Family embrace: the rise of multi-generational living in Australia

It is not true, as Tolstoy declared, that all happy families are alike. Some happy families, for example, know the only way to stay happy is not to live together any longer than strictly necessary. For them, the extended-family holiday that ran a little too long, the clan barbecue that ended in a clash, the unsolicited advice about where they’re going wrong on raising children, all stand as sobering reminders of why, when it comes to relatives, distance lends enchantment to the view.

Happy home: children Manning and Audrey with mother Zoe Flanagan-Field, Zoe’s parents, Robin and Warwick Mosman, and father Craig Field, outside the home they share in the Blue Mountains.Credit: Jennifer Soo

Then there are the happy families who actually like the idea of several generations living in the same household, day after day. Sometimes for decades.

The horror, you might say. Or the joy. Family life has a way of being both feverishly complicated and blood simple, lurching between Modern Family and Electra, contingent on stage of life or time of day or whether you don’t mind being told how to stack the dishwasher. Only some people want to extend the lease.

I haven’t had parents for such a long time I can only imagine what it would have been like to go through my own young adulthood, two marriages, child-rearing years, career crossroads, with Mum and Dad in the next room or out the back, ever present. And how would those husbands have felt? (I can picture my practical father eyeing off their bungling attempts at DIY; my mother with a raised eyebrow as she overhears a marital row or a child sobbing.)

It would have been a blessing in many ways, although I’m pretty sure I would have wanted them to be my parents when it suited me, and not be my parents when it didn’t. Doting grandparents at one’s disposal, but not meddling ones. How would we have negotiated all that?

I tell a friend in his 60s that I’m writing about what appears to be a renewed trend for several generations to live together. What a great thing, he says. The family compound. Communal living. There should be more of it! He goes on for a bit about the “sterile existence of the nuclear family”. Children encouraged to leave as soon as they can, parents rattling around empty houses, doomed to loiter in a post-child twilight, elders cruelly put out on the ice. How did we come to that, he laments. So he’d like to be living with his kids and grandkids then? “Actually, no. I just like the idea.”

I realise we’re having a very Anglo-centric conversation. In southern Europe, many parts of Asia and the Middle East, it’s perfectly normal for extended families to live together, as it once was here. They take the rough with the smooth, even if it’s in tiny apartments with only one bathroom. Many families with those cultural roots keep up the practice here – and maybe that’s reminded nuclear families what they’re missing out on. Add in housing affordability, dual careers, childcare, the frightening quality of a lot of aged care, and it’s starting to seem like a fine idea, even if it does come with a few inconveniences.

While more people than ever, especially the elderly, are living alone – about 25 per cent of households on latest figures – it’s also true that about 20 per cent of people who live in Australia live in a “multi-generational household” (when defined as more than one generation of related adults), according to research by Edgar Liu, senior research fellow at the University of NSW’s faculty of Built Environment’s City Futures Research Centre.

And more than 40 per cent of children in their early 20s – and almost 20 per cent in their late 20s – are still living at home, according to a recent Australian Institute of Family Studies report, including the so-called “boomerang children” who leave and return home because they can’t afford to live elsewhere or because of some “life shock”, like divorce.

The best thing about living with extended family? “There’s always someone there.” The worst thing? “There’s always someone there.”

“There are great advantages to living together,” says Elisabeth Shaw, a psychologist and CEO of Relationships Australia NSW. “We’ve just got to be aware that many of us who are very entrenched in a Western society don’t have a framework for understanding and accepting it.

“So if you spoke to your friends and said, ‘Mum’s annoying me today,’ they might say, ‘Well, of course, why did you let her move in?’ Whereas if you were in China, friends would be sympathetic and give you tips and normalise it. So we don’t always have the social supports. It can be seen as quite a negative thing to do, which means you can feel a bit out on a limb.”

