Report Finds Shift Toward Extended Families

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: March 18, 2010

The NewYork Times

The extended family is making something of a comeback, thanks to delayed marriage, immigration and recession-induced job losses and foreclosures that have forced people to double-up under one roof, an analysis of Census Bureau figures

has found.The analysis also found that the proportion of people 65 and older who live alone, which had been rising steeply for nearly a century — from 6 percent in 1900 to 29 percent in 1990 — declined slightly, to 27 percent. At the same time, the share of older people living in multigenerational families, which plummeted to 17 percent in 1980 from 57 percent in 1900, rose to 20 percent.

While the pre-World War II extended family may have been idealized as a nurturing cocoon, the latest manifestation is too recent and a result of too many factors, positive and negative, to be romanticized.

“It calls to mind one of the famous lines in American poetry, from Robert Frost: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,’ ” Mr. Taylor said. “I don’t know that I can offer a value judgment of whether it’s good or bad. It reflects our time.”

The decline of extended families coincided with an exodus to the suburbs, where many young adults preferred to raise their children, and the enactment of Social Security and Medicare, which made older adults more financially independent.The latest overall shift coincides with a number of demographic changes, including delayed marriage, greater longevity, more grown children (the baby boomers) with whom the elderly can share a household, Medicare cuts enacted in 1997 and the growing number of immigrants, who are more likely than native-born Americans to live in extended families.

The shift appears to have been accelerated by the recession. In 2008, at the beginning of the recession and the latest year for which figures are available, 2.6 million more Americans lived in a multigenerational household than did the year before. Perhaps as a result of job losses and foreclosures that have affected young adults, in particular, a majority of multigenerational households that include a family member 65 or older are headed by that older adult.

The growth of extended families has also been facilitated by another phenomenon: the average single-family home is about twice as big as it was several decades ago. The shift to extended families was evident across the board, but it was more widespread among blacks and Asian- and Hispanic-Americans than among non-Hispanic whites. While the share of 65-to-84-year-olds living alone began to decline, as Americans lived longer and healthier lives, the proportion of those 85 and older living by themselves grew, to 39 percent in 2008 from 22 percent in 1970. Among adults 65 and over, half are married, a share that has remained fairly constant since 1900. Among the unmarried, a century ago, only 1 percent were divorced or separated and 8 in 10 were widowed; today, nearly 1 in 4 are divorced and 6 in 10 are widowed. Nearly half the 49 million Americans living in extended families are in households made up of two adult generations, with the youngest adult at least 25 years old. Almost as many live in households with three or more generations.

The Problem: Diagram

Excerpt from 'Why Does Modernism Refuse to Die?' Session 3. Modernism and Research.pg 95

"Descriptive Programming in Contemporary Modernism" - Taeg Nishimoto, Texas A&M University

In order for the diagram to exist, there has to be more than two components involved. In architectural terminology, they are from the dialectically related components such as “inside/outside” “public/private” “service/serviced”, etc. to more articulated components such as “entrance” “living room” “waiting area” “lounge”, etc. Therefore, a diagram relies entirely on the definition of each articulated component, which are usually attributed to the spatial conditioning. These spatial terminologies are used to categorize the relative characterization of the articulated spaces. They are relative, because the articulation occurs in different degrees of clarity, as we have other terminologies such as “semi-public” or “living/dining room”, etc. The greater the degree of the articulation, the more impossible it becomes to define, as in the case of “breakfast counter (what about other meals taken at the same place)” or “relaxing area”, etc. In fact, these articulations become somewhat a combination of objects or intended activities and the ambiguous identification of space, such as “bed” “daybed” “reception” “work”, etc. plus “area” “corner” “space” “room”, etc. thus the convoluted invention of “daybed corner”, “reception space”, etc.

Living room, for example, has an inherent definition problem, especially in relationship to “family room” in the same context. “What is a living room?” creates layers of problems in the minds of our daily life. In fact, the accompanying book of “Un-private House” exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Terence Riley in 1999, uses the word “living area” as well as “bedroom” and “work space”, as the standard index for the showcased different houses. We are also witnessing the symptom these days that the real estate new terminology for the living room is “great room”. Now what is that supposed to mean?

