Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?

https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/why-is-it-so-hard-to-get-families

by caser • 1 year ago

41 73 1 year ago

supernuclear.substack.com

bell-cot• 1 year ago

Why is it so hard...

1) The article's portrayal of community living is rather idyllic.

2) To the Global Capitalist Profit Maximizer, community living is seriously sub-optimal. Ditto to aspiring members of the 0.01%, who can afford (or imagine) a "feudal lord" lifestyle - just themself and Mr./Mrs. Right, with a "community" of servants and servant-like outsourced labor services at their beck and call.

afaxwebgirl• 1 year ago

My parents had to share a house with a couple when I was a small child. It was not ideal. Shared kitchen. Other shared spaces. Unless you are all on the same page about things, you are basically taking on extra parents. Other people telling you how to do such and such in raising your child which may be ideas that you're not on par with. When you have your own home, you can amicably disagree and go to the privacy of your own house. When you live with these folks, the disagreement may not be as amicable especially if they see that you're not implementing their ideas of what they think is best for your child.

Then there is the whole issue of cleanliness. What one person thinks is clean could be light years away from what you think is clean and tidy. This would cause untold levels of stress and discomfort on both ends. I'd rather have my own domain even if its only a travel trailer, than share living space with a bunch of people continuously giving their "advice" on what they think is best.

crazygringo• 1 year ago

Yup. Disagreements over tidiness, food, kitchen usage, what is appropriate for children, the list goes on and on. Different families come from different cultures, have different values, etc. It's incredibly difficult to find a bunch of other families you're "on the same page with" where you actually want to be co-parenting with and hanging out with all the time.

It's one thing when you all grow up together. There's a baseline level of compatibility and trust that can make it all work. But in today's world where you often have to move every five years for a job, or for a better school, etc., spontaneously joining groups of families and having it "just work" is a tall order.

ryandrake2• 1 year ago

I can't even agree with one spouse about a lot of these things, let alone a bunch of co-parents from different walks of life, in some sort of community house. No way that's going to work. I would not be able to even deal with having my own parents live with us and "help" with our kid. While I love them, the things they consider important about child-raising are not all compatible with the things I consider important and I am certain we would clash all the time.

mihaaly• 1 year ago

And there are enstranged families. A sort of common occurrence nowdays, but not unknown in the past either (concealed, suppressed, being a shame, common occurrence of the present is perhaps due to less stigma nowadays). They do not want to live or even be in contact with those who gave you (you gave to) their values, efforts, view of life. Lived together for years and years in dependency. People with very strong ties, like it or not.

And co-living should work better with strangers of mixed mentality?

Yes, this must be for people with highly common way of current thinking (current, momentarily, as people do change when they go through significant life experiences, like raising children or joining a community).

geverett2• 1 year ago

I'm reminded of this Atlantic article that says 'You can try to micromanage your child’s care—whether they eat sugar, whether they get screen time, whether someone insists that a child apologize after snatching another kid’s toy—or you can have reliable community help with child care. But you can’t have both.'

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/01/intensive...

Personally I'm ok with flexing my standards a bit for the sake of having a great community - I'm on the cleaner side but I don't mind doing a little extra tidying as long as it feels like a balance. I've lived with my friends and their kids and while we don't have the 100% the same parenting styles we all respect what the others bring to the table.

drewcoo3• 1 year ago

Community and selfishness don't mix well.

And with more than 2 co-parents, a quorum might form that excludes you.

spacemadness• 1 year ago

It seems everyone’s trying to fix one part of the system without seeing the system as a whole. Build more housing is all you need to do, live in communes is all you need, etc. That’s great for easy blog fodder. I definitely think community is vital, but the system you live in can easily poison it or make it unworkable. Also the article seems to mention actual intergenerational families in India then asks why aren’t families living with other families which is a weird conclusion to make from that.

magicalhippo• 1 year ago

My company has a cabin us employees can use. Only thing we have to do is reserve it and clean up before we leave.

Cleanliness has been a huge source of frustration, as you say there's a huge chasm between what some people considers "clean enough".

