Tell me if you’ve heard this one before  – a grandmother is talking about her grandchildren, how she loves to spend time with them, how they are the light of her life. Then she adds with a smile: “And anytime I want, I can go home and leave them to their mother.”
The modern grandma —..Read the rest…

A lot of what business researchers have discovered about intergenerational issues in the workplace tend to fall along fairly easily identified “old vs. young” differences. But as we have seen in previous posts, it isn’t always about age but more often it is about a common generational upbringing and consensus on work ethics and social..Read the rest…

We continue with our series on what the multigenerational family can learn from the vast amount of recent research on the intergenerational workplace.
Teamwork would seem a simple idea to most people and it is. Unfortunately what you mean by teamwork and what I think it means might well be completely different. Even when everyone is..Read the rest…

We’ve been reading a lot about managing intergenerational conflict in the workplace. It seems like that has become a real management issue in the past ten years. We had to ask ourselves if the business management people might have uncovered some insights into managing conflict in the multigenerational family.
When we first approached the business literature..Read the rest…

In the glossary of loaded words, obligation certainly ranks right up there. Partially because human nature suggests that we do things for others for altruistic reasons. For family members we act in their best interest out of love not because we are obligated, at least that is how we like to see ourselves. Which is..Read the rest…

We might say that an all senior co-housing project would be outside of our definition of multigenerational living. One generation doeth not a multi make. However, most senior co-housing projects have a mixture of generations if only for domestic and assisted living support.
The essential element of any co-housing situation is some degree of shared living...Read the rest…

Ask most multigenerational family members how their own multi-gen situation began and you will probably get the identical “family answer.” Whether it was an illness, job loss, economics –whatever, everyone knows what was the genesis of their extended family situation. Within that story lies a potential trap for the multigenerational family. We need to be..Read the rest…

Family meetings are not going to work for every multigenerational family situation. Some families communicate so well around the dinner table that they don’t need any structured place to air family issues. Others find the formal meeting to be artificial or too often such gatherings get dominated usually by an alpha male or two.

Literally the first comment from a reader on this website strongly suggested we should write something about keys. We asked our first commenter to tell us more and she did.
Our house has six adults living in it, well actually considering one is my 19 year old brother it’s really more like 5 1/2 adults. My..Read the rest…

“Do your own thing” was a great mantra for a free & easy lifestyle but it may not work in a multigenerational situation. All it takes is a missed school pick-up and you have a child abandoned and alone or at least a missed soccer practice. The doctor appointment that took six weeks to get..Read the rest…