There is an additional way in which programmatic articulation works, and that is to characterize the activities involved, such as “sleeping” “eating” “working”, etc. However, these categorizations are inherently crude, since they require instantly more conditioning to become legitimate for articulation, such as “sleeping for half an hour after the lunch (napping)” or “eating breakfast by oneself”, etc. At the same time, they also involve a particular temporal dimension: “eating breakfast” for either 10 minutes or 2 hours are totally different situations to be articulated separately. That format continues until all the articulated components become quantifiably overwhelming, and there will be another dimension of generalization/categorization all over again.

CANADIAN FAMILIES

THESIS MARKET

The Changing Faces of Toronto. With a drastic demographic shift on the horizon , will our diversity remain a badge or become a burden? by Joe Friesen

From Saturday's Globe and MailPublished on Friday, Mar. 12, 2010 8:59PM ESTLast updated on Saturday, Mar. 13, 2010 3:19AM EST

Toronto once used vagrancy laws to harass Italian immigrants who wanted to stand outdoors and chat. It balked at sidewalk cafés and erected signs that said “No dogs or Jews allowed on the beach.”It was known as the Belfast of Canada, a place where the Orange Order and the Anglo-Saxon establishment reigned supreme.But repressive, staid, boring Toronto is in the midst of a stunning transformation. Today, people from all corners of the globe live side by side. They compete for jobs and space and influence. And the city hums along with a minimum of fuss. But there are those who warn that all may not be as we hope. They talk of troubling signs. There are neighbourhoods – ethnic enclaves – where immigrants need never learn to speak English or French, where they could live entire lives and rarely encounter someone from outside their ethnic group, the doubters say.The economic downturn has so far been relatively mild, but recessions often lead to tension over immigration. If things fall apart, will the city's motto, “Diversity our strength,” hold true?

THE FIRST GENERATION.Toronto opened its arms to Raj Jhajj on the day he immigrated in 1991 and embraced him with the half-hearted enthusiasm of a city that had been through this before. The young man from the polluted, industrial heart of the Indian Punjab had only eight dollars in his pocket and, predictably, a dream of a better life.He had worked as a tool-and-die maker in India, a highly specialized manufacturing skill, but Toronto was wary. It was the height of the recession and hard for anyone to find work, let alone an immigrant stymied by the Catch-22 of having no Canadian experience. Toronto accommodated him among the South Asian diaspora on its western edge. He drove a cab. He worked lonely shifts as a security guard. He struggled. He survived.Four years into his Canadian sojourn, Toronto succumbed and offered him the job he dreamed of, working as a machinist at the Chrysler plant in Brampton. It gave him the stability to settle down and start a family. He's since taken an undergraduate and graduate degree by distance education. At 45, he's a pillar of his community who raised thousands of dollars for a new hospital and pressured governments to get it built. He's active in politics and narrowly missed winning a federal Liberal nomination.When he thinks of what he left behind, he can only chuckle at the luxurious lives his children lead.“I was living in poverty that was like hell,” he said. “I used to beg to eat. These guys, I have to force them to eat.”Now he almost takes for granted that his children will go to university, graduate to a profession and join the establishment.But if there's one thing that nags at Mr. Jhajj, it's the concern that his children aren't getting the full Canadian experience. When they moved into their Brampton neighbourhood, the area was what he calls “mainstream,” a more or less representative mix of the Canadian mosaic. But over the last dozen years, the mainstream has moved out, he said, and now the street is almost entirely South Asian. It brings many advantages, he said, but he'd prefer to see the visible minority population distributed more evenly across the country.“I think it bothers others Canadians, which I can feel,” he said. “I want to see a Canadian city as a Canadian city where people are all together. … If Brampton keeps going this way we won't see the difference between living in Brampton and living in Asia, and that I don't like.”

