I have been playing with the thought of instead of buying a house for a big family, maybe I should buy a small land/house for me and my potential fiancee, and seperate lands/houses for my children.
At what age would you be confident that your child could handle living alone-ish?
I plan to have a large family (this is coming from a childless person, so make of it what you will, but I am entertaining the idea of double digits...so what this means in practice, is that their number probably won’t be bottlenecked by my willingness, and thus, the future possibilities vary quite a lot, and as such, it’s harder to plan for them). I think the standard route is to buy a big-ass house which will fit all your future-kids. But, when they fly out of the nest, you are left with a house too big for you to maintain, and frankly, I wouldn’t care much for a big house, if only I would be in the picture. Also, I would probably be delaying starting a family, until I’ve got enough money for the bigger house.
Now, I can think of some advantages to this (assume that the costs are equivalent):
I wouldn’t have to sell our house once they move.
They would get to have their own houses: 1. land tenure is god (and oh my, did you ever see how involved kids get the moment you allow them to customize their rooms more to their liking? (even in dorm rooms, posters go everywhere!) I feel like they could really make something great out of a piece of dirt they can call their own. Having some free time helps a lot with that, too.) 2. past a certain age, kids really value some privacy
They get to learn to be more independent early on
There is an age until which kids are comfortable with sharing a room, and you have all this time to find a piece of land, so you will probably find better deals than if you’d to choose from the options on the market RIGHT NOW
Getting together for a ‘barn-raising’ is freaking great!
Now, I’ll be honest, I didn’t think too much of why this might be a bad idea.
There seems to be a spectrum from sharing a room, through using different rooms in the same house, or different buildings on the same family land, which I think are all pretty standard, to living in seperate houses on different plots.
It does not seem THAT extreme to me? Now, if they were to live in a different city, I suppose I would get more uncomfortable?
So, uh, any thoughts? Is there something I did’nt think of?
Seperate but related ideas:
phasing in/out liberties/monetary allowances gradually, as they grow up: when kids come of a pre-agreed upon age, you may start gradually decreasing the monetary support they get. The standard I usually encountered was that the moment kids start working, they start paying a fixed amount as ‘rent’...or they can continue paying nothing.
treating child/student-ness as a job: with allowances adjusted by performance
(also involving them with the family business/whatever as such)
I think the standard route is to buy a big-ass house which will fit all your future-kids. But, when they fly out of the nest, you are left with a house too big for you to maintain
You have no children yet, and you are planning double digits. Let’s assume that means 10 children, and that there will be 2 years intervals between their births, and they will stay with you till about 20. That means it will be 40 years later when the last child flies out of the nest. Also, you might want to provide a backup solution for children who fails to become financially independent at 20.
If you are going to build a big house, I would probably try making it modular—to build it in a way that if in the future you build two or three internal walls, you will effectively split the house into two or three independent households. Each of them with its own kitchen, bathroom, etc. (With so many people, you will need multiple bathrooms anyway. So you just have to place them strategically.) So you could later split the house, keep one of the parts, and provide other parts to some of your children—or if they are not interested, you can rent of sell them to someone else. (Also this provides you an alternative if you later decide you actually don’t want so many children.)
Christopher Alexander’s Towns Buildings Construction has a treasure trove of advice for your case. Applicable patterns that come to mind:
House for a small family
Intimacy gradient (rooms more distant from the entrance should be smaller and more intimate
Couples Realm
Connected Play and Children’s Realm (the basic pattern is that all rooms/areas used by children basically (should) form a contiguous realm—simply because that’s what will inevitably happen anyway. You will recognize it by the toys littering this connected area)
Sleeping to the East
Teenager’s Cottage (this might be the minimum of what you might intend/do)
House a for a single Person
House for a couple
Home Workshop
Master and Apprentice
Teenagers Society
Public Outdoor Room (space between buildings should form ‘outdoor rooms’ with recognizable sides and ‘doors/windows’ instead of just gaps between buildings)
My brother moved out of home at age 16 and it was an excellent choice. My sister was 21, I stayed till 24. This was also a good choice.