And that's not sharing it at the same time, like in a community home...

SoftTalker2• 1 year ago

Easily solved by hiring a cleaning service to come in between bookings. Anyone renting apartments or even doing AirBnB knows you cannot rely on tenants to leave the place anything better than "broom clean" and often they don't even do that.

dheera• 1 year ago

I can't imagine sharing a kitchen with anyone but my own partner. Cleanliness is the bare minimum, but design and aesthetics is a big part of it.

I'm very particular about how my kitchen (and living space in general) looks. I coordinate the colors of appliances with the cabinetry, the styles of all the cutlery, the locations and labelling of everything. Fonts, typography, margins all matter in those labels. I sometimes design and make my own containers for things. I like bottles of ingredients being in aesthetically-pleasing arrangements by color shade.

But I'm also an introvert, an artist at heart, and it helps me save money. When my kitchen is an evolving work of art, I'm drawn to spend more time in that space, and that inspires me to make more food for myself, at 1/5 the cost of food outside. If my kitchen looks like an aesthetic mess because the person I share it with does not give a shit about design, I would be more likely to go spend $30 on food outside, and that adds up pretty quickly.

andrewstuart• 1 year ago

No one asks this question.

Except people who will never ever face the prospect of living in a community house - they’re puzzled.

op00to• 1 year ago

I don't want to deal with anyone else's bullshit. I have enough bullshit of my own.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 1 year ago

We also love divorce. Which parent would live in the community? Mom or dad?

eulgro• 1 year ago

Divorce doesn't have to be a drama. Both can remain friends and stay at the same place.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 1 year ago

There's more than that. What about their new partners? Do they want to live with a different community?

ARandomerDude• 1 year ago

And yet very few people raise their kids in community. In the US, 71% of children grow up in single family homes.

This is the fundamental misconception of the article. Living with your own family does not equate to being raised outside a community. Church, school, little league, etc. are all community networks that huge swaths of society participate in regularly.

bombcar• 1 year ago

You can have quite a close knit community in single family homes - I've known and been parts of neighborhoods where everyone wandered into everyone's house, but you'd never know that looking at the plats.

Communal areas like a shared kitchen immediately fall to the tragedy of the commons, unless there's a HOA or similar that directly pays someone to maintain it.

geverett2• 1 year ago

I've lived in community for 10 years in a variety of different houses/complexes (including ones where I've had my own apartment and there's been a communal kitchen). We've almost never had issues with cleanliness. It really depends on who you live with!

notahacker• 1 year ago

Yeah. The article feels like an AI trying to work out from first principles what human families must be like. More adults = more efficient, right?

Same with the argument that a miracle of coliving is having grandparents to help with the kids. You get that by living near your parents, which has the added advantage that your parents aren't constantly observing you and your relationship and choosing everything from your interior decor to your entertainment... and when you want your grandparents to look after the kids so you can have some peace, the kids actually go to a different building! And it turns out the fun, community-oriented bit of your friends' kids is meeting them at events or when you invite the family round and being impressed by how much more confident they've got since last time you saw them, not being woken up in the middle of the night by them.

altairprime3• 1 year ago

One reason not stated by the author is that U.S. culture and tends to handle badly the ebb and flow of physical intimacy among co-residents and their guests, not only through the excuse of jealousy as a conduit for physical and emotional abuse, but also by applying the playground puritanical ‘cooties’ logic to (almost exclusively) women who have been ‘contaminated’ for future relations by a prior partner within the community. Not that communes uniformly handle this any better — jealousy and power plays can still tear up an open-partners community! — but as all constant human coexistence groupings such as work, school, and churches demonstrate: where people are around each other often, intimacy and its successor attractions will crop up without regard for monogamous fidelity. So, given the U.S. puritanical tendencies, it makes sense that they avoid coresidency: isolating humans inhibits (somewhat) intimacy outside of the married partner.

rpmisms2• 1 year ago

Yes, because human cultures work better monogamously, this is nearly universally true.

flerchin• 1 year ago

Because hell is other people.