But even for those raised in more communal cultures, privacy is the biggest loss. Researcher Edgar Liu tells the story of the interview subject who, asked what he liked most about living with extended family, said, “There’s always someone there.” The worst thing? “There’s always someone there.”

There’s often a “sweet spot” in life when a shared arrangement best suits everyone’s needs, says Shaw. “For example, while you might be really pleased to have your parents live there when you’ve got littlies, by the time your children are teenagers, maybe everybody doesn’t want the grandparents’ input. Or you’re now dealing with both elderly parents and teenagers acting up, and you can feel squeezed. So what went very well at one life stage can start to become more difficult.”

Some families choose to be together, even building housing for the purpose; others are thrown together. “Living together can be tricky if the reasons are tinged with something else,” Shaw says. “For example, if something has gone wrong financially and they’re forced into it, or there’s no one else to care for mum or dad and someone ends up feeling lumped with it.”

Whatever the reasons, it certainly changes the relationships. Often for the better, although there’s also plenty of opportunity for “triangulation” – where two generations, or two parties, play each other off or gang up. And it’s not unusual for some hapless family member to end up playing a role between UN peacemaker and whipping boy, just like in a nuclear family, only worse.

Psychologist Anne Hollonds says attitudes to multi-generational living are changing. “In the days when I left home, you never dreamt of going back. It’s different now."Credit: Peter Rae

“Within the household, there tends to be one person who’s related to everybody,” Liu explains. “With three generations, it could be the mother who is related to the grandparents and the children, and the husband has married into the family. So the mother might be the person who cops all of the criticism and all the whingeing.

“In the case of boomerang children, it also changes the parent-child relationship. Some parents said to us, ‘I now need to see my child as an adult and not as my child.’ So it shifts to something more like friendship and that can be quite tricky to navigate because at the end of the day, you are still their parent.”

Less obvious, perhaps, is the way this kind of shared arrangement can change the landscape outside the household. “Particularly if there are siblings involved,” says Liu. “A lot of people we interviewed said things like, ‘Yeah, my mother lives with me but my brother now expects me to take care of everything. Pay for all her needs, all her food, look after all her emotional support.’ There’s often this idea, ‘Oh, Mum lives with you, so it’s great that you get free childcare all the time and I don’t need to do anything.’ ”

Then there are questions of inheritance. If a parent buys a house with one child with a view to shared living, what happens when the parent dies? How does the other sibling, for example, get their half? Do they even get a half? I heard of one case where an elderly parent paid for changes to her son’s house so she could be accommodated, then changed her mind about moving in and wanted to get her money out. Some families dot every i and cross every t; others leave it to goodwill.

Anne Hollonds, a psychologist and Australian Institute of Family Studies director, is encouraged to see more families trying shared living.

“There are tremendous benefits on the whole, for all three generations,” she says. “Of course, there are some families where it would never be a possibility because of the level of conflict and disagreement and perhaps past resentments.”

Even close families need to develop a certain saintly tolerance. “It’s not a parent-child relationship in the same way it was. It’s adults sharing a house, allowing for privacy, showing respect, and being able to compromise.”

“If you can work out how to live in the same household as adults, under the same roof it bodes well for the future.”

Anne Hollonds, psychologist

Hollonds feels attitudes are changing. “In the days when I left home, you never dreamt of going back. It’s different now and the stigma about it is going.”

The boomerang-child phenomenon, she argues, is actually working as a useful social training ground. “If you can work out how to live in the same household as adults, under the same roof – and it’s not easy for anybody, really – it bodes well for the future in terms of mutual support up and down the generations.”

In an ideal world, advises Elisabeth Shaw, people would spend time conjuring up worst-case scenarios before they went into any shared arrangement. “No one’s in the firing line at that point,” she says. “So let your imagination run wild about all the things that could happen ... Do we formally ask you to babysit or just assume that if you’re home, you’re it? What if we need breathing space? Is there a sunset clause?”

