In a mostly agrarian society the family farm was the primary reason for multigenerational families living and working together. Industrialization and a move to the cities meant an end to most multigenerational families as families began to lead rather independent lives. Today, mostly due to tight financial reasons the multigenerational family is becoming a little more popular due to financial necessity.
Advantages:
Grandparents helping with child rearing, housework, and some financial support such as paying some or all of the mortgage payments and food budget.
Grandparents can live longer in a family setting before being shuttled off to an expensive nursing home with dire living conditions.
Both parents can work full time.
Adult children can further their education online, in the community, or travel away from home in a college or university setting.
Adult children can work in low level entry jobs and save up money to buy a car or save up money for further useful education and avoid massive student debt.
If an adult child woman gets pregnant or an adult male marries and the wife gets pregnant there is a potential support group of grandparents and parents if living independently is out of the question.
Caring behavior and ability to socially interact with differing ages is important values taught in a multigenerational family unit.
Disadvantages:
Family disagreements and strife if grandparents are very religious or dogmatic and try to run their offspring lives and choose sides.
Family turmoil increases if any family member is severely alcoholic or has a drug addiction problem and gets in trouble frequently with the law.
Job mobility is limited if it means traveling to another state for a better job. Old grandparent and parent friends and neighbors may have to be abandoned due to a job relocation.
A drug addicted or alcoholic, stealing, unemployed adult offspring may have to be excluded from the multigenerational family.
A lazy infrequently employed adult offspring may mooch off of the family for too long.
An unemployed adult child may want to cohabit with a pregnant female with the multigenerational family. Unemployed cohabitation realistically should not be an option.
Grandparents with dementia or Alzheimer’s or severe immobility may need home nursing care unless they are institutionalized.
Too great a size of the multigenerational family may lead to temporary or permanent cramped living circumstances.
Conclusion:
Ideally a family with offspring should be able to live independently and have an ability to move at will if better job opportunities arise.
Realistically for financial reasons a multigenerational family unit should theoretically be able to live together relatively peacefully. If each unit with the exception of children contribute financially to the multigenerational family unit and no one adult intentionally mooches off the rest of the members then peaceful cohabitation is possible as long as there is no intergenerational strife caused by unnecessary dominant meddling behavior.
For city dwellers multigenerational family living may be impossible due to the relatively large size of the family and limited living space. So living in relatively crapped quarters may be the only realistic financial situation for city dwellers.
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