distance x time

December 23, 2015 9:50 AM

The Typical American Lives Only 18 Miles From Mom
posted by four panels (94 comments total)

And the modal American lives only 5 miles away from zir mother!
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:52 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm surprised by this, actually. I had kind of considered it a given that most people had to move across the country to find a good job after graduation.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:54 AM on December 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

Watching my mom and grandmother deal with medical shit, I have been struck by the wisdom of living close to aging parents. Things would be a lot easier if we were all closer. It's not like daughters get off the hook if they live hundreds of miles away: it just gets a lot harder for them to provide caregiving, and they do a worse job.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:58 AM on December 23, 2015 [18 favorites]

I have made poor life choices that make me live 200 miles from my mom :(

It really is hard, though, to do things like have a baby if you have no local family and can't afford to hire night nurses or post-partum doulas or whatever; the first 12 weeks of a baby's life are clearly a THREE ADULT SITUATION. Trying to do it with just two adults is a misery, especially if you have pre-existing children. (I frankly don't understand how single parents do it ... I suppose because you have no choice but to live through it.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:58 AM on December 23, 2015 [15 favorites]

I had kind of considered it a given that most people had to move across the country to find a good job after graduation.

Most Americans don't graduate from college.
posted by enn at 9:58 AM on December 23, 2015 [41 favorites]

Maybe the dearth of good jobs explains the not moving?
posted by GrammarMoses at 9:58 AM on December 23, 2015

Interesting; I know of a lot of people in my town who grew up here, so this is not surprising. I only live 7 miles from my mother, but my sister is 115 miles away and my brother is 955 miles away, for an average distance in our family of 359 miles. I'm not sure what that means, but it must be significant.
posted by TedW at 10:00 AM on December 23, 2015

The typical adult American lives an average of 18 miles from mom.

The typical American lives a lot closer than that.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:00 AM on December 23, 2015 [12 favorites]

Very interesting. I live 40 miles from my mom but just over a mile from my father, and about 10 miles from one of my siblings. (Mom lives where I grew up.) I've definitely thought about living somewhere that isn't close to home, but I'm not sure I'd ever go through with it.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:01 AM on December 23, 2015

Most Americans don't graduate from college.

That looks like it's more true than I thought it was. Somehow, I would have figured a notch over 50% for at least an associate degree.
posted by brennen at 10:03 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm about fifteen hundred and fifty miles from my mom but the average of all of my mom's kids is only seven hundred and twenty seven miles away. The average between just my sisters is less than five miles.
posted by djeo at 10:03 AM on December 23, 2015

enn: Most Americans don't graduate from college.

Is that still true of the modern generations? I kind of think that's a statistical artifact of the older generations for whom it wasn't basically mandatory.
posted by Mitrovarr at 10:04 AM on December 23, 2015

I'm the one who stayed close to home at 717 miles; my sibling moved 7,055 miles from our parents.
posted by enn at 10:05 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I would expect that among folks with graduate degrees the average distance is well over 500 miles. Most of my college friends (most of us just finished professional/graduate school) live very far from home, many times an ocean away.
posted by rockindata at 10:05 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

from brennen's link

Bachelor's degree 31.96% (age 25 and over) 34.04 (age 25-29)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:06 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I wish they had broken this down also by education and not just by income. It's true they often overlap, but I agree that college and especially graduate school creates a major schism in whether or not you live close to family. I have a graduate degree and work in my field, and google maps tells me that I'm approximately 1700 miles from my parents. As they age, I regret that distance more and more each year, but there's not much that I can do to change it at this point.
posted by backwards compatible at 10:10 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I am so damn glad my whole family lives in the same zipcode. Because I am not sure I like any of them well enough to actually travel a distance of 10+ miles to see them, even at Xmas.*


*this isn't true. Love my family. Just wanted to play Scrooge for the day. Get it out of my system before tomorrow.
posted by pjsky at 10:10 AM on December 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

My parents are 66 and 64, my in-laws a little younger, and they don't live close to each other (North Carolina and Rhode Island). My wife and are making a decent life for ourselves in the middle, in a big city with a high cost of living, in what feels like typical 2015 American professional style. I am dreading when the health care issue comes up. All of our grandparents have passed away and they all required a lot of support from our parents before the end. We obviously can't live in two places, and as a practical matter I can't live and work in the 5,000 person town my parents live in, no matter what my dad believes about how there are "lots of lawyers there" because he sees billboards on the highway. I just don't know what we're going to do about it. I know at least one person whose parents are moving after retirement to be closer to them (from Chicago to Northern Virginia), which I guess is one solution.

