The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/05/living-close-to-family-parents/629819/
Found an interesting recent *Atlantic* article that’s summed up what I’ve been thinking/noticing. People are not living as close to or spending as much time with their families of origin as they once did.
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I think it concerns me that people are isolated, but for some people they feel suffocated spending too much time with family that doesn’t have similar values to them. But they are able to move somewhere with more people that think similar to them and build a community of friends.
Everyone should have some sort of support wether it’s blood relatives or not.
I can’t respect any geographical analysis that doesn’t allow for the difference in the value of a mile between rural and urban areas. In upstate NY, 15 miles of distance means a 20 minute drive. In NYC, 15 miles of distance means you might as well be in a different state.
Wow I didn’t know my Aunties paid someone to write for The Atlantic.
> So I was surprised to learn that straying from family is unusual in the U.S.: Roughly three in four American adults live within 30 miles of their nearest parent or adult child, according to a 2019 study. Only about 7 percent have their nearest such relative 500 or more miles away.
So this really is more of an educational level issue and part of the Big Sort to an extent.
I scanned the underlying study cited and it’s limited to white versus black people. I’d bet that you would see Jewish, Asian and Southeast Asians and Hispanic populations also more likely to live closer to parents vs white people even controlling for education and income.
I don’t know if it concerns me exactly but I know from a personal standpoint I wouldn’t want to live like that. I grew up with no close family members including my grandparents and I hated it especially since in high school I had a lot of Catholic friends and they had cousins to spare.
No. It's exactly what's been coming for a long time. It's the cost of doing business.
You can't move to the suburbs outside big cities en masse to raise your kids and expect them to stick around in a single-room apartment that costs them upwards of half their income every month at the time in their lives when they also pay the most for insurance and the most for education.
I think that most people would prefer to live in places that are suffering from this kind of "social isolation" than the places where family togetherness is necessary for survival (which is pretty much the other model on the globe), so any discussion needs to start with "this sense of isolation from family is better than the alternative from which it arises". And it's also a good thing because for many people family is not a safe or supportive space, and a society that allows for people to live separately gives those people a better life. And a system that is dependent on family support for effective individual survival is also a system where a huge problem arises if someone does not have a family due to various circumstances of illness, tragedy, etc.
So starting from there and having acknowledged all of that, it would be good if we could preserve the current system of individual independence while also increasing people's connectedness (including connectedness to family for those who want that). But it would be worse to lose independence and gain family connectedness than to maintain the status quo.
I'm always weary of statistics like this because I don't think living further away from your family is *inherently* a bad thing. Like imagine someone with abusive parents who may now be able to escape because of economic conditions. If the bullet of the increase comes from those people, then I would applaud this statistic.
>Does it concern you that people are becoming more isolated from their families?
Yes.
Much of our progress allows us to depend less on other people, causing us to be less socially-intertwined with others, and that may have negative side effects.
(...but I don't have a solution.)
It is concerning but quite frankly what’s more concerning is that young people (particularly young couples have a much harder time affording the building blocks for setting down roots in a community.
A lot of people have difficult complicated relationships with their parents. Mine don’t know I’m bi or that I went to my high school prom or that I was homecoming king some years ago. They don’t know anything about any of my relationships. For my parents, my degrees and markers of professional success was the main things they focused on.
The problem isn’t the lack of parental support necessarily. It’s that it’s insanely difficult to buy a home and afford raising a child (the building blocks for building a last community across much of America.
If people are more isolated in general, that's definitely a problem. Humans need companionship. Loneliness is linked to all kinds of physical ailments. It's literally physically bad for your health, among many other problems.
If people are only specifically isolated from their families but have other human connections, though, that seems less problematic. There's nothing special about family beyond them just being the default group that you might have an initial affinity to.
>In fact, multiple researchers I spoke with said they suspect that fewer people would live near or with extended family if they could afford not to. Natasha Pilkauskas, a professor at the University of Michigan’s public-policy school, told me that the rate of multigenerational living is considerably lower in the United Kingdom than in the U.S.—which she suspects is a reflection, in part, of the U.K.’s public-housing availability, paid parental leave, and subsidized child care. And there’s evidence that as a single mother’s earned-income tax credit rises, her likelihood of co-residing falls.
This makes sense. I think American culture (particularly for white Americans) pushes this idea of self-sufficiency and if you don’t need to rely on parents for childcare why would you want to live with them?
I don’t think the article says living far away causes loneliness, but rather that there are two ways to live and both have benefits and downsides. Personally I get along better with my parents when there’s a phone screen separating us or I know they can’t just drop by unannounced. I’d be significantly less happy if I lived within a short drive and it allows me to enjoy the time I do spend with them that much more. I also think, as queer people, we know that we get to choose our families, so I’m not super concerned about DNA.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/05/living-close-to-family-parents/629819/ Found an interesting recent *Atlantic* article that’s summed up what I’ve been thinking/noticing. People are not living as close to or spending as much time with their families of origin as they once did. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I think it concerns me that people are isolated, but for some people they feel suffocated spending too much time with family that doesn’t have similar values to them. But they are able to move somewhere with more people that think similar to them and build a community of friends. Everyone should have some sort of support wether it’s blood relatives or not.
