In Arab culture it is common for families to have many children even if the house is small as children are considered a "blessing" in most cases all the children share the same room regardless of number age differences or gender. Sometimes, they even share a room with their parents or grandparents and its considered normal without much thought given to its impact on their lives.
In American families many make sure each child has their own room or at least some personal space reflecting respect for the child’s privacy.
Is this common in America? Has anyone experienced living in a crowded environment and then moving to a place with personal space? Which experience was better?
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Because calling children “a blessing” as a way to not care if you have the resources for them is dumb.
It’s called not having enough money for a big house. I live in Michigan and plenty of arab heritage people embrace big cars and big houses once they’ve gotten some financial success. If they are more working class they buy older and smaller houses and high mileage Toyota minivans for all their kids.
The standard of living is just higher in the USA.
Because Americans are used to a dramatically higher standard of living
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We have an individualistic culture where privacy and independence are highly valued, especially as children get older. This stems in part from our frontier culture, as we’ve cultivated a rugged “be yourself, do it yourself” mindset for hundreds of years.
It’s not uncommon for younger children to share a room, especially if they’re the same gender, but we believe that as they grow older, they should have more personal space, and the freedom to grow into their own personalities.
There’s an economic dimension to this as well. Kids are expensive. So a lot of people argue that if you’re unable to give all of your kids independence, you shouldn’t have that many kids at all.
I have relatives with 9 kids; they have a boys’ room and a girls’ room. I made my 2 kids share a room until the older was 8 just on principle.
But some people are all about making sure everyone’s happy and comfortable. And some just don’t want to deal with kids fighting over “he touched my bed!”
Americans very much so value personal space. That’s why we have big houses and yards. To not allow a child to have their own space would be seen as weird or overbearing here.
Some people do put two kids in one room but for the most part we prefer each kid to have their own room and space. I have a basement and my three kids have three bedrooms, a bathroom, a laundry room and a kitchen/ living room/ dining room kind of open space. So basically they could live in the basement and never come upstairs if they want.
children cost money.
in USA you don’t have social support systems like elsewhere around children . raising a child is very expensive so people don’t have kids.
a century ago people did have more children. currently new immigrants and those more religious tend to have more children.
People share rooms when they have to, not because they want to.
First, some Americans live like that exactly. Similar reasoning too.
And second, most Americans would say privacy is better. We are raised to value it.
When you say “Arab culture,” which Arab culture do you mean? Do families in Dubai and Kuwait, for examples, do this? I think you’ll find it is tied to the family’s financial wherewithal.
Historically, many American families did this as well out of necessity. You could have the entire 6+ person family in a single-room house, sometimes in winter even including farm animals in the same large room on the other side of a fence, short wall, or if they had the “luxury,” a separate room.
Well it’s not abnormal for 2 children (usually of the same sex) to share a room in the US. But our families are typically small enough that there is no need to further pack them in, and I suspect that’s less due to culture and more due to overall trends in developed countries (where across the world fertility rates have dropped, due to factors like easy access to contraception and women entering the professional workforce). 100 or 200 years ago US families were on average much larger, and personal space might have been viewed more similarly to how your culture views it now.
Some good answers. There’s also a fair number of blended families where this question gets stickier.
If you’re a woman, would you feel comfortable letting your new husband’s father share the room with your 16 year old daughter? Almost certainly not, for an American. I imagine even in Arab culture there might be a raised eyebrow.
I was an only child until I was 10. Then I had two half-brothers, and even though I still had my own room, the house was less comfortable. Then my mother got remarried to a man with four kids, and I had to share a room in the basement with my older ‘brother.’ It sucked, even though he and I got along well.
I think living arrangements depend on family resources. I grew up in a blue collar household and we didn’t have much money. At some point, my mom, my two sisters and I all shared a one bedroom apartment. Fast forward to my adulthood. My three children all had separate bedrooms but had to share a bathroom. However, I have financial resources that my immigrant parents did not.
I think part of it might be simple logistics: the US is huge in geography and we have a lot more space than a lot more smaller countries. So we are more easily able to indulge our desire for personal space.
It is normal for kids of the same gender to share rooms, especially when they are younger.
Growing up I shared a room with my sister and my brother had his own room. Although we had our own rooms by the time we were teenagers.
That was extremely common in America until the last century or so. America has followed the trend that all countries follow – wealth and education of women are inversely proportional to the number of children you have on average
It’s pretty common for young children to share a bedroom, but usually just two, sometimes three children in one bedroom. As they get older, it’s usually desirable for them to have their own space if possible.
Continuing to have more children when you don’t have much house space is generally considered irresponsible. People’s ideas of how many is too many varies, but children are generally considered actual people whose needs and feelings matter, and having no privacy or personal space is aggravating for most people.
I can’t even imagine my parents or most grandparents being willing to share a bedroom with their grandchildren unless there was some situation of dire necessity and everyone just had to deal with it…but avoiding such situations would be a priority. “We’re just going to keep having kids and we can stick them in with Grandma” would be considered thoughtless and rude.
Americans value privacy; my grandma shared a bed with her 2 sisters. Dad and siblings had their own rooms. When I was little I shared a room with my sister but at about 8 I got my own room.
So I am unusual in that I have six kids. We adopted three older kids after being foster parents and we have a bonus kiddo who came to live with us at 18 who is/was in foster care. Our boys share a room. We have to biological children because I was pregnant twice.