The article is absolutely right that my experience is mostly a product of my socio-economic class, but damned if I know what to do about it.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:11 AM on December 23, 2015 [6 favorites]

I kind of think that's a statistical artifact of the older generations for whom it wasn't basically mandatory.

It might be to some degree, but remember that starting college does not guarantee finishing it. A lot of public and for-profit schools have trouble getting people to finish. Only 40% of undergrads at the major public university in my city will finish within six years. People think it's mandatory but many of them still aren't really prepared for it, and even if you're technically prepared, if you aren't really committed to a particular career or thing you desperately want to study, at some point the pressures of wanting to have an apartment and a car and such mean you wind up working too many hours to both attend class and keep up with said classes. Once you've found a full-time job that pays enough to live on (even barely) then finishing starts to turn into a someday/maybe thing.
posted by Sequence at 10:11 AM on December 23, 2015 [5 favorites]

My (small, weird) family has this tendency to move as geographically far away from every other member of my family as possible as soon as possible. basically it's reached the point where we've all staked out positions at the far corners of the continental US from which we nervously eye each other while working on our different, incompatible, pointlessly surreal political ideologies and/or bizarre metaphysics. thankfully no one's tried to move to the midwest yet, because for obvious reasons that would be interpreted as an attempt to seize the center and then move onto other family members' turf.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:12 AM on December 23, 2015 [56 favorites]

I read this as "The Typical American Lives Only 18 Miles From The Moon" and was like, wait, what?
posted by Flaffigan at 10:13 AM on December 23, 2015 [30 favorites]

Huh. I went from 500 miles away from my parents to 3000, and am now back at around 500 again, which for me felt close enough to deal with any health crises... My siblings are about 80 miles away from our parents. But we're an immigrant family so both of my parents are thousands of miles from their familes... Guess distance runs in some families, too. I'm always astonished by my co-workers who live in the same town--often in the same neighborhood!--as their parents and extended families.
posted by TwoStride at 10:15 AM on December 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

For my family, my dad's generation all lived within 15 miles of their parents. Of my seven cousins, all but one and myself, live within 15 miles of their parents. My cousin and I that live Away, were the only two to leave town for college. I went 170 miles away and he went 150. Now, he lives in Georgia and I'm in St. Louis while the rest of the family remains in Tennessee.

Interestingly, the Away Cousin and I are the only only children in the family. With the exception of 18 months of grad school, I've always lived over 100 miles away from my parents since I turned 18. I can't even wrap my head around the idea of living close to my parents, it seems like such an alien concept.

To my mind, adulthood always meant moving away and not living in the same town.

Then again, I passionately hate my hometown, so that might color it all some what.
posted by teleri025 at 10:16 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is pretty true for my circle of friends. Most live near their parents. Over the weekend I met up with some friends I hadn't seen since undergrad, one of them moved to the same street as both his parents and his in-laws and the other is currently in the Bay Area but is trying to convince his wife to move here. Kids and ageing parents are the main forces behind this. It helps that we're in the biggest city in the country so for most people there aren't better opportunities elsewhere, but I think most people don't want to leave their home town if they can help it.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 10:16 AM on December 23, 2015

My son lives about five miles away from me and about fifteen away from his mother. He's expressed that he'd be interested in moving to a bigger city which would have a better live theater market for him to work in but the rents in those places have scared him off so far.
posted by octothorpe at 10:16 AM on December 23, 2015

