The Accordion Family by Katherine S. Newman

Author:Katherine S. Newman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2012-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Money Matters

Low-income families, including the record number of foreign born in the United States and Western Europe today, are very familiar with one of the most valuable aspects of the accordion family: the capacity to pool resources and cut expenses by “doubling up” the generations under one roof. From the perspective of the millennial child, this can be a dubious proposition. On the one hand, it provides for a higher standard of living than she could afford on her own. Kyesha Smith, the young African American woman we met in chapter 3, could not possibly have afforded a decent apartment or child care for her son when she was twenty-one and trying to make it on her minimum-wage job at the Burger Barn on Harlem’s far west side. As she edged toward twenty-five, that dependency was irritating to her in the extreme. She fought with her mother for control of her son. She resented having to turn over that pay packet. Every spring, when the time came for income-tax refunds—which she looked forward to all year since it was like a forced savings account she could spend on big-ticket items—her mother would be waiting at the mailbox for her cut. The idea that Kyesha would be stuck in this infantilized limbo forever was depressing beyond measure.

But from her mother’s point of view, Kyesha’s contributions to the household were not only necessary to keep them afloat, they were a legitimate transfer in light of what the young lady was getting in return: free child care, the freedom to go out at night and keep up a semblance of a social life, a roof over her head, and food on the table. “It’s a bargain,” her mother would explain in her testy way. In truth, though, Dana was getting a bargain, too. A longtime recipient of public assistance, Dana never had enough money to make ends meet. In addition to Kyesha, her oldest child, she had three other dependent children on the family budget, including a very sick two-year-old, who was younger than her grandchild. Kyesha’s earnings brought in much needed cash income, which could be used in ways that food stamps could not. The dependency in this household ran in both directions: Dana needed Kyesha at least as much as the other way around.

In good times, this kind of accordion family is common mainly among the poor and working class. It is an adaptation that has spread like wildfire, climbing well into the middle class, during the Great Recession of 2007–09. More than 49 million Americans now live in a household that consists of at least two generations of adults.13 The accordion opens up to receive the job seekers who cannot find work, the divorced mothers who can’t afford rent, and the sickly grandmother whose family does not have the resources for nursing-home care, as well as the boomerang child whose delayed departure is occasioned more by the desire to launch at a higher level than a freshly minted BA will permit.

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