Joint Families - The positives & negatives of being together - Page 1

Hi All;

Does anyone have any points to make in this regard.

Do you mean by joint family? all brothers and their families living together--would be so much fun for kids but tough on the adults maybe. Or just living with grandparents?

Ideally joint families sound great. But all members should have "space" and be able to do their own thing  as well.

Also, In think you give some and take some. Cannot have best of both worlds. Depends on what is important. I want the kids to be close to the extended family and want to do some things with all and some just a few. Maybe what is ideal is upstairs / downstairs arrangement or grandparents living closeby and everyone doing some things together and some things separately.

I am wondering how others look at this?

Hello

We live with my mother in law in an old family house. Joint families per se work for kids only if there are cousins living with them. A grand parent is also good if there is a bonding between the grandchild and the grandparent. But unfortunately for me my mother in law is not a very "child friendly person" so my daugther has not developed any special bond with her. But I guess it might have been different had we stayed with my parents because she does share a very close bond with them.

One of the practical problems of living with a grand parent is that disciplining a child using a certain technique might be difficult. For e.g when my daughter was young, my husband and I wanted to ignore her if she was throwing a tantrum ( usually her tantrum throwing involved screaming and crying). We used to leave the room when this was happening so that she realized that she was not getting the attention that she sought. My mother in law however used to feel that a screaming or a crying child had to be given the required attention and would rush to her when this happend. So really our strategy did not work. Another instance is our trying to teach her to keep her things in their place. We had decided that we would leave things as they were if she did not put them back. But my mother in law felt that the house was cluttered and would ask our domestic help to pick up the toys or whatever was left behind.

So from experience I can only tell you that a joint family in my case did not work. For joint families to work you need to have a shared vision with regard to child rearing methods which is difficult in the best of circumstances between two generations!

Regards

Meera

We have a joint family with one grandma at home and the other set of grandparents 1/2 a km away (and are thus here a lot).

Sucess of this arrangement, totally depends on the attitudes of the people, especially with regard to conflict resolution.

It has mostly worked for us because everyone understands the rationale of why certain things are the way there are - ie., different from what certain individuals proposed.

• With grandparents, children have a fantastic source of unconditional love
• Children flourish well as grandparents are non-critical (Parents do enough of this!)
• We (parents) get a break from all the children's activities and time to go out by ourselves
• Grandparents often intervene in parenting situations. But we have had open conversations about this and have reached equilibrium on this.  After all, someone has to teach the kids that  it is ok to break rules once in a while. And grandparents fit beautifully into this role. So their interventions are actually good life lessons for us and our kids :-)
• Space (physical space) is very important so people do not get into each other's way.
• Everyone has to learn to let go of some of their pet themes.

I completely agree with Sathya. Joint families work well when all of the people have give and take policy. Ours is a combined family (2 of my brothers, their families myself with my kids, my mother, Grand Mother and my uncle's son). We are used to this life style so well that, when I see nuclear families I feel very surprised how they spend their free time? :-)

For me I know that after going home I can see all my people and talk. Even all kids in the house feel the same. Recently I joined my son in ENGG 1st year in a remote place in Andhra (5 hours from HYD). I spent two days with him and came back. Next day he came back to HYD and told me "I will not go there again." As I have paid all the fees I said Ok, I will stay with you for 10 days then you can get used to it and that is the way you have to do. He said if you come and stay with me, what about the others? How will I spend time with them?

Luckily he got seat in another good college in HYD so he is now happy with his cousins. :-)

So what I feel is if the elders are happy and coordinating even the kids will see the +ves in it and learn to live in combined families. It helps them a lot to understand about the family and learn to share with others.

each child has a different temperament..some adjust very well with all adults in the house, while some children form special attachments with some adults and no attachment with others.

if the child is not forced to bond or to behave in a "customary way, traditionally there in the family since generations", the child doesnt lose his individuality..loss of space and individuality is a major concern in joint families if there is a bossy head of the family..often mothers' rights and wishes to raise their children as per their intuitive sense of love and care get dominated by the elders' "we have raised our kids like that"

with a small child, staying happily in a joint family means adults paying due respect to the child's temperament and to child rearing practices of the parents.

This is my pet topic, in fact we returned to India a year ago w/ sole motivation that our kids will get to spend a lot of time w/ grand parents. One of the motivating factor for us for to build a dream house and have my parents, my in-laws and ourselves living together. What makes this more interesting (or some say challenging) is that both our families come from different backgrounds, cultures and languages...still we have been lucky to see both our parents open to this idea.

BTW, we are still in the process of making it happen as we are still in the process of building our dream house or stay at a place where we can have 5 BR (real tough :-)).

One thing is for sure, while we are so motivated to do this, we know for a fact that it is a huge compromise, coming from the US, we are used to living our life our way and w/ no bounds. Now, we have two families w/ opinions of their own and getting three varied opinions to merge is not easy. But then mentally we told ourselves that this is what we want and w/ every beautiful rose plant is accompanied by thorny stems. Right now we live at our in-laws place and right there I see many interesting challenges which at times makes me frustrated. We rarely have our time and she has a lot more home responsibility than she bargained for (her retirement has not been all fun and no work, its been a bit opposite).

Other interesting challenges are around basic chores, there are now 8-9 people at home and so cooking is a big event, and one cannot just say "lets not cook today, lets just go out" as there are many people impacted, On the other hand you feel there is more helping hands, but then just think about it, with about 6 of us living together we have constant supply of utensils to be washed, lots of clothes to be washed and ironed, more traffic causing more chaos, scattered items and such in the house.

The other thing is entertaining people at home is a bit more tricky, its hard to get 3 different mind sets to get together and its overwhelming for the guest (potentially).

So, simply put, the challenge list goes on and on, its is not all fun my any stretch of imagination, but it is fun if you live to have a mela like atmosphere at home, if you are willing to put up w/ differences, chaos, scattered stuff and like. As they say, the result of an average is always average, and the more variables you have in an equation the harder it is to solve the problem....

While we are going forward w/ this plan, I still have painted not so rosy picture because anyone who wants to attempt this should be aware of all this and if they still see the motivation then they should proceed. For example, in our case, we do see this motivation and we want to take the plunge, we are half way there and are sure to go ahead w/ the other half....wish us luck!

Thx - Ajay