One of my brothers still lives at home with my mother, and the other one lives about half a mile up the street from them. I live about 150 miles away from all of them, which is far enough that I don't have to see them on a routine basis, but not so far that I can't be there in a couple of hours if the situation demands it. That works for me. Plus, with them being so close to my mother (who is 74 and in good condition, but you know how that can change), I don't have to concern myself about her immediate well-being.
posted by briank at 10:19 AM on December 23, 2015

How much of this is skewed by those darn millennials still living at home due to the shitty housing/job markets?
posted by graventy at 10:20 AM on December 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

okay to be fair I lived in Detroit for a little while, but I was young and the other players of the game... er, I mean, the other members of my family... didn't see me as a real threat.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:28 AM on December 23, 2015

I appear to be atypical in this regard; I went from living in the same city to 500 miles away, then to 3000 miles away from my mom. I moved mainly for reasons other than just to get away from a parent I no longer wished to put up with, but that was a factor.

I'm even an outlier in my own family; most of them are more closely-knit with each other than I care to be with them.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:29 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

My brother and his wife did just buy a house THREE MILES from both sets of parents, which seems excessive to me. I'd like to be closer to my parents, but maybe not three miles close. That's like, going back for a repeat of high school, which, no thank you. I already run into the parents of everyone I knew in high school when I try to run to the grocery story to grab my mom a can of condensed milk on Christmas Eve wearing sweat pants. I don't need that to be MY WHOLE LIFE.

(Of course if your parents and your in-laws live within 5 miles of each other, then WHY NOT. Also my brother went to high school with this girl but somehow managed not to meet her until they were 28, it's like he found a whole special rarefied realm of cluelessness.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:29 AM on December 23, 2015 [5 favorites]

I hate that I am always so far off the map from "typical American" because I kind of look like a typical American and it feels like I get a lot of facile social assumptions made about me as a result, but when she was alive, my mom was across the Atlantic from me, and my grandparents (who technically kidnapped and raised me) both died pretty young (pre-60s), so my story never fits any of the typical "normal American" patterns but then I get the sense some people look at me and write me off as a typical bro without a second thought because--well, superficially, that's what I am. But I was socialized weird so there's an annoying dissonance there sometimes between others' perceptions and who I think I am. If I could live close to my mom now, I wouldn't be embarrassed about it, though; I'd be grateful.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:29 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Our closest is 250 miles away...the rest are 2,000 or more.... I think I need better breath mints.
posted by HuronBob at 10:29 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

In June I (GenX, BA) moved to within walking distance of my Mom's house. Not on purpose, but the house was available and we loved it. My husband is 700 miles away from his Mom, but his sister lives with her. Both of us are relieved that each Mom has someone close by. My brother is only 4 miles away. (Dad retired to Florida. He's on his own, I guess.)

The farthest away I've lived from home was 8 miles - I guess I'm one of those people who were never meant to fly far from the nest. It doesn't bother me, though. I like my family. I like my hometown.
posted by kimberussell at 10:31 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

Checked Google Maps before clicking through and I really do live exactly 18 miles from my parents. Yay, I'm statistically average!
posted by Flannery Culp at 10:32 AM on December 23, 2015 [14 favorites]

I noticed on the map that New Englanders tended to live closer to their parents than people in the Far West. I wouldn't be surprised if an area like New England - with more cities, closer together - had more opportunity to live close to parents and still earn a living, than a more spread-out area like California, which has two major population areas (the Bay Area and Los Angeles) spread quite far apart.

Occasionally, a grandmother moves to care for grandchildren - like Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama's mom, moving from Chicago to Washington, D.C. to care for her granddaughters. Is this common enough to sway the stats?
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 10:32 AM on December 23, 2015

How much of this is skewed by those darn millennials still living at home due to the shitty housing/job markets?

I think it might have more to do with those darn Greatest Generationers moving into retirement communities closer to their darn Baby Boomer kids' homes.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:34 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I live over 2000 miles from my family that I am closest to--mom, stepdad, sister--but my sister lives less than a mile from my mom.

Things would be a lot easier if we were all closer. It's not like daughters get off the hook if they live hundreds of miles away: it just gets a lot harder for them to provide caregiving, and they do a worse job.

