This is less a psy-op thing than it is a product of Western society’s history - and I don’t mean it as in “capitalism is bad and everything I don’t like is caused by it”, but literally living in such individualist society makes people live or want to live in smaller groups as much as they can afford it. And it dates before capitalist rise, in my opinion.
However… I don’t think living in smaller groups, like living alone or with a +1, is inherently a bad thing. As people said here, there may be multiple reasons one would like to departure from their parents’ house, a lot of them are genuine and to have this option is a good thing. What I see as a bad thing is that each house is meant to be a world by its own and in some places and contexts we don’t have any community bond. This phenomenon contributes to anomie in Durkheim’s sense, in my opinion.
One reason why I want to have a house to myself: organization. I live with a hoarder and a slob, which means the kitchen counters get filled with random stuff, and the floor has tripping hazards. Plus the generally unsightly nature of just having stuff jumbled about. While I am not a clean freak by any means (DUST!), I would like to properly shelf things or to walk around without surprises.
There are some things you can’t really fight, one of them being wealthier relatives who own the shelter you reside in. So long as I am stuck in my current residence, I cannot have peace of mind beyond my room.
Your mileage may vary depending on your parents.
It is still normal in many parts of the world.
So many reasons for parents to give a big push when the children are 18.
So many reasons children want to get out at 18.
Yeah, well, no harm in waiting a few years more
I’ve left my parents’ house at 17 and now when I look back I believe this was the best year in my whole life. Why wait?
Yeah, no psyop conspiracy needed.
Plus isn’t the normal first living experience after leaving home with a bunch of roommates? It’s not 1:1
entertainment and stress relief to cope with being alone
Congratulations sailor, you made it to Friday
jokes on them, our generation can’t afford to live alone anymore
Here’s the thing.
It shouldn’t be stigmatized, and it shouldn’t be something that’s any of anyone else’s business beyond being an interesting fact about a person. Just one more nugget to find.
There’s no single right answer for everyone.
Families are fucking complicated. Some of them, you could happily live together your entire life. Others, you might need a giant house and you’d still have friction. Some, you don’t even want to be in the same state, much less share a house.
It is, however, true that as the number of people in a group increases, the work required to maintain healthy relationships increases exponentially.
If there is not parity between those relationships, it multiplies the effect. Which means that everyone involved has to be willing to adapt and change over time for things to stay hair and healthy. When that isn’t the case, the household is going to split in some way or another, and that usually means someone leaving is essentially necessary.
Think about it. Two people that love each other have work to do to maintain their relationship, be it romantic, friendship, parent/child, siblings, whatever. You add a third person to that, and instead of one relationship you have 4, not three. Because each individual relationship exists, and now the three way one does.
Now, think about two people starting a family. Say they only have one kid. The kid becomes an adult, with adult needs, responsibilities, wants, and habits. If the parents keep treating them like a child, dissonance will occur in most situations.
Now, have that child get married too. You’ve now got 4 individual relationships to maintain, the original triplet, the new triplet with the spouse and parents, plus a triplet with each parent, the child, and the child’s spouse, then the quartet.
That’s a shit ton of work. You’ve got all those people having to compromise, adjust their habits and remember boundaries. That’s not something where everyone is going to major the optimum decision every single time. It’s impossible almost, though if everyone puts in the effort roughly equally, it can be maintained for a lifetime.
Now, the second couple have a kid. Map out those connections and the level of difficulty spikes hard.
But, as hard as it is, if you find someone that’s living in shared space, people still assume there’s something wrong with the younger adults involved. And there may be, but it isn’t a certainty the way people assume it will be.
There’s benefits and drawbacks to every option when it comes to how a family lives, be it centralized, spread out, or fully disconnected.
Now, I’ve done all of that. At various points, I’ve lived with my sibling and parents as an adult; we’ve all lived apart as individuals, we’ve lived as duos (though not in every combination), and I’ve had two partners that lived with me during all of that, and a best friend that was there through damn near all of it, and his husband for a while, plus my kid in the mix.
At various points, different people owned the house, even though it’s been the same house that I grew up in for most of that. It was originally my dad as owner, with my mom having her share of that as a spouse. Then they divorced, and my dad got the house and my mom got a big check. She still lived here, but that’s a separate thing. Then my dad fucked up, and me and my best friend bought it. Now, I’m the only one on the mortgage.
The dynamics of that meant that the “power” shifted as ownership did because at the end of the day, whoever is on the mortgage/deed has final legal responsibility, financial responsibility, and that means having final say on some matters, no matter how democratic everything else is. That creates an extra dynamic on top of all the others.
I can tell you for sure that it takes work, hard emotional work, to navigate every iteration of that. When that work isn’t being done by everyone, shit can get bad fast.
But it’s also amazing. The amount of good in it is mind boggling if you take each family unit being apart as the goal that is the only measure of success. When everyone is clicking along, and there’s equity between everyone, gods it’s beautiful.
Just on a practical level, everyone with income had more left over than they otherwise would have, and none of us have ever had to face the bad times alone. We’ve had each others back more times than I can even count (I tried, and I kept remembering more until I gave up, and I was creeping on triple digits where the level of support was part of at least one of us making it through).
And on the emotional level? It can be chaotic, yeah, but if you don’t know the goodness of being able to just hug your dad any time you want to because he’s just in the other room, I’m sorry. Right now, I can go hug my dad, and don’t have to leave the house. He’ll laugh, and ask what’s up. I’ll say “nothing, I just love you”, and then we’ll get teary eyed and he’ll say it back, and then we go about our days.