Our two boys share a room. Two of the girls (the bonus kid and her friend) share a room.
We also think children are a blessing (we’re not religious) there are a fair number of religious people who do have large numbers of kids. (I used to watch 19 kids and Counting about the Duggars a family with 19 kids.)
But for the most part your average middle class family has fewer kids because there are high expectations for providing education and activities for kids and there’s not a lot of government support for kids. So it’s hard to feel like you can afford to give your kids all the educational activities they should have if you have a lot of them.
That’s part of why we were foster parents. The state helped pay for child care and activities for our older children before we adopted them and because they were in foster care we don’t have to pay for their health insurance.
> it is common for families to have many children even if the house is small as children are considered a “blessing” in most cases all the children share the same room regardless of number age differences or gender.
I mean this is awful. It’s a nightmare. Like having 20 kids and just tossing food scraps in the basement for them.
You have to realize that giving kids space to learn, grow, retreat, and express themselves is an advantage, right? It’s clearly a good thing.
> Has anyone experienced living in a crowded environment and then moving to a place with personal space? Which experience was better?
Not a single person on earth is going to tell you it’s better to live in a crowded environment with no personal space.
Mainly because Americans have personal space (our country is huge relative to our population) and Americans are (generally) wealthy enough to afford homes big enough to give each kid his/her own room.
Couple that with American society not really rewarding a family for having many kids; kids (generally) impose a cost on their families up until they’re 22 (or so). Contrast that to other cultures where a kid is often expected to work/bring in income at an earlier point.
I’ll also suggest this is much more practical than cultural; there are plenty of Arab immigrants to the US. They’re not all living together in one room apartments/homes. Because like all Americans, they’re pretty wealthy by global standards.
Americans still consider their children to be blessings, and the most important thing in their lives. Spending huge amount of money and resources per child is normal. Parents often want to give each child a full private education, health care, lessons, camps, activities, clothing, and childcare that is hugely expensive. The cost of the house (and thus bedrooms) is negligible compared to the overall cost of raising a child in the US. Most Americans (not all) choose to have fewer children so they can spend more (both money and time) on each child, and consider it unfair to have more children than they can provide a high quality of life. Having their own bedroom is also cultural, but in general, college is much more expensive than housing, so having houses with enough bedrooms for each family member is normal.
This is really economic and not cultural.
Grew up in America, in a house with 13 people. There were 4 adults and at any given point 1-2 of them weren’t working. Apart from a few isolated years, I didn’t have my own room. We didn’t just share rooms, we shared beds. We didn’t have a large family because “children are a blessing”. It was because my uncle thought “condoms ruin the sensation”.
We value privacy, so having a lot of people in one space is a nightmare for some of us.
on the legal side of things, CPS could legit get called in if there are too many kids in a small space. Some states require each kid to have their own bed. so while it’s ok to share a room with parents, grandparents, and siblings, if there’s multiple people in one bed, that will be an issue. Some apartments also will have limits on how many people are allowed to be in a living space.
Worth noting most states have some laws surrounding how many kids can be in one bedroom depending on age and gender etc. Not everybody follows them and they’re largely unenforced but that is a factor as well.
Families with lots of kids typically share rooms. I certainly did (5 of us). Smaller families with one or two kids will often have more space. America is just on average richer with fewer kids, which translates to more space per kid. All countries follow this trajectory: get richer => more space and fewer kids. then they create cultural justifications for this after the fact.
Having grown up in a developing country and moving to the States in my early teens. Privacy and space are taken very seriously in the US. In a developed country like the US. Children are seen as financial liabilities to upward mobility. Upward mobility and success are tied to having large, single family homes with ample room to raise a family in. In recent years, the number of children the average family has in the US is tied to wealth and / or culture of the family.
In the country where I was born. Children, particularly having lots of them, are considered financial assets whether you have ample room where you live to raise them or not. Children act as free labor to be used on the family farm or family business. Chances are, a few of them might go on to be successful enough to take care of you in your old age in lieu of living off of savings, a pension, or social security like in the states when you retire from the workforce.
Faith. Religious families in the US tend to have more children also.
Here, children would generally only share a space if it weren’t financially possible to give them their own space. We Americans absolutely love our personal space and privacy, generally we believe it’s a right. I’m an only child and so is my daughter, so sharing space has never been something we’ve experienced.
My husband is from Syria, and all his friends are Arab. They all embrace the American lifestyle. If anything they become more status image. They’re always chasing the bigger house, the best car, the most successful business. Humble, is not how I would describe Arab-Americans. Regardless, of the number of children. We have 3 children and somehow my husband fells were outgrowing our 4bedroom/3bath 3,000 sqft house. Meanwhile, his family is lucky to have electricity for more than a couple hours a day.
Americans have smaller families today. 1 or 2 kids is the norm, and the average house has 3 or four bedrooms, so each kid will have their own room. In the past when families used to bigger, it was common for kids to share a room.
Children are not, and I cannot stress this enough, NOT a blessing.
This is now because Americans have small families and big houses. When people were having 10 kids you had lots of kids sharing bedrooms. But with the typical family having two children then you have lots of room as almost all homes have at least three bedrooms.
I live in a one bedroom tiny hallway apartment with my husband. The people that live under us have the same floor plan. There are 2 adults and 3 kids. They actually have bunk beds in the living room the two older kids sleep in, I don’t know how they do it. It definitely happens but it’s usually because folls can’t afford anything bigger. Not because it’s the desired setup.