Forty-nine million Americans share three generations
Extended families stretch past parents and kids to aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins nearby or under one roof. Frédéric Le Play described stem families where one heir stays. Roughly 49 million Americans—16.1 percent—now live in three-or-more-generation homes, up from 42 million in 2000.
In a stem family, parents share a home with one married child and that child's spouse and children, while siblings move out or stay single. Japan and Korea paired the pattern with unequal inheritance, but in traditional Romania, northeastern Thailand and Mesoamerican Indigenous communities property was split fairly evenly, the caregiving child simply adding the house to an ordinary share. South Asia's joint family goes further: an elder man, his wife, their sons with wives and children, and unmarried daughters all live together. The patriarch decides economic and social matters, his wife runs the household, and all income flows into a common pool.
Across much of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Indigenous societies, the extended family, not the nuclear one, is the basic unit, and stem households were common in Western Europe too, England being a rare exception. Britain and the United States actually saw their highest share of extended households during the Industrial Revolution, roughly 1750 to 1900. In Mexico, a newborn enters two kin groups that can total some 70 people, and scholars describe the three-generation grand-family as the core of family solidarity.
Even where adults leave home at marriage, relatives often settle nearby, especially in working-class areas, gathering for events and helping one another with money and emotional support. Pooling a home can ease costs for single parents but strain families when only a few members earn. Researchers link higher kin involvement among Black and Latino Americans to economic hardship, with extended kinship serving as a survival strategy.
A 2010 Pew study counted about 50 million Americans in homes with at least two adult generations, citing unemployment and falling house prices. In 2018 Congress unanimously passed the Supporting Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Act.
Source: Extended family