Der_Einzige• 1 year ago

Hell is other peoples code.

jebarker2• 1 year ago

I love my own children but very much don't enjoy other people's children. I'm sure it's my deficiency but I'd probably murder someone in a community house.

ryandrake2• 1 year ago

Funny... All of my kid's friends are pretty wholesome, respectful, nice people. Always happy to have them visit to play. But many of their parents (30-40 years old) are pretty bad. Not nasty, but just... anti-social and aloof, totally absorbed in themselves and their phones. I couldn't imagine raising our kids together in some sort of shared commune.

jebarker2• 1 year ago

I think/hope my feelings will change as my kids are a bit older. Right now they're both under 5 and other kids just seem like terrorists. I actually worry though that I'm teaching my kids to be too timid and should encourage them to stand up to the terrorists more.

petercooper• 1 year ago

I imagine many people find it tricky enough to live with their own kin, but we have lots of mechanisms to generally make it work that don't really work with broader groups of people (e.g. marriage, societal expectations, judgment by broader family/in-laws, intimate relationships). It doesn't sound like the people in the article live in the very same living space, but there's a fine line between "close-knit community" and "living together."

skydhash• 1 year ago

This very much. Harmonious groups only works when there's a clear hierarchy and group pressure to do well (basically a miniature society). And even then you have bad apples. Even in a single family, you can have conflicts. Imagine scaling it to several.

zzzeek2• 1 year ago

the short answer from my immediate experience seems to be that people just dont get along with each other these days. Our relationships with other parents in our town must remain as shallow as possible because once there are obligations to be shared in any way (simple obligations like "we said we'd all get together on tuesday" which means all those people have to either show up or cancel ahead of time, bonus points for keeping the engagement even if something "more fun" comes up 5 minutes before the event) everything seems to fall apart. Your new dog bit my dog because I was sharing a snack with him? No, we're not going to "work it out" and train our dogs together, we're going to instead "dont ever speak to me again or let me ever see that dog in the same place I'm walking mine again." This is how people are.

Putting all these folks into a "shared community" that actually codifies the obligation for everyone to work together....Well you'd need to get a very special group of people to pull that off and even then, im sure the falling outs are pretty awful nonetheless.

os2warpman2• 1 year ago

People generally only live in community houses if they're poor and have no other options.

"But people in Indi.."

No.

Wealthy Indians have fucking single-family Get Me The Fuck Away From Everyone Else compounds surrounded by high walls, gate houses, and surveillance equipment.

Unless you're a lifelong career civil servant in the foreign service nearing retirement who went abroad working in consulates and embassies immediately after graduating university who has spent their entire life bouncing between different assignments to the point that you don't even feel like a resident of their own country anymore, I know more about this than you.

I know what Africans who live in villages do once they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb)

I know what Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans who live in miniscule tower apartments do once they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb)

I know what Hip Young Urban Professionals Sipping Coffee On A Sidewalk Next To A Cafe Along The Seine Or Rhine Because Their Apartment Is To Small To Do Anything do the second they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb)

It seems impossible for the nu-urbanists and the like to understand the brains of normal human beings who prefer not smelling the farts of others or their terrible cooking, hearing them snore or argue or fuck, seeing them scratch their ass and pick their nose.

foobarian• 1 year ago

You must have some stories to tell! Would love to hear more :-)

DontBreakAlex• 1 year ago

Tell me you're american without telling me you're american.

I know what Hip Young Urban Professionals Sipping Coffee On A Sidewalk Next To A Cafe Along The Seine Or Rhine Because Their Apartment Is To Small To Do Anything do the second they get money.

They buy a nice apartment on the southern bank of the seine because they're the only one that can afford it, cycle everywhere and enjoy the thousands of places you can go in Paris with their friends while sharing a babysitter because they can walk by their friends places to pickup their kids afterwards.

I moved to SF for work 6 months ago and I can't understand how you guys can "enjoy" living alone and depressed in your empty suburb.