For all of that, it says something about love and kinship that, even if the decision to live together is prompted by financial considerations, the main benefit people list has nothing to do with money. According to Liu’s research, it’s a much more precious commodity: companionship and support.

Sharing is caring

I know I’m at the right house because it’s the only one with a huge banner on the fence that reads Grandparents for Climate Action Now. The right house, a big weatherboard in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, with a 79-year-old activist somewhere inside, but not the right door. Three doors run down the side entrance and there’s nothing to tell them apart.

At the first, a man in his 40s answers with the polite but harried air of someone who was in the middle of something. This must be Craig, the son-in-law, a musician and music producer, and this must be his sound-proofed studio, and this must happen to him a lot. He not only works from home; he also lives in a family compound.

Robin Mosman, at left, in her apartment’s kitchen. The door into the kitchen of daughter Zoe’s family is the junction between the two homes.Credit: Jennifer Soo

Craig Field lives here with his wife, Zoe Flanagan-Field, their three children, aged 8, 10 and 14, and Zoe’s parents, Robin and Warwick Mosman. Robin, 79, is the activist. Warwick, 83, is a retired builder. Theirs is a success story in shared living, given the “two” families have been here for 10 years.

The younger generations occupy the much bigger, rambling part, and Warwick and Robin are settled in a spacious, purpose-built apartment joined onto the back: a tasteful model of late-life serenity with its own kitchen, laundry, living area, bedroom and study. It became clear early on that everyone needed their own space.

Zoe and Craig bought the house in a 50-50 split with her parents and Warwick set about extensively renovating it to suit. “It’s very good,” Warwick says. “Each part of the house is self-contained, so we can go weeks without saying a word to them if we choose. “

”Not that we do,” Robin adds.

A shared door between the kitchens is the entry into each half. The door is never locked and when the kids were younger, Robin says, they were always popping in. I’d had the impression from an earlier conversation that the adults would text first, or at least knock, but apparently it’s more a matter of sticking a head through the door and seeing if anyone is there. It’s an informal arrangement that sounds excellent if you need a cup of sugar or some company, but that could suit some of the parties more than others, depending on age and what you’re likely to be up to.

“On both sides we’re very respectful of each other’s privacy,” Robin says when I ask her about it. “We don’t go barging in. Sometimes, people walk around half-naked or that sort of thing. Also, you don’t want to go barging in on a personal conversation.”

“We did ask Mum to knock at one stage,” Zoe says later, when I meet her and Craig separately, “and she did for a while. I don’t knock but I don’t think it bothers them. It’s different for them.”

Who gets to be the “decider” of things that affect everybody? Can parents pull rank?

The generations happiest about shared living tend to be the young and the old. It’s the middle generation who, while grateful for the help, can miss their privacy more acutely, feel it’s all too much, or wonder what it means for their independence or their own happiness, aside from their children’s.

While it suits her and Craig, Zoe agrees that many friends her age can’t imagine living like this. “Their general view is, ‘Better you than me. I couldn’t live with my parents.’ It’s different for Mum. A lot of her friends envy her. They think, ‘Wow, you’ve got a great set-up.’ I don’t think any of the grandmothers think, ‘I’d never do that.’ ”

Robin and Warwick have another daughter, who lives nearby with her family. Is the joint investment in this property likely to complicate questions of inheritance? “I don’t see it being a problem,” Robin says. “It’s not spelt out but I know there’s not going to be any fight over each one’s share of this part of the house. They’re very loving of each other and have great integrity.”

I ask Zoe how it would play out if, say, she and Craig were to divorce. Is that complicated splitting of assets something they’ve thought about? “We’re not planning to get divorced,” Zoe says firmly. She’s already gone through one trauma. The first time her parents raised the idea of her moving in with them, she was 35, with a new baby, and had just lost her first husband to cancer. “Dad had suggested it then,” Zoe says, “but it didn’t feel like the right time.”

