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As the father of many children, making my living in the Bay Area, I can only say that there almost isn't any such thing as making enough money to have lots of kids here. We make it work because my wife's mom is of an old breed which believes in helping with the grandkids as much as possible. Meanwhile my mom is enough of a normal boomer that while she enjoys the idea of helping she doesn't actually want to do so in most scenarios. I'm sending my older kids to a parochial school while we continue to make babies but the plan is to transition everyone to homeschool once it becomes temporally feasible.
The point is that I'm a fan of the nuclear family, but to actually be functional it requires one parent (the mom) to be home most of the time and/or seriously-committed grandparents. Putting grandparents in the same house seems like overkill to me but maybe we could just make more of an effort to live near family?
And a bit of a paradox, no? "Everybody's parents live with them" is only possible if everybody is an only child, unless by "live near family" you mean "in the same compound, Encanto style". (yeah, there's got to be a better reference to use there, but I've got kids too...)
I'm a huge fan of "live near family" in a looser sense, having traded (okay, it's maybe 20:80 given:received...) childcare help with a sister-in-law who's 15 minutes away, but in general moving far away for a higher salary or better college is always tempting, and if that higher salary is in a place where the rent-seekers capture a big chunk of it as literal rent then your family might not be able to move after you even if they want to.
I think in a practical sense it usually means "the grandparents live not so far away as to make the commute long and too inconvenient for people of their age, with the means of travel that are available to them anytime".
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