My parents had to share a house with a couple when I was a small child. It was not ideal. Shared kitchen. Other shared spaces. Unless you are all on the same page about things, you are basically taking on extra parents. Other people telling you how to do such and such in raising your child which may be ideas that you're not on par with. When you have your own home, you can amicably disagree and go to the privacy of your own house. When you live with these folks, the disagreement may not be as amicable especially if they see that you're not implementing their ideas of what they think is best for your child.
Then there is the whole issue of cleanliness. What one person thinks is clean could be light years away from what you think is clean and tidy. This would cause untold levels of stress and discomfort on both ends. I'd rather have my own domain even if its only a travel trailer, than share living space with a bunch of people continuously giving their "advice" on what they think is best.
Some people quoted sound like they only have one baby.
Something I found was that different kids are, well, different.
For my own kids there is a huge difference in temperament. One is chilled and happy with basically anyone, another is extremely highly-strung. We raised them the same as far as we can tell, but one is very easy to look after and spend time with, the other is a fucking nightmare that no sane person would volunteer to spend time with (...or at least would not volunteer for the second time...).
So being able to "have dinner with our friends every night" I think comes down a lot to the individual kid and not the environment. You may have just got lucky and got a laid-back kid who just goes along with things and is happy hanging out with random adults. They're not all like that.
I tolerated living with roommates while in college because I needed to save money. The first chance I had to move out on my own, I was gone.
I can't imagine my family living with roommates for any reason other than necessity.
I love my own children but very much don't enjoy other people's children. I'm sure it's my deficiency but I'd probably murder someone in a community house.
Humans may be social creatures, but we're not hive insects. Good fences make good neighbors.
There’s also the problem of communities that are not nice to anyone they don’t approve of.
Maybe I just have too many LGBT friends to be objective. But I’ve had to leave communities because I had to keep my head down and my mouth shut to stay in them.
LGBT communities aren’t perfect either.
Communities are messy and we have a lot of choice in who we pick to be in them. In the past, you didn’t have a lot of options and you were strongly incentivized to make compromises.
the short answer from my immediate experience seems to be that people just dont get along with each other these days. Our relationships with other parents in our town must remain as shallow as possible because once there are obligations to be shared in any way (simple obligations like "we said we'd all get together on tuesday" which means all those people have to either show up or cancel ahead of time, bonus points for keeping the engagement even if something "more fun" comes up 5 minutes before the event) everything seems to fall apart. Your new dog bit my dog because I was sharing a snack with him? No, we're not going to "work it out" and train our dogs together, we're going to instead "dont ever speak to me again or let me ever see that dog in the same place I'm walking mine again." This is how people are.
Putting all these folks into a "shared community" that actually codifies the obligation for everyone to work together....Well you'd need to get a very special group of people to pull that off and even then, im sure the falling outs are pretty awful nonetheless.
> I want to raise them around a wealth of adults who model different ways to be successful and happy.
Right this is why I don't live in a community house, a lot of my kids' friend's parents suck ass. Who gets to live in the community house with the alcoholic soccer mom or the cop who got fired for threatening to kill someone at a baseball game.
In addition to the social problems, which are nontrivial, there are tons of little bureaucratic friction points to living in community houses that people may not have even considered.
I know one community house of > 10 people in California, exactly the type the author says they want, which kept getting fines from PG&E because they were using too much electricity, even though this was solely due to the house size and on a per-person basis they used much less than people living in single-family houses thanks to resource sharing. A policy intended to encourage energy efficiency ended up punishing it instead. Landmines like this are all over the place.
I imagine many people find it tricky enough to live with their own kin, but we have lots of mechanisms to generally make it work that don't really work with broader groups of people (e.g. marriage, societal expectations, judgment by broader family/in-laws, intimate relationships). It doesn't sound like the people in the article live in the very same living space, but there's a fine line between "close-knit community" and "living together."
Because hell is other people.