It isn’t for everyone. But gods damn, it sure as hell isn’t a bad thing to try either
Wow, what a write-up, this is lovely.
I’ve also been in a lot of the situations you’re describing and ultimately became the person providing shelter and stability for others, too (of course it’s far more complex than such a simple statement, as you know).
We’ve never made those arrangements permanent, it’s always been phases of some years where people who’ve needed it most have come and then gone when they’re ready. To be clear we’ve never kicked anyone out, nor (many years earlier) have I been kicked out, nothing like that. I just suspect the genetics in my family make it very difficult for us to be told how to live by another for long, no matter how reasonably or gently, lol.
For instance my pops having to ultimately be subject to my rules (I just mean in the ways you described) was eventually too much for him and he made the necessary steps to move on, and the relationship stayed healthy.
Like you said there’s lots of different ways to do things and the most important part is that everyone’s dignity is preserved, and everyone involved is prioritizing each other person as best they can in addition to their own needs, which is hard to do.
I’d be open, perhaps, to a more unconventional long-term arrangement with several of the family members in my life (including chosen family), especially as the world gets harder and harder, but I’m also content to be a temporary place of calm and respite for folks as I can.
And like you said, the mutual give and take that’s involved is everything. With the right people, anyway - I have to acknowledge there’s a broad swathe of folks I’d never want to live closely with and who I expect would be largely uninterested in compromising and prioritizing the well-being of others. Quite unfortunate for folks who grow up surrounded by too much of that.
That resonates a lot for me :)
Yeah I’m not living with my mom thanks
What if you were neighbors? My family has talked about how cool it would be if we had like a family cul-de-sac
My mother in law lives next door and we love it because we don’t have to worry about her but still have some distance
Yeah I wouldn’t mind that. My in-laws have a duplex but our aunt lives next door. If it wasn’t her, it would be us.
That can work for some people, not for me though. I want some distance.
My parents live about a half hour away, and that’s a good distance: close enough that we can visit frequently, but far enough that we can claim we don’t have time. It works for us.
Hell no. I moved halfway across the country to get away from them, and it’s still too close.
I like the idea of doing a commune, preferably with better urban planning than a cul-de-sac
Generational conflict is the other major factor. If the generation above me weren’t so difficult to be around it wouldn’t be so hard to imagine.
True. You generally aren’t treated with respect when you live under their roof so you gotta get out
I have the idea that parents are difficult to be around (especially towards their own children) to push their children “out of the nest”. I.e. it is not a natural “defect” that parents stop being acceptable people once their kids turn into puberty, but rather a feature of nature that is supposed to push teenagers out into the world to explore.
In other words, it’s a behavior that is meditated by signals: The parent gets the signal “my child is old enough to explore the world by themselves now -> push them out of the house”. That would imply that the signals can be identified and eliminated or reprogrammed to make parents more acceptable for their kids. Just a thought.
My guess is that if it were naturally preferable to keep kids in the house (for example because it’s too dangerous to go away from the house), then maybe parents would adopt to not push their children out of their house anymore.
I don’t know about that. I think in a lot of cases, it’s also down to our parents not getting any help for their mental health and not knowing how to deal with stuff they’re going through also making being around them a genuinely uncomfortable thing to do, even without anything like that going on.
That and a lot of people wind up having kids when they’re in no position to actually care for them and raise them properly, which aggravates the above, as well as providing material incentives to kick them out earlier.
These days it’s that they’re intolerable to.be around yet won’t let you explore the world on your own either.
Maybe the kids also want their privacy? If you don’t own n old house with thick brick walls between the rooms, you are basically unable to casually have sex without all adjacent rooms hearing you.
Guess what else used to be normal in societies where large families lived in one building.
Walking around your own house naked?
Love hotels?
Sharing is caring.
Not the kind of sex I want to have ;)
Like living alone makes you magically attractive to others.
Hourly motel rooms?
This post has been brought to you by Motel 6.
And Japan’s love hotel industry.
The real reason your parents want you out is so they can fuck everywhere in peace and bring the kink back into their life. Kids are the ultimate mood spoilers.
*meant in jest, you’re all lovely*
Other way around too. One major reason why the current cohort of 18-25 year olds aren’t getting any is because no one wants to bring someone back to their parents’ place.
When I was that age we fucked anywhere, no need to go home for that… Unless the old folks were away for the weekend of course
That’ll get you on the sex offender registry these days
I don’t live in Americanistan
USA needs love hotels like elsewhere (Asia, LatAm)
I would want the entire room sterilized before I check in.
And so would the people who use it after me.
Moving out was the best thing that happened to me, had zero privacy at home
Normal =/= desirable. Maybe some of you don’t mind spending your life in a miniature royal court with your parents as monarchs, but I couldn’t wait to get away from it.
10 extra… How many fucking kids did you have, and then you’d want them to all stay after they are 18???
I believe they were going for 10 extended family members. e.g. 4 grandparents, 2 “adults”, 4 kids. Kinda like this:
We’re going to start fetishizing “living together” now because the rent is too damn high.
Multi generational households are known for their lack of privacy and personal agency. You could not pay me to move back in with my parents. I don’t even stay with them over the holidays because it’s that bad. The banks did not have to brainwash me on this one.
