Comment by WarOnPrivacy
12 hours ago
"People would like to have a house that's large enough for their family and access to good employment."
"Over the last 50 years, America has kind of told them, 'You can't have both'."
I'd go past that and say you probably can't have a home over 3 bedrooms without already being in an upper income bracket.
So no large families (to offset population challenges). No extended families to help the existing family. No space to help relatives relocate.
No homes for four income earners in a 4-income economy.
> So no large families (to offset population challenges).
There are lots of reasons we're not having large families, but this doesn't seem like one of them. Average family size has shrunk dramatically while houses have gotten bigger. Lots of familes of 6 or more shared 1000-sqft bungalows in the past, with 2 or 3 kids in a room, so this doesn't jive.
In the 1800s, it was commonplace to have 8 children. Did they all lived in huge houses?
I was born in 1964 in the midwest US, the 7th out of 8 children. The house was a two story brick structure with five bedrooms and two bathrooms. The house was less than 2000 sq ft, but that included a moldy basement with seepage and jackposts all over the place helping support the sagging joists, so the real living space was closer to 2/3 of that, so 1350 sq ft or so.
The house had been built before 1920 when expectations were less grand; those rooms were much smaller than nearly any home I've been in built after 1980. When my grandpa came to visit each summer, it meant all five boys in one room, the two youngest in sleeping bags and occasionally getting stepped on in the middle of the night when one of my older brothers would get up and forget we were there.
There was also no air conditioning, nor ceiling fans. My parents had a box fan in their bedroom window during the summer. It was a big deal when the bedroom I shared with my next older brother got a box fan too; that was in high school.
The only thing I can say (having been born in 1988, sharing a slightly smaller house with 4 siblings), is that that sounds reasonable.
We all shared rooms and had less than a few square meters to ourselves. It was fine. People these days are too attached to the idea they need massive homes to live their lives.
I grew up in the 90s and I agree: I shared a room with my older brother until high school.
We shared EVERYTHING. And strangely, it didn't kill us! In fact: it just motivated us to go to sports and clubs and stay out of the house.
Obviously less extreme, but I do not understand this "every child must have their own room" thing. They don't! And I grew up in an incredibly poor rural area, imagine living in a city where there was actual shit to do.
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bunkbeds is how I grew up
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> In the 1800s, it was commonplace to have 8 children. Did they all lived in huge houses?
This is a bit of segue from where we were. To brings us more in line with the topic: In the early 20th century, large and extended families lived in commonly built row housing.
Their roomier accommodations were one piece of communities that were more affordable and an overall better fit for larger groups & families (than modern housing and communities).
A counter anecdote to all of the others: My father’s parents owned a 3 story house in Ohio, with 8 rooms and a basement. The second/third floor were intended to be rented out if you weren’t using them I guess.
I always found this extraordinary because they certainly weren’t rich. I grew up in a 1200sqft house fwiw lol
How about people who lived in igloos, tepees, and mud huts? Did they have separate bedrooms for the kids? I seriously doubt that was an issue for them.
There are, you might imagine, other factors involved. Infant and child mortality were super high, but kids were an important source of labor, so people worked to have lots. There was no real birth control or sex ed. Marital rape wasn't a concept. Cultural pressure to have children was stronger than it is now. Etc etc etc.
No but the living conditions were atrocious, dangerous, unsanitary, and probably quite psychologically traumatizing (e.g. kids growing up in households where adults would have sex in the same room have all sorts of problems)
Edit: Since HN contrarians who'd never want their children living in some particular conditions find it so confusing how others might not too:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01452...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3805127/
Overcrowded living quarters is a well known vector for a huge array of problems. Academic underachievement, sexual abuse, substance abuse, mood disorders, abusive relationships, the list goes on. Even after controlling for socioeconomic status!
Sure, to my western/puritanical upbringing that is weird, but I suspect for the majority of human history: parents have being having sex in very close proximity to their children. Separate bedrooms, even separate beds are a modern luxury.
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Everything is traumatizing to these people. Their mother told them to hold the bottle for their baby sister. Oh no, what is this? Is this Parentification, the Source of More Trauma? Despite the fact that the elder sibling would prefer to sleep, perchance to dream-- and there lies the rub! For in that sleep, what trauma comes!
There are plenty of laws on the books that make it even harder, you can't have mixed genders of children sleeping in the same room, limits to how many can sleep in the same room, and many more.
Less than 1% of houses are accessible and that is a problem with aging boomers, SIL bought a home near parents to support them but when the stroke and dementia hit, the parents couldn't move in because no bedroom and only a powder room on the main floor, and they couldn't make it up/down the stairs anymore, and the parents house was too small to move into.
Lots of ways to get money from the table.
Reference please. I'm not aware of any state or federal law that prohibits mixed gender children from sharing a room in a private residence (foster care and other institutional situations do have regulations).
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You can't afford a 1 square foot lot anywhere near Times Square for four bedroom house in the Midwest money. Luckily, no one was talking about raising a family in Times Square, which in 1970 was adjacent to one of the most notoriously degenerate and crime ridden neighborhoods in the Western world. People understand that's out of their reach now.