ESTABLISHING COMMUNITIES.Ethnic enclaves have been a part of Toronto's history from the outset, and they've always been a source of worry for the Anglo establishment. Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney makes a regular point of discussing the need to ensure that Canada doesn't become a country of ethnic silos or parallel communities. The first large group of ethnic immigrants to establish themselves in Toronto were the Jews, who lived in the Ward neighbourhood that centred roughly on present-day City Hall. Ryerson professor Myer Siemiatycki said the Ward, which was demolished to make way for downtown, was typically treated as a grave threat to the norms of the city and condemned as a slum.The Italians who established themselves on College Street were treated with the same suspicion. As were the Chinese in Chinatown. Today, those former ethnic enclaves are celebrated as colourful, desirable parts of the city.“It shows how the concerns of the past fade,” said University of Toronto sociologist Jeffrey Reitz. “People who were foreigners or strangers are now ‘us,' and that makes you optimistic that those arriving today will down the road be considered ‘us' and we'll look at the enclaves, the Chinese, the South Asian and Afro-Caribbean, the way we now look at the Italian enclaves or the Jewish enclaves, as just historic remnants of immigration history.”As Prof. Reitz argues, there are sound reasons for communities to agglomerate in a certain area. There's comfort to be had among those who can easily understand one's language and experience, and there's also the ease of finding places of worship and familiar goods for sale.“The settlement of new immigrants is vastly facilitated by the presence of ethnic communities that perform all sorts of social-service functions which if they didn't exist would fall to governments to provide,” Prof. Reitz said. “This is really private citizens solving public-policy problems through market behaviour.”

THE INCOME DILEMMA.The market poses other policy problems, however, that bode ill for the Toronto of 2031.Don Drummond, chief economist at TD Bank, said the evidence is overwhelming that recent immigrants are not integrating into the labour market as well as their predecessors.“Within five years [of arrival] immigrants used to make more than the Canadian-born, and every generation of immigrants used to make more than the previous one. Since 1981, all of that stuff is just falling further and further away,” Mr. Drummond said. “Immigrants are never catching up to Canadian earnings … even though they're better educated.”What changed over that period is that, with the end of racial discrimination in immigration policy in the late 1960s, Asia became far and away the largest source of immigrants. Roughly 75 to 80 per cent of immigrants over that period were visible minorities.

THE SECOND GENERATION. Even the children of more recent immigrants, who in some cases outperform the Canadian-born in school and are more likely to go on to post-secondary education, also lagged the Canadian-born in earnings in one study led by Mr. Drummond.“You hate to say it's racism. You could say maybe they don't have the context other people have. But yeah, it's certainly there as a possible explanation,” he said.Prof. Siemiatycki also underlines the challenge of ensuring the second generation has a platform to prosperity.“Immigrants expect to encounter adversity. They tend to be very forgiving of the host society,” he said. “With the second generation, legitimately, they will be less forgiving than their parents. They were born here. They went to school here. They have every reason to believe they're full and equal Canadians. When their experience suggests otherwise, they will have a bigger fall than their parents.”A little more than a quarter of Toronto's population will be second-generation Canadians in 2031, and about half will be first generation (meaning they were born elsewhere), according to Statscan predictions.

THE NEW DIFFICULTY: BLENDING IN.What's different for the present wave of immigrants, as opposed to earlier generations, is that they and their children may not blend in as easily as “Canadians” even years after their arrival, or years after being born in Canada. The issue of race, raised by the very fact that counting visible minorities is considered a job for the national statistics agency, may be ever present in their lives.Shabnum Budhwani, an Indo-Canadian mother of two who immigrated a little more than a decade ago, likes the fact that visible minorities are counted, but she hates the term.“First, it refers to your colour. You're being referred to by your skin, instead of as a person. Second, you're a minority … so it creates a suggestion that there are two kinds of Canadians.”Her daughters, both university students, consider themselves entirely Canadian. The same is true for Mr. Jhajj's kids, who are still in the public-school system, which Mr. Jhajj raves about as the best aspect of life in Canada.Many experts say that the ties of tolerance and understanding that Toronto has more or less successfully nurtured are forged in the city's schools and on its playing fields.

COPING WITH BACKLASH.However, Mr. Jhajj said he worries though that, should the Canadian economy get considerably worse, there will be a backlash against visible minorities, whether they're immigrants or long-time Canadians.“As long as Canada is growing there won't be problems with immigration. As soon as we run into economic problems, people will be looking for scapegoats,” he said. From time to time, moments of tension arise. There were the attacks on Asian fishermen north of Toronto, and allegations of racial profiling of blacks by Toronto police. But polls show that Canadians are still very favourably disposed toward high levels of immigration and the agitation over Muslim dress has so far been largely contained to Quebec. On the question of how Toronto is coping so far, Prof. Siemiatycki sums it up as a series of successes and warning signs.

“In terms of day-to-day life, this is a very civil, harmonious and diverse city. The number of daily exchanges that cross boundaries of race, language, religion, nationality, et cetera, are nothing short of extraordinary,” he said. “In an age of border crossings, the world needs examples of cities that can make it work.”