Craig met her when she was still fragile and he quickly realised how much her family meant to her. “Even when we were courting and engaged, Zoe’s whole focus was her family, her parents and her sister,“ Craig says. “When the idea of buying a house together came up, I was all for it.”

Zoe wasn’t as sold on the idea. “I didn’t want to feel like I was just moving back in with my parents. Part of what made me get over that was the fact we were going halves and we were getting our own space.

There are many things to navigate in multi-generational households – such as whether pets are allowed. Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

“I knew I loved them and could deal with any quirks they had, the location was handy and it seemed crazy to be living in separate houses, to-ing and fro-ing. I just wasn’t sure if that was enough to make me commit to it. In the end, Craig’s willingness made me up for it.”

They’re obviously a close, loving family, but, like any household, it has the occasional strained moment. Take, for example, the puppy I notice leaping out of its basket in Zoe and Craig’s section of the house. Innocent enough, but apparently the source of some debate. Who gets to be the “decider” of things that affect everybody? Can parents pull rank?

Well, they can try. Robin and Warwick had always been opposed to a dog on the property, Zoe says, yet here one is, even if Warwick is still waging a small war of resistance by declining to install a back gate. (He has, however, agreed to a system of dog-confining electric flags on the lawn. Compromise!)

Naturally, there have been other minor tugs-of-war. Zoe is still smarting over losing a long-ago battle over the exterior paint colour. “The painter agreed with my parents,” she says. “We had to accept things like that. A little thing but also a big thing, because it’s your house.”

But is it their house, when owned 50-50? “That’s where it’s very blurred,” Craig says. “Zoe has said a few times, ‘I feel like I’m living in my mother’s house’ but those kind of tensions can happen at any Christmas lunch. They’re pretty normal. It’s like a marriage. You’ve just got to make it work and it’s not all about you.”

When I come back into Robin and Warwick’s apartment, the children and a cousin are piled happily on a sofa, their devoted elders looking on as the kids watch a video. The scene is idyllic: the spread of ages, their ease with each other. The way more of us should be living?

Close encounters

There isn’t much loving parents won’t do for their children at any age. Even so, I can think of a few who might baulk at the idea of giving up their own three-bedroom house for their adult daughter and her family to live in, and moving themselves into a 20-square-metre dwelling in the backyard. This little space has to accommodate a kitchenette, small dining table, window seat, bedroom, bathroom and two people. A stylish caravan comes to mind.

You have to admire inner-city couple Emma and Jim’s* sense of sacrifice, not least because the tiny house has also replaced Jim’s shed. Yet the pair, who don’t wish to be identified, seem sanguine about this being home for the foreseeable future. Then again, they’ve only been in it for three weeks when I visit.

“I’m sure there are things we do that annoy them. I try not to be a hovering grandmother but it’s hard not to get it wrong some of the time.”

Emma*

They actually handed over the big house a few years back, when their daughter was about to give birth to her second child and her family had to move out of their rental property at short notice.

“It made more sense for them to have it,” Emma says. “They didn’t want to do it at first but we talked them into it, as a way of giving them stability for a while, to see how it went. We rented a house around the corner. They effectively paid our rent on the smaller semi.”

Building the tiny house was, as they see it, the next logical step. No rent, environmentally sustainable, closer to the family. A lot closer. In fact, only five or six metres away.

“It’s a noble experiment,” Emma says. “But we’ve also put some of the furniture into storage, so we haven’t totally burnt our bridges.” If anything, their greatest worry seems to be about imposing on their daughter and her family by living on the same block, even though they own it. A couple of times Emma talks about her fear of “being too on top of them here”.

“That’s why there’s a blind on this window that looks towards the house. We’ll only ever use the back entrance. We haven’t set any rules. If our door is open and the grandkids want to come in, they can, but we don’t go in there unless we send a text or have some arrangement.”

