Somehow in our social DNA we have learned to treat friends with more skill and deference than we treat our own family members. Ask yourself, do you give your friends the benefit of the doubt more often than you do a family member? Who are you more likely to criticize – family or friend? Maybe more on point, do you leap to offer critique rather than advice or counsel with a family member?

It really is a societal thing that somehow after childhood, we do not easily form intra-family friendships. Fortunately, this is really an easy change to make. What it takes is a bit of self reflection on who your real friends are and how you treat them because they are your self-selected friends. What you are looking for is your own personal conduct when you are in the friend-to-friend relationship. What makes that different from your conduct with a colleague at work? How is friend behavior different from other social interactions? with people to encountered everyday out in the wide world?

Here are a couple of hints:

-we tend to show interest in our friends interests whether we share them or not; we ask about what is going on in their life and we truly are interested, concerned and supportive.

-we offer this support to friends because we know they will do the same for us, friendships are defined but this mutuality, which deepens the connection of friendship.

-we do certain things (sports, dance, dinners, poker etc.) with our friends because we share an interest, it is not necessary to share all of our hobbies or recreation but some or even just one.

Now the rather simple task is to see the aspects of friendship in our multigenerational family members. Practice the same friendship patience and acceptance with family as we do with friends. And most importantly, give yourself a break – this will take time and you will backslide but the benefits of “family as friends” can go a long way to creating a much more peaceful and harmonious multigenerational home.

On the motion picture front You Again got very good reviews from our staff. The film is carried by veteran actresses Jamie Lee Curtis and Sigourney Weaver. The cast involves three generations of female members of a family.

Each of the ladies is dealing with some generational version of high school jealousy centered on the two decade old conflicts between Weaver and Curtis characters. The mirrored generations of high school girl jealousy sustain an entertaining look at cross cultural and cross generational similarities. Surprisingly the film got good to excellent reviews across the board from our staffers who took in the movie on its first weekend of release. (We have an added perk in our office benefits package, if you see a multigenerationally themed picture when it first comes out, we pay for the popcorn).

On television, the U.S. new fall season began rolling out series premieres this past week and one that caught our multigenerational notice was Blue Bloods a new police drama starring Tom Selleck. The plot here wraps around three generations of New York City police officers. The former Magnum P.I. star Selleck heads the show, the family and the NYC police department as its commissioner. His father is a retired cop, his son a newly minted rookie officer and his daughter a NYC assistant district attorney.

From the first episode it appears to be a standard police drama set in big city America but with the added plot twists of the highly embedded multigenerational family. Reviews were more mixed for Blue Bloods than they were for You Again but the overall consensus was positive with one or two “Give it a few more weeks” comments.

She suggested that they never really took the time to ask about all of the stories their parents had lived through and now that they were gone and with them the stories.

Which reminded us that everyone has collection of stories in their life but often no one thinks to remember them or better yet write them down. So we decided on a little project – over the weekend anyone with an “older generation” in the house or reachable by phone, everyone would collect a story. Even you had heard the tale before, this was an attempt to get it right by going to the source, by asking mom or dad, grandmother or grandfather to tell their story; to tell or retell one episode of their life.

Here is what we discovered:

• if we knew the whole story, we often didn’t know why it happened or what happened next;
• quite often we had the details wrong and just as often those details changed the meaning of the story;
• people are happy to tell their stories;
• questions often lead to more stories; who knew Uncle Murray lived in Australia?

Stories get lost in time, take a little time now to hear them again and you will probably find there are many more tales about your family you have never heard and surely should hear.

We choose Sunward for two reasons. First, several of our staffers have visited Sunward and second, their website is a real model for anyone considering a co-housing venture or already in a co-housing situation. The Sunward property is just over 20 acres with more than half dedicated to open space and woodlands. Cars are kept on the periphery of the 40 total living units. The Sunward founders selected a condominium structure with the units spread out over nine buildings. There is also a Common House which serves as the focal point of the community and the site of the 3 or 4 community meals each week. The natural path of any co-housing community is to be multigenerational. As you can see from the 2008 group picture above, Sunward certainly is that.

We would encourage anyone interested in co-housing options to visit the Sunward website, they really have taken the time to address the specifics of Sunward but also to cover a wide range of issues that any co-housing venture will encounter. We find that many of these topics would be of interest to anyone involved in a multigenerational living arrangement, whether it be one home or many.

Topics include: values, work, safety, governance, communication, conflict and finances. They also link to more general websites on co-housing and the specifics of the area around the Sunward community.  We want to thank the Sunward Co-Housing designers for the wonderful resources of their website.

“There aren’t enough television shows about real families.”

We agree, but we also acknowledge that shows about “real” anything can be really boring. Reality shows are edited and the participants are manipulated by directors, editors and yes, even writers. But we wondered just how many multigenerational families are portrayed realistically or otherwise on television. Here is our short fast survey of the multi-gen offerings today.

