What Our Intergenerational Household Taught All of Us About Care

My mom is happiest each Thursday afternoon right after she’s gotten off her weekly Zoom call with a group of her oldest friends.

I mean oldest in both ways—these women are in their late 70s and 80s, and oldest in the sense that they’ve been friends forever. This group once called themselves a journaling group but, decades in, shed the journals. Now it is part group therapy, part political discussion, part tech troubleshooting (my mom just taught the whole group how to get on the social media platform threads!). There are tears (partners have died and are dying, bodies are breaking) and so much laughter.

After the call, my mom likes to watch Matlock. One day as Ben Matlock cracked another case, my eight-year-old daughter, Stella, spontaneously developed a character named Rita. Stella grabbed her cheerleading baton from her preposterously messy room, put one hand on her lower back, and started slowly shuffling into the living room. “Janice, where are my nuts?” she yelled with exasperation in a Southern accent.

To be clear, my mom’s name is not Janice and my daughter’s baton is not a cane. I have no idea why this phrase, in particular, has become Rita’s tagline. My mom, who is in a lot of pain—physically and emotionally—these days says no to me quite often when I invite her to do things or make suggestions, but Rita is hard to resist. My mom transforms into Janice—an even older, even grumpier woman—and Janice and Rita chat about all their aches and pains, the drama of their various children and pets, and everything else under the sun.

When we decided to buy a house with my parents and all move in together, I had dreams of intergenerational delight. Our visits to see my parents had consistently been joyful and sweet. Even as my dad’s dementia progressed and I could see how exhausted my mom was getting from the full-time caretaking, the dominant feeling was buoyant and creative. I hadn’t anticipated that in living together, not just visiting, my kids would get daily access to their grandparents’ unconditional love—but they would also be exposed to some of the hardest parts of living, which is to say aging and dying.

They have had to adjust to their mom’s overwhelm, anger, and grief; their grandfather’s often tender, but also unpredictable, and sometimes unintentionally hurtful behavior (the amount of times my dad accidentally ate Stella’s dessert!); and their grandmother’s exhaustion—physical and existential. They have been asked to be quiet, so as not to agitate my dad on hard days. We’ve had to postpone sleepovers and playdates, and they’ve had to forgive the grown-ups for tension, irritation, distraction, and worse. 

There have been moments over the last year that I have wondered if I am asking too much of my kids. Is it fair to curtail their exuberant energy or ask them to be understanding about my divided attention? Have they witnessed too much “real” life too early?

But as our shared journey unfolds—my dad is now in a beautiful memory care facility 15 minutes away, my mom is recovering from a decade of caretaking—I sense that this isn’t a situation with binary answers. Has it been too much? Yes, surely at times, it has stretched their capacity. It has certainly stretched mine.

But has it also taught them what grit and teamwork and emotional regulation under duress look like in action? For sure. In many ways, I think our multi-generation household has been the best possible education they could have had in what their teachers call “social-emotional learning.”

I’m the first to advocate that school, especially in the younger years, is most importantly a social experience, not an academic one (I wrote a whole book on it). With the advent of AI, this has become even more true; our kids don’t need to cram as much as know how to calm and connect and create. But this year has taught me that it’s not just schools that can model all these things for us, it is also our families and, in particular, the ways in which we show up for one another during challenging seasons. 

My kids have witnessed a lot of heartbreak and a lot of creativity. When I learned that some people approach dementia with Montessori techniques, I brought in baskets filled with napkins and building materials, and we tried that out with my dad. The girls helped me make nametags that we would place next to our plates at dinner in hopes that it would help my dad distinguish between his food and others’. We played with language as my dad continued to struggle to remember the names for things—his car became “106” because of the license plate, and my brother became “the big guy.” 

My kids have had to learn a lot of patience and tolerate a lot of unpredictability. One Saturday morning, I brought my eldest and one of her besties to Denny’s after a sleepover. My dad came along, too; I hoped that the promise of food would keep him calm and happy, but it just wasn’t in the cards. He was ready to go as soon as we sat down and agitated by the noise of the other families in the restaurant. We made it through the meal, but we all had to let go of what we thought the outing was going to feel like. What’s more, they learned to communicate with their friends about what was going on with their grandfather, something most adults I know aren’t very good at.

My kids also benefited from a village of care. On particularly bad days, my husband sometimes scooped all four kids up—mine and my two nephews—and headed off to a trampoline park. An architect by training, he renovated my parents’ bathroom when we moved in to make sure it was ADA accessible. My sister-in-law took my dad on walks and out to ice cream every single Friday so that me, my brother, and my mom could have time to discuss my dad’s care, finances, and other issues unencumbered. All the adults, even the ones who weren’t blood-related to my dear dad, demonstrated just how committed they were to being part of collective care.

And it wasn’t just our family. Our new neighbors were often our angels. My dad wandered and one neighbor called me multiple times when she spotted him alone and far from our house. Another neighbor noted that he was cutting through their lawn, but said to never worry about it; they, too, had loved ones with dementia and understood how complex it was. My friend organized a meal train for us and an army of amazing women showed up, delicious, nourishing food in hand.

The grace and goodwill were everywhere for our kids to witness. This felt especially healing to me as I realized that I had often taught them that we were “the helpers,” that we should show up for others in need. Now I was teaching them, or rather the moment was teaching them, the other side of this sacred lesson: We are also “the helped.” We are also vulnerable. We are also dependent on others.

This has been a more intense curriculum than service hours at an assisted living home or a library hour about neurodiversity, where kids have a theoretical discussion about how a community should respond to people whose brains don’t function in typical ways. Those things are worthwhile, but they’re neat and tidy. Our learning this year has been messy and deep as hell. It has surprised, exhausted, and bonded us. It has demanded that we each—kids included—find creative ways to show up with our unique gifts for the survival of the whole. Like Stella’s old lady improv and my husband’s spatial intelligence and so, so much ice cream. 

This intergenerational learning just keeps unfolding…my mom and my 11-year-old daughter, Maya, now have a weekly ritual. On Wednesdays, when Maya gets out of school early, she and my mom head out to the grocery store, the pharmacy, or anywhere else that my mom might need to run an errand. Maya acts as my mom’s arms and legs (my mom has a frozen shoulder and a knee desperately in need of a replacement) and my mom gives her that gentle, fierce attention that only she can give. They come home and snack on Maya’s favorite Trader Joe’s Asian crackers and watch a show they both love (this week it was Wednesday) while chatting about the sound design, plot points, or characters.

My mom doesn’t accept help easily, so having it show up in the form of a gentle soul a skip-generation down and with lots of mutuality is a real win. I know Maya will never forget how hard this year has been, but I also know she’ll never forget those afternoons, the pride she feels at being supportive to her grandmother, their shared understanding and delight.