets the mood and calms everyone down."

Like other parents, Ms. Tatge said she had fond childhood memories of family dinners. "I came from a family of seven, and we had dinner together every night on the dot of 7:30," she said. "This is really the only time that I can catch up with my kids on what happened at school that day."

Other parents say that depending on the season, nightly dinners can be almost impossible to pull off. Fall is the worst time for Gary and Pam Garstkiewicz of Haddonfield, N.J., who have two boys, 4 and 7. That is when the older boy, Jason, plays football, with practices three evenings a week, from 6 to 7:30. Mr. Garstkiewicz coaches. "Pam and I aren't always ready to eat dinner at 5," he explained.

Still, the family manages to eat together at least five nights a week most of the year.

But it may be the last time that the Garstkiewiczes can manage to dine together as often as they do. As children grow older, after-school activities not only proliferate but may also run later.

When planning dinner, Dana Levenberg, a Westchester County homemaker active in her community, notably as president of the Ossining Council of P.T.A.'s, has long had to grapple with her schedule of night meetings. (Her husband, Stephen Hersh, has a more predictable routine for work, so his schedule is less of an issue.)

But now her sons' evenings are starting to fill up. On Monday and Wednesday, the boys, Eli, 8, and Caleb, 10, have classes in tae kwon do from 5:45 to 7:30. On Thursday, Caleb has a piano lesson from 6 to 6:45. She, too, has pushed the dinner hour back. "We've ended up eating later and later," she said. "Sometimes my kids eat dinner and then go to bed."

For a long time, fewer families shared meals. Thomas H. Sander, executive director of the Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America, a research project of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has tracked an internal marketing study conducted by DDB Worldwide, an advertising agency. He found that the number of married respondents who "definitely" agreed that "our whole family usually eats dinner together" has fallen markedly in the past 30 years.

But the decline may have bottomed out or even begun to turn around, as suggested by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse survey. The low point for family dinners in the DDB study occurred in 2003, and the percentage of respondents who said they "definitely" agreed has since risen slightly.

Marcia Marra, a parent in Ridgewood, N.J., has tried to do her part to promote the trend, helping to start the annual family night there in 2002. She worked with school officials and community leaders to suspend baseball practices, book clubs and Girl Scout meetings to allow a night of downtime and dinner together. The effort has since spread to a half-dozen other communities in Bergen County.

After the first night in 2002, and a deluge of news media attention, Ms. Marra received inquiries from towns across the country. She created a Web site, readysetrelax.org, and, with a grant from Hasbro, put together free information kits. She has sent out 350 kits to communities from Kentucky to Oregon.

Many families, of course, have scheduling conflicts that are insurmountable. But some have learned to adapt. In Maplewood, N.J., Marianne Pappalardo's two sons, Christopher, 14, and Nicholas, 16, are ravenous by 6 p.m. But her husband, Salvatore, with whom she also has two grown children who live on their own, gets home from work between 8 and 9.

So Mrs. Pappalardo, a substitute teacher whose great passion is cooking, prepares an elaborate dinner for herself and her sons. (Veal Bolognese and mustard-and-herb chicken were recent offerings.) When Mr. Pappalardo sits down to dinner — around 8:45 — their sons interrupt their homework and visit with him while he eats.

"The boys are usually looking for a break anyway," Mrs. Pappalardo said. "They adore their father and it's the only time during the week that they get to talk to him. The meal is such an important part of our lives."

    Families With Full Plates, Sitting Down to Dinner, NYT, 5.4.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/nyregion/05dinner.html