My stepdad (well, he's my real dad to me) has Parkinson's, heart congestion, prostate cancer, and it looks as though his kidneys are failing too. I am constantly reminded by my mom and my sister that I have no idea what it's like for them to take care of him. They're right, I don't. But I don't think I'd be much help even if I lived closer.
posted by Kitteh at 10:34 AM on December 23, 2015

Sometimes it's the parents who decide to move closer to the kids. I know my parents and my grandmother would do this cat-and-mouse thing where whenever we moved, my grandmother would try to move close too, and my parents would always dread it happening.


I'm surprised by this, actually. I had kind of considered it a given that most people had to move across the country to find a good job after graduation.

Well, if you grow up where those good jobs are, it probably won't work out that way. I mostly grew up in the Bay Area, so most of my friends and I stuck around.
posted by picklenickle at 10:36 AM on December 23, 2015

Currently 2803 miles (great circle) for me, down from an all-time high of 6971. Further away, in practice. However, I live about 25 ft from my in-laws.

I... have made some weird choices in my life.
posted by zjacreman at 10:37 AM on December 23, 2015 [5 favorites]

Occasionally, a grandmother moves to care for grandchildren - like Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama's mom, moving from Chicago to Washington, D.C. to care for her granddaughters. Is this common enough to sway the stats?

No. Statistically, only 1 in 80 million Americans are the grandparents of the President's children.
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:37 AM on December 23, 2015 [47 favorites]

i'm about 50 miles from my parents which is juuuust about perfect. an hour's drive is a really good stopgap against unexpected visits from the folks yet was close enough for me to drag all my laundry down there on weekends when i was in college

my mom and her oldest sister live two blocks apart in nor cal and the rest of the siblings are clustered in LA, where my grandma lives...except for my eldest uncle, who decided to move to new zealand. kinda throws the average off
posted by burgerrr at 10:37 AM on December 23, 2015

I noticed on the map that New Englanders tended to live closer to their parents than people in the Far West. I wouldn't be surprised if an area like New England - with more cities, closer together - had more opportunity to live close to parents and still earn a living, than a more spread-out area like California, which has two major population areas (the Bay Area and Los Angeles) spread quite far apart.

I think there's merit to this. My family are in Maine, and I am in the Boston area. Many, many New Englanders leave home and head to Boston and stay here. (I got here via detours in Chicago and Bloomington, IN, but ended up back here anyway).
posted by briank at 10:39 AM on December 23, 2015

My wife has been watching her family deteriorate back home, a family that has traditionally lived close together, and feel enormous pangs of guilt whenever she can't really be of much help since we live about two hours away - a short enough distance to allow regular visits but long enough to prevent stopping by after work. She often wishes she could move closer to them but understands that work would be an issue up there and she would be just another burden if unemployed.

Additionally, for married couples, whose family do you stay close to? My mother lives 2.5 hours south, my father 2 hours east and my wife's parents are two hours north. If we had the money we'd just buy the house next door and move them all in there...
posted by charred husk at 10:40 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

21 miles from my brother, 3.2 miles from ma, twenty feet from one ex, eight from another, and approximately six inches from my sister and nieces. I like my world small and contained, so I can vacation away from the everyday.
posted by sonascope at 10:41 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

Looking at the second plot, it's not at all obvious the median distance is a useful description of this distribution. A better headline might be "around half of all Americans live in the same town as their families and around 25% live a plane-ride or multi-day trip by land away." Distance really isn't a continuous variable when judged by its impact on human behavior.

That still seems shocking to me. But, it's pretty clear my friends and colleagues are not a fair sample of the US population with respect to much of anything.