Want to know who actually lives in the "american-style suburbs" of Paris? Poor people who have no choice but to live there

rpmisms2• 1 year ago

I always appreciate it when the grumpy expert appears on HN.

Are there truly no exceptions that you know of?

os2warpman2• 1 year ago

Of course there are exceptions. Exceptions are irrelevant.

Like when someone says "cats are furry and fuzzy and I like petting them" and someone chimes in "Well what about hairless cats??????"

Why do you think Tata bought the brands and formed Jaguar Land Rover?

Did Ratan Tata "just like the brand" or did he see every single person around him buying Land/Range Rovers as Indians (and people in China, and Kenya, and everywhere else) got wealthier and started moving out to single family homes in suburbs and he wanted to profit off that?

crest• 1 year ago

Urban doesn't have to mean slumming it. There is a very comfortable peak in the middle between capsule hotel and suburbia.

BeetleB• 1 year ago

Not from India, but seen this in other countries. Fully agree.

People who are forced to cohabit with relatives (siblings' families, with parents/grandparents as well) conform, and you don't hear them complain because they don't have a choice. But oh boy there are so, so many problems/conflicts. Harmony is usually an illusion.

They of course get the benefits when it comes to helping raise kids. But you have to pick your poison. Life isn't better - it's just different.

Much of what's in the article is fairly different from multiple (related) families having to share a house. I'm guessing for each of them, leaving is always an option, and it results in a different dynamic than "I'm stuck with these people because I can't afford to leave." If you offend someone who is not your relative, you don't have to live with the consequences forever.

zzzeek2• 1 year ago

this might be one of my all time favorite HN comments, and it's getting downmodded. Why do you people all suck? How are we supposed to all live in the same house?

yongjik2• 1 year ago

I know what Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans who live in miniscule tower apartments do once they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb)

No they don't. I may not know a lot about families, but I know a thing or two about Korea, and the one thing I know is that they overwhelmingly stay in apartments. When they get money, the move to bigger, fancier apartments.

...which casts doubt on your other confident assertions.

tomashubelbauer• 1 year ago

Isn't the principle still the same? Koreans moving into bigger, fancies apartments to make sure they put more distance and barriers between them and people they don't want to meet. Fancier apartments guarantee a building with reception that can take your packages so you don't have to talk to delivery people. Bigger apartments means people in the building are more spread out so the noise they make is more spread out and as a result dampened. They might not be moving to literal houses, but they are isolating themselves to the same end.

maxglute2• 1 year ago

The wealthiest family India lives in multigenerational skyscraper. Others in multigeneration compounds / culdesacs.

East Asians overwhelming move to nicer / larger apartments or urban villas before fucking off to suburbs with shit schools and bad travel time to nice large, cities.

Rich in poorer/develping countries with shit urban centres may pick private suburbs for privacy/security, because they simply don't have choice / access to world class urban living.

Nu-urbanists are kind of delulu, but they (probably) know more than "normal humans" when it comes to spectrum of livable build enviroment, the vast majority haven't lived in a nice 200-300 sqm apartment in a tier1 city. Most see medicore suburb living > medicore city living.

Ultimately it's not even that expensive to make that kind of housing (i.e. extra sqm construction $$$ to odor and sound proof units is not much). It's much harder to build nice cities people (or rich) want to live in, vs easy to spam livable single family unit suburbs.

That said, housing (and access to services) preference is almost seperate discussion from single family vs communal / multi generation living arrangments. Plenty of people would not want to live with extended family even if culture compels them too. And plenty of people probably wish family was closer.

Analemma_• 1 year ago

In addition to the social problems, which are nontrivial, there are tons of little bureaucratic friction points to living in community houses that people may not have even considered.

I know one community house of > 10 people in California, exactly the type the author says they want, which kept getting fines from PG&E because they were using too much electricity, even though this was solely due to the house size and on a per-person basis they used much less than people living in single-family houses thanks to resource sharing. A policy intended to encourage energy efficiency ended up punishing it instead. Landmines like this are all over the place.

zdragnar• 1 year ago

I tolerated living with roommates while in college because I needed to save money. The first chance I had to move out on my own, I was gone.

