and comedians who told MIL jokes.

grandmothers made us the animals we are. blocking them out was a bad idea.
then when we expanded beyond clan, we flourished. but we seem to suck at all that now.

i think we are experiencing a new burst of human evolution right now. i am not hopeful.

to the moon alice.

the kernel of truth is that men resent old women w power of any kind. the bigger the asshole, the bigger the beef. the bigger the gang he hang w, the bigger the beef will get.
grandmothers changed what we were. some guys have never gotten over it. but they are the natural counterweight to male violence.

disney didnt invent stories about crones. it's hard wired.

it's more about tribes than clan, tho, really. that was a big bump in human evolution. expanding the tribe. and it is just an evolutionary fact that tribes work for humans, and we can make a tribe based on anything.

The line between helpful or not is blurred within comedy. But I generally think comedy reflects back what it sees, so it lags behind more than it drives forward while giving space to see behavior anew. I’ve only experienced the Honeymooners well after the fact of its original airing, but nonetheless, I can get where you’re coming from.

Tribes and all? I’m pretty fond of my chosen family

when jung talks about archetypes, i hear- genetic roles in the tribe.

when i started my farm i ran into a lot of silly bullshit that i summed up as- some people seem to think this is a disney movie.
people laughed, then i gave them a short history lesson about what real people do to real crones.

Hard to have an extended family of 15 people in a railroad apt.

Now, in fairly poor suburbs with big houses, it's still seen--family across the street has grandmother, parents, and 4 kids, plus one of two kids' significant others and one of those couple's babies. Crowded, but they seem okay with it for now.

Thank you so much for this, Recursion. I'm going to use it in my classes on the 50s, 60s and 70s. But there should be discussion groups around it. This article could help policy makers if we could trust those on the other side to do anything about it except banning divorce and contraception.

families were still the standard, even in rural areas and labor needs were rarely as large as what he describes which sounds like a clan, village or plantation, far beyond the 'Waltons' even, lol.

The family unit was normally a husband, wife and children with the occasional grandparents. Adding in single persons ('strays' wth?) such as an aunt, uncle, cousin or servant was uncommon except in unusual circumstances and in areas with larger farming or ranching operations, more space and greater need for labor.

My ancestors who lived in rural areas had large families, for example my grandparents had eight children but there were no others in the family household. In two generations there was a single sister/aunt who worked and lived on her own, quite independently in the city and one brother/uncle who was able to live on his own with some support since he was blind.

Going back even more years, I know that at Monticello when I first saw it as a child, the guides referred to extended family members of Thomas Jefferson who lived at the large plantation, an entire community really, c. 1780-1830.

Included in the household was Jefferson's disabled younger sister, and his daughter's husband with health problems who lived separately from the large main house.
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> "People needed a lot of labor to run these enterprises. It was not uncommon for married couples to have seven or eight children. In addition, there might be stray aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as unrelated servants, apprentices, and farmhands. (On some southern farms, of course, enslaved African"...).

Multigenerational living was very common before the middle of the 20th century.

families in the U.S. 1950-1965. At the time we had well paying jobs with benefits, unions and a stronger social safety net, all of which benefited white men the most. Since then wages have been kept down, unions have been broken, jobs were outsourced and the social safety net has been dismantled, all in the name of holy free- market economics and Reaganomics.

The debt that young people have to take on for a college degree since the 1980s is robbery and doesn't exist in other advanced countries. Prior to Reagan, the U.S. had affordable college tuition costs; in three generations none of us had to take out loans. And the cost of homes in the last 20 years is prohibitive for most young people and with the recessions and 'gig jobs' lately no wonder many of them are living with parents, delaying marriage, buying a home and starting a family, the case with a nephew.

Much of the way people live, especially in one household has to do with finances and economic need; it's not all about the social and personal aspects of 'family life' with children and grands, or 'selfish single career women and some men,' more. ~ On this topic, I've done a considerable amount of genealogy and family history research and worked at the National Archives. I used U.S. Census records and other historical materials, some dating to the mid- 19th c., centered on the Mid Atlantic region and including newer immigrants from Germany and other European areas. None of the records showed a high number of complex, multiple generation families with 'strays' and servants. That would have stood out.
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Note, glad to hear Brooks supports reparations, he should. I'm on the traditional side in some areas, and am actually in favor of cross generation family groups and shared households and work. Children and adults benefit greatly from being close to and growing together with cousins, grands, aunts and uncles. To me the prototypical 1950s 'nuclear family' was a bit exclusionary and cold, at least the way it was often depicted on television.
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- NYT, Multigenerational Households: The Benefits, and Peril, By Ann Carrns, Aug. 12, 2016.

Even though the recession officially ended seven years ago, a housing trend seen during the downturn has endured: The number of multigenerational homes continues to grow.

A record 60.6 million people, or 19 percent of the American population, lived with multiple generations under one roof in 2014, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of federal census data. That compares with 17 percent in 2009, the year the recession ended, and 18 percent three years later, in 2012.

The share of households with multiple adult generations has been growing since hitting a low of 12 percent in 1980. The trend greatly accelerated during the 2007-9 recession, when high unemployment pushed younger people, in particular, back home to live with their parents. The question was whether the trend would ease, as the economic recovery made it more feasible for people to strike out on their own. So far, the shift shows no sign of abating.

“The striking thing is that this really has persisted after the recession,” said D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer and editor at Pew Research Center. “Perhaps this trend is here to stay.”

There are many economic benefits to living with parents or grandparents as an adult, Ms. Cohn said: If you’ve lost a job, moving in with family keeps a roof over your head and helps keep you out of poverty, and those with student debt can pay down loans more easily. “All of those things are still true,” she added.

Another possible reason for the trend, Pew’s report noted, is that the Asian and Hispanic population is growing more rapidly than the white population, and those groups are more likely to live in multigenerational households.

John L. Graham, professor emeritus at the business school at the University of California, Irvine, and co-author of “All in the Family: A Practical Guide to Successful Multigenerational Living,” said he saw the trend as part of a return to interdependence within the extended family. “This is the way people have always lived around the world,” he said. The economic benefits of sharing services can be substantial, Mr. Graham said: Grandparents and older family members can provide child care, while younger adults can care for elderly relatives...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/12/your-money/multigenerational-households-financial-advice.html

Well, at least until this month that was true.

This idea of the 1950s as some golden age is crap.

My grandfather was the second-youngest of fifteen. My grandmother was the youngest of ten.

They had two children, my mother and my uncle.

My parents had three.

My sister has two. My brother has no children, and neither do I.