If it doesn’t work out, she says, they’ll sell the lot, get themselves something else tiny and give the kids the money.

They have another daughter. “She’s very happy with this arrangement,” Emma says. “She knows we haven’t given the house to her sister. That’s been made very clear.”

Still, inheritance aside, I can’t help thinking that the size of their quarters puts quite a lot of pressure on the older couple’s own relationship. “It’s been all right so far,” Emma says, glancing at Jim, a retiring man who is happy to let his wife do the talking. “We still like each other.”

Both of them like being so near to the grandchildren, being able to help with breakfasts, school runs, etc. But for the middle generation? “I’m sure there are things we do that annoy them ... I try not to be a hovering grandmother but it’s hard not to get it wrong some of the time.”

In the end, this arrangement was more about love than practicalities. “We’ve never been good thinking about things in a financial way, or we’ve chosen not to. This is an investment in the fabric of our family.”
* Not their real names.

Space: the final frontier

Talk to anyone about the key to successful shared housing and the answer is one word: space. California-born Leah Salo, 47, and her Australian husband Tim, 43, took that to heart. When they couldn’t find a suitable house to buy, they built one, on the Gold Coast.

An enormous one, even for six people. The floor space is 550 square metres, with a separate self-contained wing downstairs for her parents, shared family spaces on that floor, and an entire upper floor – essentially, a self-contained four-bedroom house in itself – for Leah, her husband and their two daughters, now 10 and 11.

Leah Salo (second from right) with husband Tim, her parents Mark and Dixie, and kids Annalia (at left) and Savanna at their Gold Coast home, which incorporates shared and separate family spaces. Credit: Paul Harris

Her parents moved out here from the US about 10 years ago, in their 60s.

“We actually bought some land for them on our street before they emigrated,” Leah says. “We built them a custom-made house four houses away, so that way we couldn’t see each other but we were close by. But it meant we each had a five-bedroom, triple-bathroom house. We were thinking, ‘This is crazy: between us we’ve got 10 bedrooms, four refrigerators, two internet bills, two energy bills. Why are we doing this?’ And we spent half the time together anyway.”

They tested the waters by renting a house together for a year. It didn’t put them off the idea, but they realised the house was too small and not designed for shared living.

“The biggest thing we learnt in talking to people about it was that every generation has different needs. So my parents need to have a private area of their own – their own offices, their own en suite and bedroom. They need an area where we don’t go and we need the same, and my children need the same.”

“It’s my parents giving to us now what we would have inherited from them, but they live in it, so they have a great standard of living.”

Leah Salo

Leah put a lot of thought into setting up the financial side. “You’ve got two ways. Everybody owns 25 per cent, or the last one standing gets it. The first way, everybody has a percentage. The other way is that everyone owns the property and when one person dies, three people own it, when the next dies, two own it.

Then it’s the last one standing.” Her parents paid a bit more than 50-50 towards the house – “because they could”, Leah says. “Basically, it’s my parents giving to us now what we would have inherited from them, but they live in it, so they have a great standard of living.”

She acknowledges that siblings can complicate matters and she herself has a brother who lives in the US. “But he’s not worried because he’s independently wealthy.” And, of course, in years to come, it means the care of her parents is most likely to fall to her. She’s already factored that in with wide hallways for mobility equipment.

What about her husband’s equity, given they are her parents, not his? “We set up a prenuptial agreement when we were first married to determine what the split would be. At that time, my parents had given me some money to get my first house. It wasn’t so much to protect my assets as to protect my parents’ assets. We’d seen other couples get divorced and fight over money.”

Do they spend much time together communally? “Probably not a lot, to be honest. That’s part of us trying to be respectful of everybody and their own space. We try to find a nice balance.”

The biggest plus, “hands down”, she says, is the time her children get to have with their grandparents. And when her parents need it, she’ll be there to care for them. “It wasn’t abnormal to live like this 50 years ago. We’re just going back to what works.”

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