That idealism isn't how families happened. Traditoinally you split the farm when the sons (it need not be sons, but sexism generally comes in somehow as someone needs to leave home for genetic diverstiy reasons and the entire culture needs to follow the pattern in general so lets just talk about sons with the understanding that sometimes it was daughters) until the farm was too small to support the family at which point the oldest son got the farm and the other kids were sent off on their own. If you were lucky enough to be the oldest son you got to stay home and raise your own family with your cousins nearby in the village - but for your brothers who knows where they went, if they had a family it wasn't in sight and they didn't have the family.
B. F. Skinner dreamed that people can be scientifically (behaviourally) trained to live together and described his vision in "Walden Two". It is interesting that the book spawned quite a few attempts to do that and some have survived longer than usual. I think one such community still functions someplace in Mexica, but do not know how close it remains to Skinner's ideas.
Monks live together in harsh conditions just fine. This is a specific community, of course. Yet this is also the answer: you need something bigger than yourself to submit your wishes to.
We also love divorce. Which parent would live in the community? Mom or dad?
Different cultures. Your culture determines who sets expectations and who enforces them in these situations, and Indians can work with their culture's existing system for organizing and managing community homes. Americans would have to figure out a system, agree on it, troubleshoot it, while trying to learn how to be parents. That's almost impossible.
> And yet very few people raise their kids in community. In the US, 71% of children grow up in single family homes.
This is the fundamental misconception of the article. Living with your own family does not equate to being raised outside a community. Church, school, little league, etc. are all community networks that huge swaths of society participate in regularly.
I wonder if some of it is a good old fashioned marketing problem. "Communes" in America seem to be far-left or far-right coded, with little in between (and always - it appears - with a subtle suggestion that you're getting a nice cult along with your little village).
I don't see any reason it has to be that way, though. It's more an accident of history.
I probably would have chosen to have children if I grew up in a culture where "a bunch of people living close together and helping each other out" was the norm. I didn't, though. I grew up in 1980s "Superman and McDonalds and the American Way" suburbs. Having kids in that environment always looked like a nightmare to me, so I didn't.
I also suspect this has an extrovert / introvert component. The super social people around me constructed these little "ephemeral villages" out of nought but thin air, smiles, backyard barbecues, and PTA meetings. Or so it seemed to me. I was always too introverted to do this, though.
Having kids isn't "making people unhappy" because they move. It's a rewarding undertaking that, like most things that are truly rewarding, is quite difficult and requires you to struggle.
Because other people do it wrong :)
My own mother and of course my mother in law are absolute liabilities with my 5 and 3 year olds. They continually and repeatedly break our rules.
It's not unsafe per se, but it's just high-risk things for no reason apart from what we believe is just willful defiance from the grandparents. E.g. letting them out into the garden with no direct supervision, when there is no physical barrier from them getting into the road etc. "Oh lighten up! It's just a busy street with loads of distracted drivers in 2+ ton vehicles going over the speed limit! What's the problem!"
As a result, they're not usually left alone with the kids unless we can avoid it.
Ultimately if any harm were to come, I want to know that it was my own fault effectively, and not because I suspected that some other adult was not paying enough attention, or could have tried harder/made more effort to stop it, or was deliberately not doing things how I like it to be done. If it was under your own watch or your partner's watch that something bad happened then you can be pretty sure that the harm was unavoidable and not because someone else has other concepts of safety and risk for your offspring.
Is that true that most Indian families live in multigenerational compunds? It sounds more of a upper middle situation to me, where a multigenerational family has enclosed or walled in land.
People generally only live in community houses if they're poor and have no other options.
"But people in Indi.."
No.
Wealthy Indians have fucking single-family Get Me The Fuck Away From Everyone Else compounds surrounded by high walls, gate houses, and surveillance equipment.