*Also, in looking at the second plot, one has to ask, "what the hell, NYT? You had everything in hand to make a histogram and instead decided to make something bizarre and far less useful." Yuck.
posted by eotvos at 10:42 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

My ailing dad wants to live with me, here in the bay area. That will never happen because I saw what happened to my sister when she was living with him and I'm not going to let that happen to me. I am about to go spend two weeks with him have his place in Colorado. He lives alone, is 85, and is dying. Very slowly and erratically because his heart is pretty much worn out. The ER Doctor Who called me on Thanksgiving eve yelled at me because my dad was at home alone. Why isn't he with you, she demanded? Tomorrow is Thanksgiving! well, I responded mildly, I invited him and he declined. my my dad gets to visit, but I refuse to be his full-time caretaker and housemate. My dad gets to visit, but I refuse to be his full-time caretaker and housemate. And the entire state of Colorado can go screw itself if folks there have a problem with that. As my dad said a while back, maybe if I had been nicer to one of my wives, I'd still have one. Yes. And maybe if he had been nicer to his daughters, I'd be willing to let him live with me. But he doesn't get a free pass because he's now elderly and ailing. Sorry, dad; no do-over.
posted by Bella Donna at 10:43 AM on December 23, 2015 [19 favorites]

No. Statistically, only 1 in 80 million Americans are the grandparents of the President's children.

So, what you're saying is that it's statistically unlikely that I'm about to become the grandchild of Obama?
posted by el io at 10:46 AM on December 23, 2015 [4 favorites]

I read this as "The Typical American Lives Only 18 Miles From The Moon" and was like, wait, what?

The Typical American lives only 62 miles from Outer Space.
posted by leotrotsky at 10:48 AM on December 23, 2015 [14 favorites]

picklenickle: Well, if you grow up where those good jobs are, it probably won't work out that way. I mostly grew up in the Bay Area, so most of my friends and I stuck around.

Well, this applies to a few people, but probably not a lot, except the people who work in fields that exist everywhere (medical, elementary ed., etc.) Most people won't happen to pick the industry that is active in their hometown, if there even is one. Also, there has to be an opening, and you might end up waiting for years.
posted by Mitrovarr at 10:51 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Additionally, for married couples, whose family do you stay close to?

I once worked with someone who married the girl across the street and then bought a house next door.
posted by octothorpe at 10:51 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

stopgap against unexpected visits

Is this still common? I feel like with cell phones people would be more inclined to text a check-in. Even my grandmother texts now. Occasionally her messages randomly switch to ALL CAPS midway through a sentence, but we still get a little heads up that she'd like to swing by and drop off whatever she found at the farmers market.
posted by ghost phoneme at 10:57 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

In addition to the poor staying close to home, almost every well-born person I know lives within a quick drive of mom or dad.

It makes perfect sense for living close to your parents to be socioeconomically bimodal: for both the poor and the rich, the value of your parent's and natal communities resources / connections makes it significantly more advantageous to stay home than to venture away, at least permanently.

It's when you're born middle class where your ability, and need, to create value for yourself outweighs that which can be provided to you by your parents and their friends and neighbors once you reach adulthood.
posted by MattD at 11:04 AM on December 23, 2015 [11 favorites]

I live 3000 miles from both sets of my parents (adoptive and biological). My wife's parents live 1200 miles away.

I'm more involved with my adoptive family than my birth family, so what follows is not about my birth family.

My dad and mom chose to live 2200 miles from their parents. My paternal grandfather chose to live 600 miles from his parents. My maternal grandfather and grandmother lived 1800 miles from their parents. My paternal grandmother's family history was tangled so I don't really know where her parents lived.

My paternal great grandfather lived 1800 miles from his father.

In fact, there are only two North American generations in my paternal adoptive ancestors that have sons and fathers living nearby one another as adults, roughly from 1810-1866.

I would guess this pattern is most common on the West Coast.
posted by mwhybark at 11:04 AM on December 23, 2015

That title made me expect a wind rose like velocity relative to parent infographic.

Also I'd like the distance to mom compared to average distance to nearest 200 people.
posted by bdc34 at 11:12 AM on December 23, 2015

The Typical American lives only 62 miles from Outer Space.

61 if you are in Denver; 54 if you are Roger McGuinn.
posted by TedW at 11:14 AM on December 23, 2015 [10 favorites]

ER Doctor Who

I would watch this show as long as both George Clooney and David Tennant agree to participate
posted by Flannery Culp at 11:21 AM on December 23, 2015 [16 favorites]

The house I grew up in was less than three miles from both sets of grandparents, who lived on the same block. My parents now live in one of those houses; that grandmother (the only one still living) lives five or six miles from there, I think? Although she's in Boca for the winter right now. I live twenty miles from my parents, driving, but probably less as the crow flies. My younger sister's 12 miles from them. My youngest sister's in college in Georgia, but that doesn't count-- she'll almost certainly be back.