I can't imagine my family living with roommates for any reason other than necessity.

phil-lnf• 1 year ago

The people here aren’t necessarily roommates. They live in their own private units next to their friends (rather than next to strangers)

J37T3R• 1 year ago

Humans may be social creatures, but we're not hive insects. Good fences make good neighbors.

InMice• 1 year ago

Let me be frank, millenials and boomers don't make good housemates.

That said, I would not mind a good size plot of land with multiple structures..a family compound. Inside the same house? Absolutely never.

kayodelycaon2• 1 year ago

There’s also the problem of communities that are not nice to anyone they don’t approve of.

Maybe I just have too many LGBT friends to be objective. But I’ve had to leave communities because I had to keep my head down and my mouth shut to stay in them.

LGBT communities aren’t perfect either.

Communities are messy and we have a lot of choice in who we pick to be in them. In the past, you didn’t have a lot of options and you were strongly incentivized to make compromises.

altairprime3• 1 year ago

If one can be selective about who is “in” and who is “out”, then it’s a social club, not one’s community.

Community precipitates around shared characteristics; typically places or hobbies. You have no say whatsoever in who else shares that characteristic. Shunning is the only form of exclusion reliably available.

Social clubs are organized around voluntary membership, where one can choose to enter or exit the club at any time, and constraints may be placed to prevent that. Eviction is an available form of exclusion.

Discord, Mastodon, and Twitter are social clubs: one has control over interactions, membership is loosely or tightly controlled, and the threat of eviction is used by club leaders (which are sometimes an inhuman corporate entity!) to keep people in line.

Support meetings are communities: the shared property of “recovering from XYZ” cannot be revoked by others. A much higher bar of social violations — that are more or less stable per cultural context, but typical minimum bounds are sharing private conversations publicly and committing nonsexual violence — are required for a community leader to pursue exclusion.

It sounds like you’ve had to deal with a lot of awful rainbow clubs; that sucks and I empathize from my own experiences as well. I’m still modeling the language to discern whether a given group is a club or a community; my best so far is to ask: “Is this a queer support group, that welcomes anyone queer and necessitates compromise?”. Obviously this phrasing is still mediocre, but that’s not reason not to use it. It doesn’t necessarily reveal clubs at first, but it’s useful for exposing the lie more rapidly if it turns out that it’s a club disguising itself as a community but malice and exclusion are prioritized over compromise and tolerance.

kayodelycaon2• 1 year ago

I really don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. I think you're trying to make community too specific. And support meetings are very much clubs by your definition.

Also I haven't had to deal with "awful rainbow clubs". In fact my experience has been the exact opposite. Twelve years ago, I went to a furry convention and ended up joining one of the most accepting communities I've ever seen. And let me tell you, once a community gets to a certain size, it will have Problems™. :)

drewcoo3• 1 year ago

If one can be selective about who is “in” and who is “out”, then it’s a social club

If one can be selective about who is "in" and who is "out", then one is a leader of the social club. There can be plenty of animosity between members.

garbagecoder• 1 year ago

Having kids isn't "making people unhappy" because they move. It's a rewarding undertaking that, like most things that are truly rewarding, is quite difficult and requires you to struggle.

jp572• 1 year ago

Many of the problems this article talks about are relatively new, historically, and I can't help but wonder if the problem isn't really other trends like high-intensity helicopter parenting, rather than "atomic" families.

I grew up in a fairly typical American suburb, in the 70s, and lived in a single-family, single-generation household. But, there were 35+ kids on my one-block street! The neighborhood consisted entirely of families with children and retirees, and among the families, the median number of kids was three. There were a couple of families with two, but multiple with four; there were also families with 5, 6, and 7. We were constantly in and out of each other's houses. I regularly would walk out my door, through my neighbor's front yard, and into my best friend's house without knocking. A lot of the time we were outside, and unsupervised by adults. Overall I think the burden on parents (per kid) was much lower than today.

