Multigenerational living is a historical norm until societies reach a certain level of economic output and then people tend to switch to paid childcare. It als

Multigenerational living is a historical norm until societies reach a certain level of economic output and then people tend to switch to paid childcare. It also only works well when people have kids at a certain age across generations so that health active years & need years align. I saw this with my dads family that came over from the old country and had a wide range of ages. The oldest had live-in grandma help raise not only their own kids, but because of modern American medicine and old world early marriage/kids.. she helped raise her own great grand children. So in a total boomer move, that aunt got free childcare and never stopped working, even as she used her own mother to take care of her grandchildren so that her kids could also have free childcare with no cost to her. And in the end when the benefits no longer accrued to her, she put grandma in a home.. My father however was a decade older than that sister and had kids at a more American age. So me & my siblings experience with that same grandmother was mostly of her last decade of ill health and dementia. Had she lived with us it would have mostly been my mother taking care of her mother in law, begrudgingly.