Consequences of coronavirus: People are moving closer to family
More and more people are leaning on family networks in hard times
The coronavirus pandemic has been a disaster on so many fronts, but one of the more curious collateral impacts, according to a new piece from Slate, is that more and more people are moving closer to their families.
According to a Pew survey of 12,600 U.S. adults published this month, 5 percent of Americans moved for reasons related to the coronavirus outbreak. Forty percent of those people moved into a different community than where they lived before the pandemic; 17 percent moved to be near family. But that may undercount the family movers, since another 14 percent of respondents moved because of a college campus closure, and more than 30 percent moved because of financial problems including job loss. In either case, living near—or even with family—seems like a likely outcome.
The piece goes on to cite a number of specific reasons, some predating the pandemic, people might be more willing to live with family: high rents have impacted younger Americans; parents of young children need help with childcare; and seniors have a hard time aging in place.
All of those things are unfortunate realities when it comes to living in the U.S. today. We ought to solve them. We ought to make affordable childcare, housing and senior care a priority.
But since those things don’t appear to be happening any time soon (recent proposals notwithstanding) I welcome this apparent return to living near family. It’s great, because family has historically been a social safety net for people. We support systems based on extended family networks can work.
A lack of proximity, however, kills it. Though it’s certainly possible to be emotionally close to family members who live far away, it’s difficult to rely on them for childcare. Or to crash at their place for a few months if housing is too expensive. Which is to say, distance works against the family’s role as a social safety net.
For decades now, many people have often had to choose between their families and their careers. If you wanted to work in finance or media, you had to go to New York. If you dreamed of working in tech, you went to San Francisco or Seattle. If you came from a struggling Rust Belt city, you might have to move far away to find any job at all.
That’s still true to a large extent, but I welcome a more remote-oriented world in which people don’t have to sacrifice their family network in order to pursue their dreams.
This is my life, and has always been my life. My dad took his family 2000 miles away from any family for a job. I left home at 17 for college and never expected to return, not even for a summer term. I had to find someone to marry or a job and neither were possible by returning to my struggling rust belt city. Now that I have had both (job and spouse) and subsequently, retirement and children, we have moved even further from family for husband’s job training. It took just four years of familial isolation and a pandemic to illuminate my need for a village—or maybe even just a mother. Without one, I can’t. I can’t have more children. I can’t date my husband. I can’t even exercise or eat healthy, because my family is...just me, and on occasion the husband/father who eats with us on occasion between training. It’s sad to me that my parents will likely pass away without my children having had any real knowledge of them, because my children also need to eat, and at the moment bellies full trumps nearly everything else in life for me. It’s also sad to me that I’m paying for a therapist to tell me to pay a cleaner so that I will like my children and keep my husband. Maybe a minute of village relief would cure all.