Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times,

As readers know by now, my favorite television show was made in the 1970s. It is called "The Waltons." It's about the experiences of one Virginia household in the Great Depression and how they found the good life not through money and prosperity but family, love, and a stable home on the land. It's such an inspiration. Every episode offers an interesting life lesson of some sort and reinforces the values that made this country great.

You might not notice at first, but one unusual aspect is that this show features a multigenerational household. The father's father and his wife live in the house with their seven grandchildren. The grandfather helps daily in the family business of lumber harvested from their own land. And the grandmother helps with all household chores of cooking, cleaning, laundry, plus dishes out wisdom at every turn. The grandparents provide an essential element of stability.

This model of living was not unusual at the time. It was a pattern. My grandparents on both sides of my family lived this way as children with several generations in a single household or, at least, very nearby. This shaped who they were. It was part of becoming civilized to learn what it is like to age, to have sickness and even death occur alongside new life, and to observe the cycles taking place right before one's very eyes.

In the absence of these extended households, we have lost so much. The children no longer hear grand tales of the old days on a regular basis from the elderly. They are denied access to vivid accounts of what life was like in earlier times. The past doesn't seem real; it seems like a book in which the kids are not interested.

Mothers with children are set adrift in decision-making on a daily basis on what to do with misbehaving and sick children. Many moms these days think they can just make up something or listen to some YouTube influencer on how to raise and educate children. In health matters, moms doing this alone are prone to panic and medical dependency rather than relying on the home remedies their mothers and grandmothers knew.

We have lost experience and knowledge in the decline of the extended family living under the same roof.

In the mid-19th century, intergenerational residency was very high. Roughly 70 percent of Americans aged 65 and over lived with their adult children (and the rate was nearly universal among those who had surviving children). About 10 percent more lived with other relatives. Multigenerational arrangements were common enough that a large share of people experienced them at some point in life.

From the late 19th to early 20th century, a steady decline set in. By 1900, about 57 percent of adults 65 and over lived in multigenerational households.

Then came the bait-and-switch. The Social Security system came along purporting to support the elderly without their children's help. I know, don't laugh. The children could offload them entirely so they stopped worrying about them, figuring that they were going to be fine. So they moved away and started embedding themselves in what was called the nuclear family.

After the Second World War, extended households declined markedly. The share of the U.S. population living in multigenerational households fell from about 21-25 percent during the war to a mere 12 percent by 1980. Elderly co-residence with adult children continued falling, reaching about 15 percent by the 1980s. For children, the share living with a grandparent dropped to a low near 5 percent in 1980.

We thought we had it all figured out. One income from dad, mom stays home, and the kids are raised there and attend public school. The American dream was cemented when everyone could afford a home on one salary plus a couple of cars in the garage. What could go wrong?

What happened was the economic shock of the late 1970s. It shattered the entire model. A decade later, it became ever more clear that the household would need two incomes.

An overlooked survey from Pew Research ("How family work arrangements have changed over time," June 16, 2026) has documented changes: Households with children under 18 where both parents work full time rose from 31 percent in 1975, to 46 percent a decade later, to 52 percent in 2025 - from a third to more than half in 50 years.

Couples with kids where the dad works fulltime and the mom is not employed - that was my home until the inflation of the 1970s hit - fell from 42 percent in 1975 to 23 percent in 2025.

These trends have intensified since the more recent inflation, which drafted many part-time earners among mothers to become full-time workers, making up for the pressure of declining real income for the household in total.

Ready for the next blow? It's the explosion in health-care costs. Grandparents and the elderly are already mostly alone but now they face incredible medical bills. Social Security has been little more than grocery money but the main expenses are huge bills to pay for the nursing home, assisted living facility, retirement home, or other long-term care (which is mostly misnamed).

Insurers used to offer policies to cover these expenses. Nearly all lost money. They are ever more rare today. Some of these facilities can run into the hundreds of thousands a year with full service for one person. These arrangements can start with a $6 million dollar estate and reduce it to nothingness within only a few years.

You know what this means? It means that the children and grandchildren no longer have an inheritance because the entire estate has been spent on the elderly grandparents and great-grandparents paying the medical services system.

The tragedy is unfolding now. It is getting worse. Everyone is scared of what it implies about the future. There are no plans for what to do about it.

Why not bring aging parents home to live with you? Sure, but there is a problem. With both parents working, there is no one there to care for them. So in a large majority of American homes, even if they happened to have a space big enough, that is simply not an option.

Every system designed to prevent this - including Social Security and Medicare - has completely failed. Looking at the big picture, the valorization of the nuclear family was a giant leveraged risk. We have all lost the bet on this implausible model. We wanted to believe it but it is no longer working.

Would that we could all return and live in the world of "The Waltons" with a happy, extended, multigenerational home, with kids in good schools, and a culture of loving and caring for each other. This was the Great Depression. Prosperity was not the key to making it work. Love of family and meeting one's obligations were the ticket to a good life.

I know it's just a show. But it reflects reality. The nuclear family as celebrated after the war did not sustain the kind of world in which we want to live, especially once two income streams became necessary. Now we can only look back and weep that we did not know how good we had it back in the day.