I'm puzzled by how America ended up with this "lone-wolf" nuclear family mentality where families move away from parents and insist on going it alone. Maybe it goes hand-in-hand with the American individualistic culture. Maybe it just happens in urban centers and I'm blind to places where it does not hold. But it is such a sad state; my best childhood memories are from being in a small town where everybody knew everybody, kids played together, and grandma took you on walks from house to house almost daily to sync up with neighbors. Oh and did I mention this is where our two working parents would drop us off for weeks at a time?
I almost feel as though suburban living forces this in the modern era... the area my parents moved to when they left the small town where I was born to for the sake of raising children with cul-de-sac and good school district had almost nothing to offer for me as a young adult, so I left and moved across the country to a place which was more in line with what I was looking for. There were few jobs nearby in my chosen field (or really any field for an educated young professional, service industries dominated) so my peers all left, too.
We've chosen hyper-specialization of our living areas. The places which are good for raising children are mostly horrible for careers and social life. The places where young people can get ahead and be social aren't as traditionally convenient for raising children (unless you have lots of money).
You pretty much have to pick where you live based on what phase of your life you're in, and I think for most people the expectation is still that once you get married you'll just move out to the 'burbs. Personally, I hate the idea, but I'm both not in a place in life where I'm too worried about children and also fortunate to work in an industry where its at least theoretically viable to afford to raise city kids and maintain a career.
My parents are getting ready to retire and thinking of moving to the mountains somewhere because being retired is no fun in a place where everything is optimized around children and everything is developed family-size. They won't be a support system where they are for my hypothetical kids anyways, and are eager to escape the suburb I grew up in as it has declined over the decades, so I wouldn't want to be there either.
Wrapping up that rant... quite simply, I insisted on moving away from where I grew up because there was nothing for me there and I wouldn't want my kids to grow up in that place. The fact that my parents still live there for now is mostly incidental. (But I also generally think suburbs are a worst-of-both-worlds kind of thing, none of the cohesive culture or community of a small town but also none of the variety, walk/bikeability, or cultural diversity of big cities, so my bias might be showing).
Another major factor you didn't mention is urban housing prices. Before kids, we lived near downtown Seattle in a walkable, urban neighborhood. It was great, and is where I would have preferred to stay long-term. When we decided to have kids, we knew that buying a large condo or decent-sized detached home within the Seattle city limits would be way out of our price range (housing prices in Seattle have almost reached San Francisco/Silicon Valley level).
So we moved out to the burbs, where we could afford a starter home big enough for our two kids and a mother-in-law.
Maybe a contributing factor is that it is significantly easier and more acceptable to move house in America. Thinking back to where I grew up, the house we lived in was where my grand-grand-parents were born; it would be pretty much unthinkable to move (and was not even possible in previous non-capitalist regimes) so people stick around in close-knit communities. But maybe if moving was dead-easy like in the States this would naturally fall apart?
I guess it's already happening to some extent with Schengen and young talented engineers moving to job centers.
>I'm puzzled by how America ended up with this "lone-wolf" nuclear family mentality where families move away from parents and insist on going it alone
Because over a several hundred year period a large fraction of the people in Europe who were willing to risk financial ruin for a chance at a better life wound up here and our culture reflects that.
Much of America is inhabited by people who left their place of birth in search of better opportunities elsewhere. And most of this happened quite recently: the USA only consisted of 16 states in 1800 and 45 by 1900. I think this has caused American to be inhabited by people who are much more likely to value independence and (perceived) self-reliance.
What you experience is still quite common. Some of my siblings live 5 minutes from my parents and my nieces & nephews basically stay with their grandparents while their parents are working. A lot of my coworkers claim similar situations as well.
Striking it alone by moving away from home has been a part of the American mythos since colonial times, when a big part of the Revolutionary War was the prohibition on settling west of Britain's declared Proclamation Line. And in future centuries America also soaked up all of the people in Europe who could be tempted by having a farm to themselves; they came to America daily by the thousands.
That being said, multigenerational households were really common up until the postwar period, at which point the US really started pushing the standalone suburban nuclear family as a way to avoid another case of excess industrial capacity. It takes a lot of workers and goods to build all the highways, infrastructure, and houses to support a two-story house with a white picket fence and a car in the driveway.
If my parents didn't live in an economic and cultural backwater with few opportunities and rampant political corruption, I'd be neighbors with them in a heartbeat. Sadly, they seem stuck where they are, and so am I.
No matter where you were born, the best career opportunities were likely to be somewhere else. So if you didn't want to get stuck in a dead end job then you had to move.
It's not just America. One reason is increased costs of living in big cities. If you buy a house, you probably are not going to buy one so large that you, your children, and your grandchildren (who will only be born a few decades later) could all live there comfortably. Instead, you just buy one large enough for you and your children. Or just you and your partner, if you are not planning to have kids soon.
But this means that when your children decide to have children, they will have to move away. If they are lucky, they can buy a house near you; but if there are many people who want to live in the city, and the new houses are not built often, or at least not near you, then they will have to move further away from you. And this is still just talking about living in a city... I haven't mentioned proximity to job opportunities or schools yet.
>> where families move away from parents and insist on going it alone.
If you don't live in the larger metro areas, there aren't the same number of jobs paying good wages. So you move to where the jobs are, or at least where the jobs you want are. If you're a software developer you probably don't want to live in Ohio, and if you're a defense contractor you probably don't want to live in Wyoming.
Is a better wage worth having no family around? I'd rather be in Ohio making decent money with family around than in CA making gobs of money with no one.
