Posted on 04/21/2014 2:30:54 PM PDT by thackney
The number of Californians 50 to 64 who live in their parents' homes has surged in recent years, reflecting the grim economic aftermath of the Great Recession.
Debbie Rohr lives with her husband and twin teenage sons in a well-tended three-bedroom home in Salinas. The ranch-style house has a spacious kitchen that looks out on a yard filled with rosebushes. It's a modest but comfortable house, the type that Rohr, 52, pictured for herself at this stage of life. She just never imagined that it would be her childhood home, a return to a bedroom where she once hung posters of Olivia Newton-John and curled up with her beloved Mrs. Beasley doll. Driven by economic necessity — Rohr has been chronically unemployed and her husband lost his job last year — she moved her family back home with her 77-year-old mother. At a time when the still sluggish economy has sent a flood of jobless young adults back home, older people are quietly moving in with their parents at twice the rate of their younger counterparts. For seven years through 2012, the number of Californians aged 50 to 64 who live in their parents' homes swelled 67.6% to about 194,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. The jump is almost exclusively the result of financial hardship caused by the recession rather than for other reasons, such as the need to care for aging parents, said Steven P. Wallace, a UCLA professor of public health who crunched the data. "The numbers are pretty amazing," Wallace said. "It's an age group that you normally think of as pretty financially stable. They're mid-career. They may be thinking ahead toward retirement. They've got a nest egg going. And then all of a sudden...
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Exactly. 3 generations isn’t a bad thing. Raising the kids and taking care of the old folks. In fact it was the model not so long ago.
True my Great Uncle lived with my Great Grandparents he was a bachelor. I love looking at the pics I Have of them all together in a flat on the lower east side of Manhattan.
“we would have seen some potshots at W and his policies.”
Some?? EVERYDAY these MSM f*cks were hurling grenades at him 24/7 for 8 years.
I will not help them in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack.
But you have no problem spending lots of time on a CA based website...
BTW, since you declined to post wher it is you live, then asked anyone looking to guess, I'd guess New Jersey. Maybe Guam.
BTW, CA has probably sent more aid/equipment to other states in times of disasters, than any other.
The economies of shared living. Often these things can make sense.
Yes,that's often true.It's easy to imagine it being the reason why some parents move in with their kids as they get up in years.It wasn't the case with my Dad,though.He was financially comfortable...he was failing medically and needed "assisted" living.
Absolutely. I lived it myself.
When I was 15 my grandma came to live with my family and we did so until I graduated from college and moved away.
It wasn't always easy but it was well worth it.
I think it’s great how you live, giving mom a bit of independence while seeing to her needs. Love it.
One point I really need to make on something you said. Please don’t EVER say to ANYONE “I’d never put my parent into a home.” Even if it is true. The reason I say that is because alzheimers takes away a person’s personality or self control or many other functioning ways. I’m on an alzheimers caregiver list, and because of that line, that every loving child thinks about his own parents, good people are being beaten down literally and figuratively, keeping their spouses or parents home at all costs.
There comes a time when they just can’t do the heavy work any more. I won’t go into all the terrible experiences, that can go on 24/7, that a caregiver can suffer when their loved one is deep down the alzheimers path. You can imagine, and some of the experiences are far worse than you can imagine. But it’s time we ALL started caring for the caregivers in our neighborhoods. Trust me, they are struggling. Some actually die before their affected partners because it’s too much for them.
Luckily my parents could afford full time at home round the clock care. Not everyone can. Sometimes people physically simply can’t do it any more. I’m just saying, because I’m getting to know that world. Sometimes there is no other way than a home for the memory impaired. It helps to have neutral people help.
It happened a lot during the Great Depression when many in the urban areas lost it all - savings, homes, cars, jobs, etc. and were put out on the street. Many returned to the family farms of their parents or moved in with siblings until they could start over. People with strong families ties survived.
Having talked with survivors of that era, it was a terrible time. People lived “without” and “made do” with the most basic necessities of life until after the end of WWII.
There was no welfare safety net like we have today to fall back on. They learned to struggle with no job, no money, no food, no clothing, no shelter, or shortages of whatever until times got better. This period resulted in a lot of the government welfare programs we see today.
This is what is scary about today’s government welfare safety net. People expect it to always be there and sufficient to meet their survival needs. They are being lulled into a false sense of security. Each day more and more people are being added to the welfare rolls.
Our government should be encouraging people to get off the welfare rolls through tax breaks and other incentives. Instead, they are going in the other direction.
Potentially these programs could be overwhelmed in another economic crisis or nationwide disaster and might fail completely. And where would these people go and what would they do if they had to survive another Great Depression?
Do they have strong family ties or other ways to survive? I doubt if family ties would be of much use since entire generations of families are now dependent on government welfare. Depending on the government could be fatal.
Older children moving back into their elderly parents home is definitely a sign the economy is failing. But is it an early warning that government welfare programs are not achieving their intended purpose and are starting to fail?
I totally understand. We DO have Alzheimer’s in our family. My aunt on my Dad’s side. My step mom also went through it with her mother, and it’s NOT pretty. My Mom’s hairdresser also has a client, whom we met last time we were there, that is in her late eighties and has declined significantly over the last few years. You could see the strain on her husbands face. Said she had been a devout Catholic all her life, and you would never hear a swear word cross her lips, but lately she’d let out with a string of cuss words aimed at her husband, vicious, mean things that would normally never occur. My step mom said her mother got the same way, and in her more lucid moments would apologize. It’s something that cant be controlled. If it ever comes to that, I will look for help. I have 4 older brothers that will need to kick in for that cost if it happens. So far it has not, and Mom’s doctor told us a couple months ago she has no signs of it. Still sharp as a tack (you should see her answer the questions on Jeapordy!). I’m glad that so far she’s independent, and I’ll do what I can to keep her out of a home, and in the little home she loves so much. But, you are right, sometimes life happens, and you CANT do it all. God Bless You and the work you do. I’m sure it can’t be easy.
How many modern multigenerational households have even as many people in them as a nuclear family Catholic home of two generations ago?
That’s true, that these multigenerational houses usually have less people than the homes of a few generations ago. I’m talking about situations where the homes were designed to only have one family with at the most three children.
Fair enough—I’d be steamed too if my homeowner’s insurance went up because an overloaded neighbor’s house overloaded their circuits.
“6,7 or 8 people crammed into modern houses on 9,000 sq ft lots? Sounds like the barrio. “
A barrio?
I raised my 5 kids in a house on a 7500 square foot lot.
It sold last year for $900,000.00. (I had sold it 11 years ago)
Lot size is meaningless,location is everything.
.
You can buy and sell 50 sq meter apartments for a million bucks, doesn't mean I wanna live in one when all my neighbors have the full extended family living with them.
You apparently consider 9000 square feet a small area.
It’s probably a regional thing because that is a good sized lot where I live,and we all raised large families on smaller lots.
We had 5 kids and were considered a fairly small family in those days.
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