I started learning to manage assets when I was 13. I could have started sooner. I was doing things on my own from 18.
With power comes responsibility. It’s a great idea to give someone their own space; so long as you are sure they are responsible enough not to wire electronics badly; or start a fire. I would suggest a certain level of adult-ness is required to not accidentally kill one’s self. given that we live in the age of big metal things on wheels that you control with your fingers to take you across the country, and electron flows in our streets that can kill people in a blink. flammable gas flowing around the place too, sharp objects (and weapons available generally), the ability to play music loud enough to deafen ourselves by accident… Just to name a few.
Now I have no reason to think that bright lw-kids will suffer risk to their health like that; but if they are self-raising they might not have the right guidance to get it right first time. By all means people should make mistakes; but only mistakes that don’t kill, or seriously wound you in the process. Those mistakes are the good ones that we can learn from.
There are multiple stages or degrees of “living alone”, and it’s very difficult to satisfy all of them without a number of physical moves that you can’t buy space very far in advance.
a) shared room with parents
b) shared room with siblings
c) separate space/room, shared meal preparation and amenities
d) separate house/apartment, walking distance for many shared meals and events
e) separate household, rare visits
f) separate household, moving through it’s own phases a-e.
It’s hard to know when each of these phases will become appropriate to an individual, nor the individual preferences for variation in distance and specifics of house. Also, building a house is harder than you think.
Distance, I don’t really know. When I think about living in the same city, I instinctively think about my city, which allows for getting from one point to another relatively fast. Like, less than 15 minutes.
I think you can usually buy land in the same general area, so I would go as far as to say ‘in really comfortable walking distance’.
But how one’s feelings change as the distance increases would be worth going into more.
Parenting/Housing
I have been playing with the thought of instead of buying a house for a big family, maybe I should buy a small land/house for me and my potential fiancee, and seperate lands/houses for my children.
At what age would you be confident that your child could handle living alone-ish?
I plan to have a large family (this is coming from a childless person, so make of it what you will, but I am entertaining the idea of double digits...so what this means in practice, is that their number probably won’t be bottlenecked by my willingness, and thus, the future possibilities vary quite a lot, and as such, it’s harder to plan for them). I think the standard route is to buy a big-ass house which will fit all your future-kids. But, when they fly out of the nest, you are left with a house too big for you to maintain, and frankly, I wouldn’t care much for a big house, if only I would be in the picture. Also, I would probably be delaying starting a family, until I’ve got enough money for the bigger house.
Now, I can think of some advantages to this (assume that the costs are equivalent):
I wouldn’t have to sell our house once they move.
They would get to have their own houses: 1. land tenure is god (and oh my, did you ever see how involved kids get the moment you allow them to customize their rooms more to their liking? (even in dorm rooms, posters go everywhere!) I feel like they could really make something great out of a piece of dirt they can call their own. Having some free time helps a lot with that, too.) 2. past a certain age, kids really value some privacy
They get to learn to be more independent early on
There is an age until which kids are comfortable with sharing a room, and you have all this time to find a piece of land, so you will probably find better deals than if you’d to choose from the options on the market RIGHT NOW
Getting together for a ‘barn-raising’ is freaking great!
Now, I’ll be honest, I didn’t think too much of why this might be a bad idea. There seems to be a spectrum from sharing a room, through using different rooms in the same house, or different buildings on the same family land, which I think are all pretty standard, to living in seperate houses on different plots. It does not seem THAT extreme to me? Now, if they were to live in a different city, I suppose I would get more uncomfortable?
So, uh, any thoughts? Is there something I did’nt think of?
Seperate but related ideas:
phasing in/out liberties/monetary allowances gradually, as they grow up: when kids come of a pre-agreed upon age, you may start gradually decreasing the monetary support they get. The standard I usually encountered was that the moment kids start working, they start paying a fixed amount as ‘rent’...or they can continue paying nothing.
treating child/student-ness as a job: with allowances adjusted by performance (also involving them with the family business/whatever as such)
You have no children yet, and you are planning double digits. Let’s assume that means 10 children, and that there will be 2 years intervals between their births, and they will stay with you till about 20. That means it will be 40 years later when the last child flies out of the nest. Also, you might want to provide a backup solution for children who fails to become financially independent at 20.
