[ponker]

We live in a 3 generational family sharing anything but a small apartment and it's absolutely wonderful. Us, the nuclear family, occupies the 3000 sqft house. My in-laws live in the guest house which is about 800 sqft. My parents live about a mile away. We see a lot of each other but everyone has their space.

[pjc50]

If you're the 1%, anything is great.

(That area of living space is almost unimaginable in the UK, I'd have to buy a disused hotel or small castle to get that)

[kimjongtrill]

That is 100% different from parent comment’s situation though...

[ponker]

Right, but my point is that “Living with parents” is a wildly different experience if you have enough space. Not a rebuttal, a different anecdote.

[buran77]

> “Living with parents” is a wildly different experience if you have enough space.

> My parents live about a mile away.

Living with parents is indeed great especially when you're not actually living with them. You live alone. In-laws in another house, parents a mile away.

Living with family means sharing the actual facilities of the house not just technically being on the same property, or in a house where you never have to cross paths. Having parents in another house on the same property doesn't mean "living together" more than a neighbor on the other side of a 30cm wall is living with you.

[GuB-42]

Totally, I spent some time with my parents, grandparents and uncle in a very large house (800 m2). We didn't even feel like we were living together, it was more comparable to living in the same apartment complex. We even had internal phone lines.

It was actually shocking to me because I usually lived with my parents in a small apartment and we were always aware of each other presence. It that big house, we actually had to do something to see each other, we could stay all day in our rooms as if we were alone if we wanted to.

[macspoofing]

... but you're not living with parents.

[0ld]

the parent comment was about a 3gen family sharing a (most likely) 17m^2 room in a 30-sh m^2 apartment, which was very common in the ussr. 6-7m^2 per person was even officially considered norm until middle 80s

[eptcyka]

What's the annual household income in that situation?

[ponker]

$400k, parents generation is retired with plenty of money. My point is more broadly that in a family where everyone can comfortably afford to live alone, living together can be massively more fun.

[xenocratus]

I think the percentage of families that earn enough for that kind of mansion is below 1%

[ponker]

More like 5%. But the fact remains that "living alone" is considered aspirational in society, and that's not axiomatic. Plenty of American adults can afford to live alone, and do, but by pooling their resources with their parents, both can live on one property and have a much richer life together than living apart. My in-laws who live on the property sold their house to help us buy the property -- we couldn't have done it by ourselves, so we really had to break down some assumptions/default behaviors about financial independence which are fairly standard in the US.