Grind Culture and Multi-generational Support
I had that conversation with my father a few weeks ago - the one that all unschooling parents have practiced. "Will he... be able to...?" "Attend post secondary education?", I filled in for him as he tried to find the right words. I assured him that, yes, unschoolers have a lot of options for post secondary and he still has the option to get a diploma even if he doesn't go to high school.
I think my Dad was actually asking if he'll be able to be successful. Get a good job. Be able to make enough money to support himself as an adult. And I would have assured him that, yes, that options are still all on the table.
But as an unschooling parent, those concerns are not my focus.
If my kids never make more than a living wage, if they never buy their own home, if they never find financial "success", I'm not worried. (which is good because in this economic climate, things are looking iffy...)
As a child, teen, and young adult, it was hammered into my head that I needed to become something in order to be successful. Become a doctor or a lawyer or a scientist or a teacher. I needed to focus my energy on doing well at school so that I could get into a good post-secondary school so that I could get a good job and make good money to support myself. (Jokes on them, I studied philosophy and sociology...) I spent my entire youth striving to reach the goal of being self-sustainable in a capitalist economy.
Really though, sustainability is never the real goal in our economy, is it? It's always about climbing higher, needing more, finding more security, being able to afford brighter and shinier and bigger things. For me, this is grind culture: the belief that the more I work or the harder I try, the more I am guaranteed that next level status.
This is a sham and we all know it. There are limited high paying careers and an abundance of low wage labour-based jobs. Besides that, endless growth can never be sustainable. What we should be focusing on instead is meeting our basic needs, without the frills, without the excess, without the ever-present need to consume more and more and more.
So if we're not going to try and climb the corporate ladder and focus instead on meeting basic needs on a lower income, how can we fulfill those needs with a baseline of security? I think that the answer is community. We rely more on each other to help lower our personal costs and limit the number of services we have to pay for by providing support for each other. Where do we find this community that can provide support while living a lower income lifestyle? Well, family might be a good place to start.
I mean, this is how everyone used to live, right? We lived together in multi-generational homes to support each other, sometimes immediate but also sometimes extended families. We shared things like cooking, cleaning, childcare, housing, and even paid labour. If you have four adults contributing to household finances, it should stand that each of those adults needs to work one quarter of the time that a single income family would need.
I wonder if we, as a culture, have replaced extended family support with grind culture in some ways. This plays into the ideas of individualism, where we believe that we can do everything on our own but I can't imagine why we would want to replace the support and love of a community with more individual work.
I hope that as my kids get older, they know that they'll always have the option to stay at home, to work together to have our basic needs met. They may not stay and they may go get corporate jobs and they may make more money than they need and work long hours. And that's okay - if they find a career that makes them happy and feel fulfilled. And maybe I'll change my tune in another 15 years when I'm ready to kick my youngest out of the house. But I hope not. I hope they know that they'll always be supported by the community that is family.
This describes so much of what I’ve been feeling and pondering. I think that I’ve had related feelings for years. With the timing of some of my kids having hit the young adult years and one only a couple of years away, coinciding with so many world happenings right now, both micro and macro and many of them interconnected, it’s on my mind that much more.
It’s interesting for me to hear their different perspectives. I picked my youngest son up from work tonight and we had such an interesting conversation, initiated by him, around time, money, slower living, family and community, shared resources - much of what you’ve written about in this post. I have another son who is wired to press forward in quite a driven way, so it’s interesting to see. I validate both because their way is coming largely from who they are as individuals - I can look back to infancy and clearly see the threads of different personalities playing out - but I’ve been observing the way extended family and society values one over the other and it’s hard.
There is another facet to this that comes to mind which is that intergenerational living, while more sensible in a whole host of ways, paradoxically can require a level of financial privilege/security at the outset. We have a very small, simple house (although a good-sized backyard) and we’ve creatively managed through the child and teen years, but if we were to live intergenerationally longer term, we would need to move and upgrade. We could figure it out longer term in our current space with one, possibly two adult children in times of necessity, but likely not more than that, so I guess number of children ties in too. I know people upgrade to accommodate living together with older parents or adult children, but it does mean that our adult children need to have been earning consistently and make a large degree of commitment, rather than in longer term student mode, engaging in creative or unpaid work, child-raising, etc. I’m not suggesting you’ve said otherwise - your fractional example of each person theoretically needing to work less would still be relevant to our situation. It’s just that it would need to be a financial decision committed to by a group of adults rather than us as parents welcoming adult children to come in and out or stay/ live as long as needed. It’s a different energy than the way I sometimes hear it talked about in unschooling circles. I guess I’ve just been reflecting that we don’t have the space and financial situation to let things flow and see where four kids find themselves in quite the same way that I often see written about/alluded to (not here). Of course much of this all ties in with capitalism ...
Maybe it’s a moot point as my older kids are making money and haven’t chosen to be longer term students anyway (two of them chose college, but with a clear end point for now, our oldest graduated) or even to necessarily engage in extended family living but these are thoughts I have. ☺️
Many of these thoughts are coming up in my paid work too with my deep concern for people’s housing security - wow. So, yes, lots of pieces weaving together! Thank you for a great read.