How They Do It In... Russia
Most families do just fine without a home of their own.
by Kim Brooks
October 20, 2009
About a year ago, my husband and I were faced with a dilemma. We had a dog. We had a kid. We had a lot of material possessions no luxury cars or Steinway pianos — just stuff, the kind that is sometimes hard to remember where or why we acquired, the kind that takes up space. In addition to these things, we also had an apartment, not a particularly small apartment but an apartment nonetheless: two and a quarter bedrooms, a wonderful location in a neighborhood we adored, a mensche of landlord, access to basement laundry, an all-in-all good set-up. Still, it wasn’t our own place. There was no garage, no mudroom, no private back yard or separate family room or guest room or any of those cushy amenities that have become synonymous with middle-class suburban living. And so with a one-year-old and vague thoughts about a second child at some unspecified future time, we took what seemed to us and to our parents and to many of our friends the only logical step: we moved. We bought a townhouse in a less exciting but perfectly acceptable neighborhood where our family would have plenty of space and room to grow.
I should pause here to say that what follows is not one of the countless real-estate horror stories that have become so commonplace. We didn’t fall pray to sub-prime loan sharks or end up in foreclosure. We didn’t end up mortgaging off anyone’s birthright or buying a McMansion built on quicksand. We guiltily accepted the help our parents so graciously offered. We kept to a budget (most of the time), and the next thing we knew we were shopping for our first lawnmower. Of course, even for people as lucky as we’ve been, home-ownership is not without its drawbacks: I’m thinking of all those hours spent not with family and friends, not working, but trying to find a good plumber or worrying about a flooded basement or trying to erect an effective but not-too-ugly fence to keep the god-damned bunnies from eating the begonias. In other words, as happy as our family is in our new home, there are times when I wonder — was it really necessary? Did we really need more room and a house of our own to raise a family, or were we just buying into a cultural ideal, an illusion of necessity? I began to wonder just how prevalent the idea is in other industrialized countries that family = house?
Out of space necessity, co-sleeping is incredibly common.
I brought these questions to Cynthia Gabriel, an anthropology doctoral student at East Michigan University who spent a significant amount of time studying childbearing and family living arrangements in Russia’s urban centers. She explained how, "Western-leaning businesspeople are increasingly able to live apart from parents and grandparents, but multi-generational households are still the norm. In these apartments, the young mother or couple is usually given the one bedroom in which to sleep with the baby and the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, great-grandparents sleep in the living room. Almost every living room in the Russian homes I observed doubled as a bedroom. So out of space necessity, co-sleeping is incredibly common. I rarely, rarely, rarely saw cribs in Russian apartments."
I have to admit that at first I was shocked by this description. I certainly understood that Russia’s standard of living was not as high as that of most western countries, and that poverty was still pervasive. But the image of an entire extended families sharing an apartment seemed such an extreme example of want — the idea of not having space for something as simple as a crib an example not simply of a less affluent society but of real deprivation. How do they do it, I wondered. How do they make it work, raising a family in such close quarters when so many American families feel the need for a multi-acred lot and a ping-pong table in the basement just to stretch their legs?
©2009 Kim Brooks and Babble Media
About the Author
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Kim Brooks has written for Glimmer Train, One Story, Epoch
and the Missouri Review. She also writes non-fiction for
The Crier. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son. |
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