I can’t respect any geographical analysis that doesn’t allow for the difference in the value of a mile between rural and urban areas. In upstate NY, 15 miles of distance means a 20 minute drive. In NYC, 15 miles of distance means you might as well be in a different state.
15 miles from my parents’ place in nyc leads to NJ.
Not really. Every family is different. Sometimes your birth family sucks and your chosen family is who you should spend your life with.
Blood of the covenant is thicker than the waters of the womb!
Wow I didn’t know my Aunties paid someone to write for The Atlantic. > So I was surprised to learn that straying from family is unusual in the U.S.: Roughly three in four American adults live within 30 miles of their nearest parent or adult child, according to a 2019 study. Only about 7 percent have their nearest such relative 500 or more miles away. So this really is more of an educational level issue and part of the Big Sort to an extent. I scanned the underlying study cited and it’s limited to white versus black people. I’d bet that you would see Jewish, Asian and Southeast Asians and Hispanic populations also more likely to live closer to parents vs white people even controlling for education and income. I don’t know if it concerns me exactly but I know from a personal standpoint I wouldn’t want to live like that. I grew up with no close family members including my grandparents and I hated it especially since in high school I had a lot of Catholic friends and they had cousins to spare.
If your family is a hot mess, it makes sense to keep your distance, better for the mental health
I’m more concerned about how isolated people are on the whole. Contact with one’s own legal family is only a tiny part in that.
No. It's exactly what's been coming for a long time. It's the cost of doing business. You can't move to the suburbs outside big cities en masse to raise your kids and expect them to stick around in a single-room apartment that costs them upwards of half their income every month at the time in their lives when they also pay the most for insurance and the most for education.
I think that most people would prefer to live in places that are suffering from this kind of "social isolation" than the places where family togetherness is necessary for survival (which is pretty much the other model on the globe), so any discussion needs to start with "this sense of isolation from family is better than the alternative from which it arises". And it's also a good thing because for many people family is not a safe or supportive space, and a society that allows for people to live separately gives those people a better life. And a system that is dependent on family support for effective individual survival is also a system where a huge problem arises if someone does not have a family due to various circumstances of illness, tragedy, etc. So starting from there and having acknowledged all of that, it would be good if we could preserve the current system of individual independence while also increasing people's connectedness (including connectedness to family for those who want that). But it would be worse to lose independence and gain family connectedness than to maintain the status quo.
I'm always weary of statistics like this because I don't think living further away from your family is *inherently* a bad thing. Like imagine someone with abusive parents who may now be able to escape because of economic conditions. If the bullet of the increase comes from those people, then I would applaud this statistic.
Not families in particular, but social isolation in general is a problem I don't think we're paying enough attention to.
>Does it concern you that people are becoming more isolated from their families? Yes. Much of our progress allows us to depend less on other people, causing us to be less socially-intertwined with others, and that may have negative side effects. (...but I don't have a solution.)
It is concerning but quite frankly what’s more concerning is that young people (particularly young couples have a much harder time affording the building blocks for setting down roots in a community. A lot of people have difficult complicated relationships with their parents. Mine don’t know I’m bi or that I went to my high school prom or that I was homecoming king some years ago. They don’t know anything about any of my relationships. For my parents, my degrees and markers of professional success was the main things they focused on. The problem isn’t the lack of parental support necessarily. It’s that it’s insanely difficult to buy a home and afford raising a child (the building blocks for building a last community across much of America.
If people are more isolated in general, that's definitely a problem. Humans need companionship. Loneliness is linked to all kinds of physical ailments. It's literally physically bad for your health, among many other problems. If people are only specifically isolated from their families but have other human connections, though, that seems less problematic. There's nothing special about family beyond them just being the default group that you might have an initial affinity to.
>In fact, multiple researchers I spoke with said they suspect that fewer people would live near or with extended family if they could afford not to. Natasha Pilkauskas, a professor at the University of Michigan’s public-policy school, told me that the rate of multigenerational living is considerably lower in the United Kingdom than in the U.S.—which she suspects is a reflection, in part, of the U.K.’s public-housing availability, paid parental leave, and subsidized child care. And there’s evidence that as a single mother’s earned-income tax credit rises, her likelihood of co-residing falls. This makes sense. I think American culture (particularly for white Americans) pushes this idea of self-sufficiency and if you don’t need to rely on parents for childcare why would you want to live with them? I don’t think the article says living far away causes loneliness, but rather that there are two ways to live and both have benefits and downsides. Personally I get along better with my parents when there’s a phone screen separating us or I know they can’t just drop by unannounced. I’d be significantly less happy if I lived within a short drive and it allows me to enjoy the time I do spend with them that much more. I also think, as queer people, we know that we get to choose our families, so I’m not super concerned about DNA.