Most places were much closer to equilibrium, with about the same number of people farming a given district from one generation to the next. Something more like 3 adult children, one of whom never has a family, is what you should imagine. And then it's easy to picture multigenerational households being common. As they were, in many (but not all) parts of the world.
Absolutely not - and I have direct experience of this.
First: multi generational households are extremely common.
Second: people, including children, spend tons of time with other people outside of the parent-child relation. Relatives, often cousins, granparents, and neighbors.
This is still the case for most agrarian societies outside of the English-speaking world.
The obsession with the hyper nuclear and exclusionary family is very american.
Everyone who has direct experience of this time has been dead for half a century at least.
>First: multi generational households are extremely common.
Define "extremely common". What percent of people in a given society in a given time period do you think grew up in one?
>Second: people, including children, spend tons of time with other people outside of the parent-child relation. Relatives, often cousins, granparents, and neighbors.
Nobody is debating this. Of course prior to the industrial revolution people moved around less so your friends and neighbors are more likely to be your cousins and if grandma is nearby she'll wind up babysitting more. I don't see this as being meaningful to this discussion since they are outside one's household.
>This is still the case for most agrarian societies outside of the English-speaking world.
Back this up with numbers. Grandma has to live somewhere, but for an child in any given agrarian society to be more likely than not to have have grandma living under the same roof birth rates need to be low to the point of apocalyptic.
>The obsession with the hyper nuclear and exclusionary family is very american.
Is the fact that it's an American obsession supposed to be a bad thing?
Yes, multi generational households were far, far more common from the grandparent's perspective in the past because elderly parents living alone was far, far less common. But from the perspective of the child growing up they still far from the default. The birth rates are simply too high for them to have been default. Nobody here is saying mutligenerational households are bad but the people who think they were default have a skewed understanding of history. Calling something that just has to happen by mathematical necessity "unnatural" (i.e. the comment my initial comment replied to) seems a little over the top.
TIL: I'm dead.
I think the best data is for England, and centuries before the industrial revolution, the pattern is very strongly not multi-generational. Young couples expected to set up new households together, not to live with their parents.
(The royal family & such of course were different, and still are.)
This is definitely not true. At minimum you placed span from 1020, which means middle age, feudalism, powerty before French revolution and after, industrial revolution which meant completely overcrowded housing.
Living in multi generational household was normal, expectation to care about parents was normal. Building new house at the time of marriage where couple would live alone was not the expectation - at minimum it would be unaffordable for huge parts of population. Plus your social system was family, whether in old age or in sickness.
What you are asserting is what historians widely believed before they actually looked at the data, around the 1960s. They said this by looking at the more recent past of less developed places (like rural Russia, pre-1917) and assuming that the far past of England looked the same, and thus that nuclear families became common only recently. And they were wrong.
Of course, there are many places even further away than Russia. Lots of other cultures did have multi-generational families as the pattern, and many still do.
When 4/6 of your sons grow to adulthood you can't live in the same household as all of them. You live with one of them (probably the most or least functional one). 2 of the others have their own farms (one probably gets yours, maybe you split your farm between them if it's big enough) so you probably pick one of them. The 4th you never see because he runs a business making cart wheels or something in the next village over. The 5th left town to get a job in the port by the sea when he was 15 and you haven't seen him since. And of your daughters that survived childhood will all move in with their husbands. If you run the numbers for them it's the same thing.
Multi generational households don't work at scale simply because of the numbers involved. Anyone pretending that that's how most people lived prior to the industrial revolution doesn't understand how many kids people had back then. At best you might get 10-25% of households having a grandparent around depending on the infant mortality rate at any given time. The birth rates and life expectancy just don't support more. 10-25% certainly isn't abnormal, but implying it is the default is Olympic level mental gymnastics.