I think the large number of kids made this kind of arrangement both necessary and possible. Nobody could have the energy to supervise so many kids the way kids are supervised today, but also we all looked out for each other. There were lots of siblings. Older sibs were responsible for younger, and by extension, their younger friends as well. If someone got hurt, some friends would help while others would run to get a parent, and not necessarily the parent of the kid who got hurt.

Even this situation, I can't imagine wanting to actually share a household with any of my friends' families. In fact, when I slept over, I was always struck with how weird other families' closed-door customs seemed. It's the same now: when we get an occasional glimpse into the behind-closed-doors dynamics of our friends' marriages and families, my wife and I are always like, hm... weird. I think it's like that for everyone.

Getting married and having a family is a very personal thing. I love my friends, but I wouldn't want to marry any of them.

drewcoo3• 1 year ago

The nuclear family is also relatively new.

It probably just seemed normal to you if you grew up in it.

It was almost certainly not how families worked when your parents or grandparents were kids.

jp572• 1 year ago

My dad was born in 1925. He lived with his parents and sisters and didn't share a household with grandparents aunts or uncles. My mom was born in a small town in Italy on the eve of WWII and orphaned when she was ten. Again, there were no grandparents aunts or uncles, or friends or neighbors living in the same household, and none were in the picture to care for her. She was went to boarding schools until she could emigrate to America, where her uncles lived. During school breaks she lived with neighbors in her home town.

I don't know enough about my grandparents to be able to answer, but I think it's likely that small three-generation households were common somewhat common, i.e. a grandparent and one of their children, that child's spouse and that set of grand children. But I think multi-family households and intentional household relationships not bound by marriage or parent/child bonds were rare in their day as well, at least in the US and western Europe.

chneu• 1 year ago

Basically every aspect of modern life is new. It's weird how people yearn for "the old ways" yet they don't even know what they're yearning for.

There is p much nothing in our life that wasn't an invention of the industrial revolution or later. Every aspect of our life was invented within the last 2-3 generations.

But yet people talk like these weird, mostly white Christian ideals, are how life has always been throughout history. People believe what they want to feel good about their extreme overconsumption in todays modern world.

happytoexplain• 1 year ago

What on earth? That's an eye-catching headline. That's like asking, "Why is it so hard to get people to give up on the American Dream?" Sure, there's a big conversation to have on the topic, but "why" sure as hell isn't an unsolved mystery.

onlyrealcuzzo• 1 year ago

The question isn't: Why doesn't everyone want to raise their children in communal living?

It's more like: why does almost no one want that?

There's a big difference.

It should be obvious why not everyone or even most people don't want that.

It's less obvious why basically no one does - especially since lots of people are actually interested in the idea, and there are - theoretically - advantages.

currency• 1 year ago

Different cultures. Your culture determines who sets expectations and who enforces them in these situations, and Indians can work with their culture's existing system for organizing and managing community homes. Americans would have to figure out a system, agree on it, troubleshoot it, while trying to learn how to be parents. That's almost impossible.

bluGill• 1 year ago

That idealism isn't how families happened. Traditoinally you split the farm when the sons (it need not be sons, but sexism generally comes in somehow as someone needs to leave home for genetic diverstiy reasons and the entire culture needs to follow the pattern in general so lets just talk about sons with the understanding that sometimes it was daughters) until the farm was too small to support the family at which point the oldest son got the farm and the other kids were sent off on their own. If you were lucky enough to be the oldest son you got to stay home and raise your own family with your cousins nearby in the village - but for your brothers who knows where they went, if they had a family it wasn't in sight and they didn't have the family.

jcranmer• 1 year ago

Traditoinally you split the farm when the sons (it need not be sons, but sexism generally comes in somehow as someone needs to leave home for genetic diverstiy reasons and the entire culture needs to follow the pattern in general so lets just talk about sons with the understanding that sometimes it was daughters)

The anthropological term for the kind of arrangement you're talking about is "patrilocality." Matrilocality is where it's the daughters instead of the sons, and it's much more the norm in the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and somewhat more sporadically in Africa). The really fun part is that matrilocality does not imply matrilineality (let alone matriarchy), so you can have a society that is both patrilineal and matrilocal.

breckinloggins• 1 year ago

I wonder if some of it is a good old fashioned marketing problem. "Communes" in America seem to be far-left or far-right coded, with little in between (and always - it appears - with a subtle suggestion that you're getting a nice cult along with your little village).

