Multi-Generational Households Quotes

I remember my own life as a small boy, son of Jewish immigrants, in a janitor's flat on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side of New York City. My father made pants and doubled as janitor of a tenement - before he made janitoring at $30 a month, plus rooms, a career.

I don't design houses with the nuclear family idea because I don't believe in it as a concept.

In working class districts, you had several families living together in the one house, and it was very difficult to get a house, because the politicians who controlled housing were doing so in a very discriminatory fashion.

Being a father of three children and grandfather to nine, I do think that this thing called 'parenting' is becoming increasingly difficult.

There can be problems with extended families, and it can get a little close for comfort. But for the younger generations, it's clear that this option is becoming almost as appealing as living alone.

The question that I can't shake - it's this question that keeps coming up for me - is What does the shared home of the future look like? People are sharing homes at a rate that no one ever predicted, but residences and homes weren't designed for it. They were designed around ideas of privacy and separation.

In Europe, it's common to hear about young professionals living with their parents. With the continent's high rents and taxes and its population density, it makes sense.

If I close my eyes, I can remember the first apartment where I lived with my family in Newark, N.J., in the late 1930s. The rooms were lined up like train cars - you had to go through one to get to another - and there wasn't any heat or hot water.

My childhood was spent in a typical Mumbai chawl at Girgaum and I studied at the nearby St. Sebastian School.

Let's bring back grandmothers! A real family consists of three generations. It's time Americans stopped worrying about interference and being a burden on the children and regrouped under one roof.

I grew up in Alsace - in Strasbourg, by the canal; the family business was coal handling. It was still in the days when three generations would live under the same roof. There were 15 people for lunch, 20 for dinner.

Sting and I have six kids between us. A lot of members of our family have ADHD and dyslexia.

I've always been interested in alternative family structures.

I come from a very big family from every economic background. Some of the streets I talk about, I've actually walked on because I have family from there. Jamaica has so many contradictions.

I've got eight children, 10 grandkids. I have friends over all the time, and I like to cook.

My older brothers and sisters have kids and families.

My sister was such a young mom (as was my mom), and she loved the help that I was more than willing to give.

I grew up on the south side of Chicago, most of that time on welfare. My mother and sister and I used to live with my grandparents and various cousins. We shared a two-bedroom tenement, and the three of us slept in one of those bedrooms and had a set of bunk beds.

People are going to be living quite soon for 100 years. Our idea of how a family works no longer applies. It's no good saying you're going to have children for 15 years and then you're going to retire and have hobbies, because you've got 40 more years to go after 60 and you're in good health until 90 or something.

My dad was born in Chicago in 1908... his parents came from Russia. They settled in Chicago, where they lived in a little tiny grocery store with eight or nine children - in the backroom all together - and my grandmother got the idea to go into the movie business.

I wanted to get us a place of our own with a little bit more space. The kitchen is just huge, because my mom... lives there, man, and she loves being in the kitchen.

My parents both came from working-class backgrounds, my father particularly. He came from a very poor family, 12 of them lived in a little three-bedroom terrace house in Fulham, it was very small with an outside loo and a tin bath on the scullery wall.

I grew up in the countryside with the factory here, my house 200 metres away, my grandma's house 50 metres away, in a kind of old-style Italian society where everyone works for the family business, everyone lives nearby, and the people you spend your time with are your family.

I am a member of the 'sandwich' generation, that group that must simultaneously care for elderly parents and support children.