We mentioned some months ago the very good multigenerational show Packed to the Rafters on Australian television. The most obvious example on U.S. television might well be Modern Family, not only does it have the theme of family but there are three generations as main characters and some of them live together. Mad Men was suggested by several staffers; true there are several generations represented in the cast, but mostly they interact at the office and not in the home setting.

Let’s not forget reruns. Historically, there have been some really big TV hits with a multigenerational living focus. All In The Family was a two generation household of all adults, that was also the case for Frazier, which ran for 12 years. The Cosby Show had grandparents but they lived elsewhere; in later years there were grandchildren added to the household. Who’s the Boss was a three generation household and in that case the generations were not all related with two children and two single parents sometimes sharing space with one grandmother.

Notice how families seem to fit into a sit-com formula but there are a couple of exceptions to that – Judging Amy had three generations in one house and that was clearly a drama. So was The Walton’s, if that show had run much longer there would have been four generations saying Goodnight to John Boy.

We know we have missed some of your favorites. Feel free to add a multigenerational suggestion in the comment section.

The estate sale was of all the contents of a family farm that had been built, owned and operated by five generations of the same family over 114 years. Several of the categories of collectables had been divided by which generation had done the collecting. For example, there was a beer can/bottle collection of over 500 individual items, each labeled by the year of its manufacture and with the date it was added to the collection and by which family member had found the piece. Thirteen names shared those 500 pieces with one member from each of four generations being the main curator at one time or another.

The ladies of the family had been quilt makers, though most of their display items were in photographs as they had long ago been donated to various local museums or as one current quilter told me: “we didn’t make them for show, we used them and used them up.” There was a sewing room with scores of single quilt squares from the estimated 250+ quilts made over the years.

We had asked our staffer to be sure and find out why this multigenerational homestead was being sold. It appears after over a century, there were no younger family members interested in farming as a lifestyle, however, the story has a multigenerationally happy ending. The final two generations who lived on and worked the farm are moving to California, north of San Diego and forming a three generational household with one of those non-farming members of the youngest generation.  As the eldest member of the clan told us: “After all these years of living on the plains, it is time this family spent some time near an ocean.”

Here are a few things to consider.

Bedrooms: Not just how many but where are they? Will you be looking for a separate mother-in-law quarters or perhaps even a garage apartment? A converted basement for the teenagers? Would the two master suite alternative fit better for your multi-gen family?

Bathrooms: Again not just how many but where are they located? Do you want or need master bathrooms for the adult couples? What about the extended time demands on bathrooms by teens. How many showers are needed on work/school mornings? Who can share?

Kitchens: Not everyone even considers the two kitchen or second service kitchen as an alternative but these can make all the difference to a larger multigenerational family. Can you add a small service kitchen as needed, a good question to ask your realtor and don’t forget to check the local building codes before you buy.

Building systems: Heating, cooling, plumbing and electricity are all important concerns before you buy. The questions range from: How many showers in a row will the water heater provide -to- can we establish different heat zones with individual controls?

The most important questions are always the ones you don’t ask, so before you start shopping for a multigenerational home, do your research. Layout all of the options to all of the potential multi-gen family members and get everyone’s input on what is important and what ‘would be nice’ but is of secondary importance. You will be surprised by what each individual feels is important but as long as you know before you buy, the surprises can be dealt with within the framework of a truly multigenerational family.

Generally speaking the two master suites are at opposite ends of the building with private master baths and a sitting area of some kind. “Shared living space” including the kitchen separate the two private spaces. In the 80s and 90s these were often two bedroom homes with perhaps a third guest bedroom.

Now, however, with the increasing interest in multigenerational home formations, builders are putting up models of four and five bedroom projects with the two master suite anchors. With a second floor for the “kid’s rooms” and two master suites at opposite ends of the house, everyone can stake their claim to some private space on the periphery of the shared common areas.

Home builders are even marketing directly to the multigenerational home-buyers offering to outfit one or both of the master suites with bathroom assist hardware, wider doorjams and “senior building considerations.”

So rather than feel you are searching for a house that might be reconfigured to accommodate your multigenerational family, today you might well feel that builders are considering your situation as mainstream and offering designs and amenities that previously were owner add-ons. Welcome to the world of multigenerational living.

Bill Warrington is experiencing the early stages of Alzheimer’s. He lives with his daughter a single mother of his rebellious 14 yr. old granddaughter. Bill hopes for a family reunion of sorts, even though he two sons are completely out of the picture and his daughter is barely holding on to her sanity with the trials of her job and her increasingly problematic daughter.

The solution?

A road trip! Bill and his teenage granddaughter April head to California to attempt to see Bill’s sons and find some family closure before Bill drifts into his growing Alzheimer’s twilight. The interactions between Bill and April are well written and not the typical Hollywood stuff. Eventually, the two grown sons do step up to the reality of their father’s condition. But for us the most compelling aspects of the book are Bill’s own realizations of both his place in this multigenerational family and of his own mortality in the face of the ever encroaching Alzheimer’s forgetfulness.

By the way, if you have a teenage daughter, you might want to slip her this book. Looking into a mirror is never a bad thing and King hits the teenage daughter’s angst and disaffection pretty close to the mark.