A house, two cars, a healthy relationship ,a career, livable wage, 2.5 kids, a dog. ya know, the expectation many children were told in school.
Everything I hear on social media says this is a myth.
A house, two cars, a healthy relationship ,a career, livable wage, 2.5 kids, a dog. ya know, the expectation many children were told in school.
Everything I hear on social media says this is a myth.
I have this, and to be honest, it’s exhausting to maintain.
I think that’s why you see social media push back about it being a myth.
The idea of “normal” that we pretend is true started after WW2. The US was highly unionized, highly industrialized, and most other countries were either former colonies that had been gutted economically, or were European powers that were decimated by the war.
We stepped into the manufacturing void, and suddenly one income was adequate to provide for a family. That’s not the case anymore. If your family happens to have resources now, you can maintain the semblance of that lifestyle, but you will probably need two incomes and will always be at risk of losing it.
We absolutely must, as a society, change our conception of “normal” and stop penalizing people for trying something new. Going back to some old ways may have benefit as well.
For example, multigenerational housing would solve a huge number of my problems. I want a kid, but I don’t want to pay a second mortgage for daycare. I can keep myself clothed and fed, but cleaning the house suffers. If you have more people under one roof, then you have opportunities for economies of scale that just don’t work when we all live in our own cloistered enclosures. There’s more resilience in that sort of system, and we need to be engaging with ideas like this to land gracefully as the world continues to fall apart.
My brother and I live together. A lot of people think it’s weird but it’s been great for both of us. I worked part time while going to college while he footed most of the bills. Now he’s a full time student and I’m paying for everything. We get all the household benefits of a married couple (shared chores, lower food bill, cheaper housing per person, mixed finances, etc) without the risks.
Success in early adulthood heavily depends on having familial support, especially from your parents. We don’t have that, but together we can still pool resources and do better than if we were alone.