5 ms·

Depends where, but in western Europe for the last thousand years, probably not. I think the best data is for England, and centuries before the industrial revol

• watwut 6y ago
  > Depends where, but in western Europe for the last thousand years, probably not. 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.
  • iguy 6y ago
    There is pretty good data on this from pre-industrial England. 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.
    • watwut 6y ago
      You don't know much about European history and even less about Russia, isn't it?