Sometimes I think we all watched too many episodes of “The
Waltons.” Remember? At bedtime, the lights blink out, one by one, in the old farmhouse. Goodnight, John-Boy. Goodnight, Jim-Bob. Goodnight to Mama and Daddy and, of special relevance to readers here, goodnight to Grandma and Grandpa.
Back then, the multigenerational family was the norm, we sigh. Grandpa taught the grandkids to fish; Grandma made pies and sewed curtains; everyone magically got along. Now, we often hear how we’re all too busy, too geographically dispersed, too careerist, too selfish, too something to move an elderly parent into our households. We berate ourselves for it.
That our elders’ living arrangements have changed drastically is simply a fact. In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, almost 70 percent of elderly widows lived with an adult child; by 1990, that proportion had plummeted to 20 percent, according to the Census Bureau.
What’s intriguing to me is the reason. Economists Robert F. Schoeni of the University of Michigan and Kathleen
McGarry, now at Dartmouth College, investigated this phenomenon, using more than a century of Census data showing where elderly widows resided. (The researchers studied widows because they were more numerous and more economically vulnerable than widowers.)
Mr. Schoeni and Ms. McGarry pinpointed the year the big change began: 1940. After that, the graph depicting the percentage of widows living with children resembles a ski slope: down, down and down some more, until by 1990 more than 60 percent of widows lived alone.
So what happened in 1940, decades before the large-scale influx of women into the workplace, to upend the multigenerational tradition? Did we stop loving or feeling responsible for our mothers? Did “family values” take a U-turn? The economists, testing various hypotheses, found a far simpler explanation.
In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. In 1940, the monthly checks began to flow. And even those tiny checks — Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vt., got the first one, for $22.54 — were enough to allow widows, who had historically high poverty rates, to remain in their homes. As Social Security benefits rose and reached a larger proportion of the elderly, the trend toward remaining at home accelerated.
The single greatest factor driving this immense cultural shift, in other words, was economic. Once elders no longer had to move in with their children to survive, most opted not to.
“When they have more income and they have a choice of how to live, they choose to live alone,” Ms. McGarry said. “They buy their independence.”
So let’s let ourselves off the hook for this one, shall we? We have enough other sources of
elderguilt. Co-residence, as gerontologists call it, can work beautifully for some families, and it remains a common arrangement in certain ethnic communities (Latinos and Asians, for instance). But most elders started rejecting that option almost 70 years ago.
Economics still plays a central role in decisions about where to live. Another team of researchers at
M.I.T. and Syracuse University looked at more recent data from the nationally representative Current Population Survey and found that even modest shifts in Social Security benefits can have major repercussions on decisions about where to live.
Every $1,000 in annual benefits allows more widows and divorcees to live alone, the researchers found. Conversely, according to their analysis, “a 10 percent cut in Social Security benefits would lead more than 600,000 elderly households to move into shared living arrangements” — something to ponder when President Obama talks about tackling entitlements.
In fact, Census Bureau demographers looking at current multigenerational (meaning, three generations or more) households, which they estimated at less than 4 percent of the nation’s total, have noticed that such arrangements are most common in states with high housing costs (like California) and high rates of unmarried births (like Mississippi).
And consider this: The great majority of these multigenerational families don’t consist of householders opening their doors to elderly parents or in-laws. The folks moving in, the Census Bureau points out, are their children and grandchildren.
So when we nervously eye our spare rooms, wondering if we have the stamina and resilience to take in a family member, we may be making a fundamental miscalculation. Most of our parents would rather not share our homes, if they can possibly avoid it.
My own 86-year-old father, still managing quite well in his own apartment, has repeatedly made it clear that he’d rather drink Drano. My kid, on the other hand….
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