Unless you're a lifelong career civil servant in the foreign service nearing retirement who went abroad working in consulates and embassies immediately after graduating university who has spent their entire life bouncing between different assignments to the point that you don't even feel like a resident of their own country anymore, I know more about this than you.
I know what Africans who live in villages do once they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb)
I know what Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans who live in miniscule tower apartments do once they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb)
I know what Hip Young Urban Professionals Sipping Coffee On A Sidewalk Next To A Cafe Along The Seine Or Rhine Because Their Apartment Is To Small To Do Anything do the second they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb)
It seems impossible for the nu-urbanists and the like to understand the brains of normal human beings who prefer not smelling the farts of others or their terrible cooking, hearing them snore or argue or fuck, seeing them scratch their ass and pick their nose.
Let me be frank, millenials and boomers don't make good housemates.
That said, I would not mind a good size plot of land with multiple structures..a family compound. Inside the same house? Absolutely never.
Do all the men have to be effeminate to live in community houses? Judging by the pictures there surely is a … type
No one asks this question.
Except people who will never ever face the prospect of living in a community house - they’re puzzled.
I don't want to deal with anyone else's bullshit. I have enough bullshit of my own.
What on earth? That's an eye-catching headline. That's like asking, "Why is it so hard to get people to give up on the American Dream?" Sure, there's a big conversation to have on the topic, but "why" sure as hell isn't an unsolved mystery.
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> Why is it so hard...
1) The article's portrayal of community living is rather idyllic.
2) To the Global Capitalist Profit Maximizer, community living is seriously sub-optimal. Ditto to aspiring members of the 0.01%, who can afford (or imagine) a "feudal lord" lifestyle - just themself and Mr./Mrs. Right, with a "community" of servants and servant-like outsourced labor services at their beck and call.
One reason not stated by the author is that U.S. culture and tends to handle badly the ebb and flow of physical intimacy among co-residents and their guests, not only through the excuse of jealousy as a conduit for physical and emotional abuse, but also by applying the playground puritanical ‘cooties’ logic to (almost exclusively) women who have been ‘contaminated’ for future relations by a prior partner within the community. Not that communes uniformly handle this any better — jealousy and power plays can still tear up an open-partners community! — but as all constant human coexistence groupings such as work, school, and churches demonstrate: where people are around each other often, intimacy and its successor attractions will crop up without regard for monogamous fidelity. So, given the U.S. puritanical tendencies, it makes sense that they avoid coresidency: isolating humans inhibits (somewhat) intimacy outside of the married partner.
Many of the problems this article talks about are relatively new, historically, and I can't help but wonder if the problem isn't really other trends like high-intensity helicopter parenting, rather than "atomic" families.
I grew up in a fairly typical American suburb, in the 70s, and lived in a single-family, single-generation household. But, there were 35+ kids on my one-block street! The neighborhood consisted entirely of families with children and retirees, and among the families, the median number of kids was three. There were a couple of families with two, but multiple with four; there were also families with 5, 6, and 7. We were constantly in and out of each other's houses. I regularly would walk out my door, through my neighbor's front yard, and into my best friend's house without knocking. A lot of the time we were outside, and unsupervised by adults. Overall I think the burden on parents (per kid) was much lower than today.
I think the large number of kids made this kind of arrangement both necessary and possible. Nobody could have the energy to supervise so many kids the way kids are supervised today, but also we all looked out for each other. There were lots of siblings. Older sibs were responsible for younger, and by extension, their younger friends as well. If someone got hurt, some friends would help while others would run to get a parent, and not necessarily the parent of the kid who got hurt.
Even this situation, I can't imagine wanting to actually share a household with any of my friends' families. In fact, when I slept over, I was always struck with how weird other families' closed-door customs seemed. It's the same now: when we get an occasional glimpse into the behind-closed-doors dynamics of our friends' marriages and families, my wife and I are always like, hm... weird. I think it's like that for everyone.
Getting married and having a family is a very personal thing. I love my friends, but I wouldn't want to marry any of them.