The change in coexistence: the decrease in intergenerational households

We have previously talked about how one of the changes in how old people live nowadays has to do with the desire for independence and permanence at home. We pointed out on that occasion the desire to stay in the familiar environment in front of the idea of ​​moving to the children's home. As we have also seen, the option of living in a residence is unwanted and that the preference for the home-house is clear and majority. But with whom do people over 65 live in Spain? In homes, yes, but how are those homes? We already pointed out that the option of living together as a couple was the predominant one and that intergenerational households had been greatly reduced. Let's analyze today how is the evolution of intergenerational households and the trend shown in recent years.

What is an intergenerational home? If by household we understood (according to the definition of the National Institute of Statistics) the group of residents living in the same dwelling, by intergenerational household we mean those households in which several generations of the same family (of blood and politics) coexist. For example, grandparents, children and grandchildren. Other relatives could live (uncles, a cousin) but what we are interested in today is talking about family cohabitation, taking as axis people older than 65 years.

A household of a generation would be that made up of the elderly person, or the elderly person and his or her partner. A home of two generations would be one in which children live together, and in three generations would also be the grandchildren (always taking as the epicenter of family relationships to the elderly). The homes of more than three generations, very scarce at present, would have the presence of a great-grandchild, for example (by the way, we still have to talk about the grandness and how the arrival of the grandchildren is lived).

The change in the patterns of coexistence is one of the most interesting when we want to talk about current social changes. It relates, how could it be otherwise, with aging and with the increase in divorces, but also marks a change in the patterns of relationship and coexistence within families, which is always a very controversial issue. We tend to idealize family relationships in the past (any past time was better). Not living together does not necessarily mean a decrease in the relationship and sometimes, even, it can mean the improvement of it. The frictions of coexistence can put personal relationships in difficulty; it happens to us with the couple (the one that the poet Rafael de León said we had found on the street - there is only one mother and I found you on the street-) but also with the children when they are adults. And of course, with our parents when we no longer wish to stick to their rules or customs. There is a tremendous idealization of family relationships in the past, but, as we discussed in another post, it was sometimes the force of custom (one's own and one's social) that forced one to maintain a type of relationship that was not necessarily desired. I also believe that relaxation in the forms of modern society allows for fuller and more satisfactory family and personal relationships, inasmuch as they are chosen. On the other hand, not living in the same house does not necessarily mean living far away: in Spain we tend to remain close to our parents and relatives.

To exemplify this change in households we can refer to the Population and Housing Censuses. As we already know, it is done every ten years, so the most recent information refers to the situation of 2011. What we are interested in right now is analyzing how a change occurs, and how intergenerational households are reduced (or not). For this, having three dates (1991, 2001 and 2011) observing the percentage change is enough to give us an idea about the trend in Spain.

But first, and to contextualize the percentages, let's see how the number of households increases during this time, as does the population. In the general population (without making distinctions by age), households increased from 11,852,075 in 1991 to 18,083,685 in 2011.

Graph 1: Total number of households in Spain. 1991, 2001 and 2011.

Source: own elaboration from data Population and Housing Censuses 1991, 2001 and 2011. National Institute of Statistics.

As we can see, the total number of homes increases considerably. What happens with multigenerational homes? Does the composition of the home change in what refers to the coexistence of generations?

Table 1: Evolution number of generations living in the home (%). Spain, 1991, 2001 and 2011.

Source: Own elaboration based on 1991, 2001 and 2011 Censuses.

The first thing we notice is that single-generation households increase their importance in distribution, while the weight of households of three or more generations is reduced to less than half. The homes of two generations (there is a coexistence father / mother-child) experience a decline of more than 11 points since 1991. That is, there is a trend towards less coexistence between generations.

Households in general reduce their size and not only because there is less intergenerational coexistence (fewer grandchildren living with their grandparents, although the figure was not as high in the past, as we see in the data) but the generations decrease. We have fewer children (in addition to having them later) and that has a key influence on the size of the home.

The paradox of the above is that the cycle of households is longer, so we spend more time with the children (who emancipated later) but the longer life expectancy means that we also live longer alone. Thus, the change that Spanish society shows in household forms has been mainly experienced by the elderly (again, leading social change) that go from being part of large homes in their childhood to star in the boom of single-person households and monogenerational homes in old age.