I don't see any reason it has to be that way, though. It's more an accident of history.

I probably would have chosen to have children if I grew up in a culture where "a bunch of people living close together and helping each other out" was the norm. I didn't, though. I grew up in 1980s "Superman and McDonalds and the American Way" suburbs. Having kids in that environment always looked like a nightmare to me, so I didn't.

I also suspect this has an extrovert / introvert component. The super social people around me constructed these little "ephemeral villages" out of nought but thin air, smiles, backyard barbecues, and PTA meetings. Or so it seemed to me. I was always too introverted to do this, though.

__turbobrew__• 1 year ago

Do all the men have to be effeminate to live in community houses? Judging by the pictures there surely is a … type

mattlondon2• 1 year ago

Because other people do it wrong :)

My own mother and of course my mother in law are absolute liabilities with my 5 and 3 year olds. They continually and repeatedly break our rules.

It's not unsafe per se, but it's just high-risk things for no reason apart from what we believe is just willful defiance from the grandparents. E.g. letting them out into the garden with no direct supervision, when there is no physical barrier from them getting into the road etc. "Oh lighten up! It's just a busy street with loads of distracted drivers in 2+ ton vehicles going over the speed limit! What's the problem!"

As a result, they're not usually left alone with the kids unless we can avoid it.

Ultimately if any harm were to come, I want to know that it was my own fault effectively, and not because I suspected that some other adult was not paying enough attention, or could have tried harder/made more effort to stop it, or was deliberately not doing things how I like it to be done. If it was under your own watch or your partner's watch that something bad happened then you can be pretty sure that the harm was unavoidable and not because someone else has other concepts of safety and risk for your offspring.

micromacrofoot• 1 year ago

I want to raise them around a wealth of adults who model different ways to be successful and happy.

Right this is why I don't live in a community house, a lot of my kids' friend's parents suck ass. Who gets to live in the community house with the alcoholic soccer mom or the cop who got fired for threatening to kill someone at a baseball game.

mattlondon2• 1 year ago

Some people quoted sound like they only have one baby.

Something I found was that different kids are, well, different.

For my own kids there is a huge difference in temperament. One is chilled and happy with basically anyone, another is extremely highly-strung. We raised them the same as far as we can tell, but one is very easy to look after and spend time with, the other is a fucking nightmare that no sane person would volunteer to spend time with (...or at least would not volunteer for the second time...).

So being able to "have dinner with our friends every night" I think comes down a lot to the individual kid and not the environment. You may have just got lucky and got a laid-back kid who just goes along with things and is happy hanging out with random adults. They're not all like that.

D13Fd• 1 year ago

Five kids here, and I’ve found the same thing. Even though we’ve raised them all the same way, they are each unique individuals with very different behavior.

Before kids I was very much on the “nuture” side of nature vs. nuture, but now I think a lot of it is random, just a genetic lottery.

mzs• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

Mikhail_Edoshin• 1 year ago

B. F. Skinner dreamed that people can be scientifically (behaviourally) trained to live together and described his vision in "Walden Two". It is interesting that the book spawned quite a few attempts to do that and some have survived longer than usual. I think one such community still functions someplace in Mexica, but do not know how close it remains to Skinner's ideas.

Monks live together in harsh conditions just fine. This is a specific community, of course. Yet this is also the answer: you need something bigger than yourself to submit your wishes to.

hatly22• 1 year ago

Is that true that most Indian families live in multigenerational compunds? It sounds more of a upper middle situation to me, where a multigenerational family has enclosed or walled in land.

Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?

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