If you are going to build a big house, I would probably try making it modular—to build it in a way that if in the future you build two or three internal walls, you will effectively split the house into two or three independent households. Each of them with its own kitchen, bathroom, etc. (With so many people, you will need multiple bathrooms anyway. So you just have to place them strategically.) So you could later split the house, keep one of the parts, and provide other parts to some of your children—or if they are not interested, you can rent of sell them to someone else. (Also this provides you an alternative if you later decide you actually don’t want so many children.)
I think this sounds like a very cool idea, but I have some questions about potential difficulties.
My first thought was that this sounds expensive. Have you checked on the costs vs. your resources, admitting that both of them will be estimates?
Are you planning on adopting if it looks like you’re not likely to have that many biological descendants?
Have you thought about how to teach your children housekeeping and home maintenance, both the facts and the habits?
Christopher Alexander’s Towns Buildings Construction has a treasure trove of advice for your case. Applicable patterns that come to mind:
House for a small family
Intimacy gradient (rooms more distant from the entrance should be smaller and more intimate
Couples Realm
Connected Play and Children’s Realm (the basic pattern is that all rooms/areas used by children basically (should) form a contiguous realm—simply because that’s what will inevitably happen anyway. You will recognize it by the toys littering this connected area)
Sleeping to the East
Teenager’s Cottage (this might be the minimum of what you might intend/do)
House a for a single Person
House for a couple
Home Workshop
Master and Apprentice
Teenagers Society
Public Outdoor Room (space between buildings should form ‘outdoor rooms’ with recognizable sides and ‘doors/windows’ instead of just gaps between buildings)
Adventure Playground
See here for a list of the patterns: https://www.patternlanguage.com/apl/aplsummary.htm
Depending on where you are, the limiting factor might be not your willingness to let your children live on their own, but your legal right to do so.
mostly worth adding: it depends on the kid.
My brother moved out of home at age 16 and it was an excellent choice. My sister was 21, I stayed till 24. This was also a good choice.
I started learning to manage assets when I was 13. I could have started sooner. I was doing things on my own from 18.
With power comes responsibility. It’s a great idea to give someone their own space; so long as you are sure they are responsible enough not to wire electronics badly; or start a fire. I would suggest a certain level of adult-ness is required to not accidentally kill one’s self. given that we live in the age of big metal things on wheels that you control with your fingers to take you across the country, and electron flows in our streets that can kill people in a blink. flammable gas flowing around the place too, sharp objects (and weapons available generally), the ability to play music loud enough to deafen ourselves by accident… Just to name a few.
Now I have no reason to think that bright lw-kids will suffer risk to their health like that; but if they are self-raising they might not have the right guidance to get it right first time. By all means people should make mistakes; but only mistakes that don’t kill, or seriously wound you in the process. Those mistakes are the good ones that we can learn from.
There are multiple stages or degrees of “living alone”, and it’s very difficult to satisfy all of them without a number of physical moves that you can’t buy space very far in advance.
a) shared room with parents b) shared room with siblings c) separate space/room, shared meal preparation and amenities d) separate house/apartment, walking distance for many shared meals and events e) separate household, rare visits f) separate household, moving through it’s own phases a-e.
It’s hard to know when each of these phases will become appropriate to an individual, nor the individual preferences for variation in distance and specifics of house. Also, building a house is harder than you think.
Lots of kids wouldn’t want to live alone even at an age at which they safely could.
I would assume that most guys who have such an idea and propose it to their wife wouldn’t have the wife accept the idea.
Do you mean the age where the child wants to live alone or the age where they could handle it without too much damage?
How much distance between the houses are you talking about?
Handle it without too much damage.
Distance, I don’t really know. When I think about living in the same city, I instinctively think about my city, which allows for getting from one point to another relatively fast. Like, less than 15 minutes.
I think you can usually buy land in the same general area, so I would go as far as to say ‘in really comfortable walking distance’.
But how one’s feelings change as the distance increases would be worth going into more.