My family isn't super big on change, though: my paternal grandfather was a podiatrist who met my grandmother on a blind date set up by their parents, and lived in the DC suburbs for most of his life. My dad? A podiatrist, who met my mom on a blind date set up by their parents, and has lived in the DC suburbs for most of his life.

Frankly, as long as I'm not a podiatrist in an arranged marriage in Potomac, I'm really breaking the mold.
posted by nonasuch at 11:25 AM on December 23, 2015 [9 favorites]

We are between 500 and 3000 miles away, depending on which set of parents. If I am counting correctly, I am at least the fifth generation in my family to repeat this pattern (and actually that should go back another generation to account for the immigration to the US, but I'm just counting moves within the country). Honestly, we are all nice people, but we clearly don't like to live near each other. I think the peak distance has been about 7000 miles, and the average more in the 2000 to 3000 range.

People I knew in college mostly moved near-ish to their parents, except for the people who went on to become academics. People I knew in grad school mostly live very far from family, often in other countries. I am not in touch with anyone from high school but I expect most of them are still living very close to their families.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:29 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I moved out at 19. my sisters each moved out (respectively) at 29. I live 3000m away, my sisters live less than 30m from our parents. my mom has made it very clear to me that I am off the hook for elder care. w00t!!!! of course I will go home when and if needed for health crises etc., but there is no way I can be there as much as my sisters can--and will!
posted by supermedusa at 11:30 AM on December 23, 2015

They briefly mention the distance factor out west, but did they account for it? It doesn’t seem like it. When I look at the map it looks like a map of "how far is it to the next town?"

In the area listed as 44 miles for instance there mostly is nothing out there if you drive out of the city, while in the south and northeast you drive from one small town to another hardly able to tell the difference (at least to this westerners eyes). So the question in the western part would be "how many people have a relative that lives in the middle of freakin nowhere?" which would really skew the results.

I’m claiming East Coast bias here.

Having grown up in the 44 mile area and living in the South for a while I notice when I go back that distances are relative. I go with people to a restaurant that’s "right down the street" and it’s actually 20-30 miles.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with some Australians I was working with many years ago. We were talking about housing costs and where they live and I kept asking them "what if you want to live out of town, can you get a place cheaper out there?" I had to keep repeating the question, they just kept looking at me strangely and saying "what do you mean, 'live out of town’, where?"
posted by bongo_x at 11:37 AM on December 23, 2015

Apparently I live 3.5 miles from my mother, who lives 3.9 miles from her mother. (I live 0.8 miles from my grandmother.) My aunt lives 1.6 miles from her mother. (Before my grandmother moved, the distances for my mother and aunt were reversed.)

The 3.9 miles is enough to be a huge pain for my mother, though.

Before she died, my father lived 1.5 miles from his mother.

My parents and I all have graduate degrees, for what it's worth.

If you get along with your family, this is actually very lovely.
posted by jeather at 11:43 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

I live 1,300 miles from my mom. Still not far enough.
posted by galvanized unicorn at 11:57 AM on December 23, 2015 [7 favorites]

4,000 miles was pretty great, easily the best decision I made in my adult life.
posted by poffin boffin at 12:01 PM on December 23, 2015 [4 favorites]

I have strategically lived about four hours drive from my parents for my adult life. Close enough for weekend visits but not near enough for frequent ones. Not having children of my own makes that a lot easier. They're not bad people per se, but we have increasingly little in common and don't interact very much when we are together. They've swung into Tea Party stuff and there's only so much small talk that either party can take.
posted by Candleman at 12:02 PM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

Basically Candleman's experience, but my family is uniformly on the religious right side of the GOP fracture, and not at all the Tea Party/libertarian side (to their credit they acknowledge Jesus was big on charity and at least the ethos of social safety nets).
posted by Ryvar at 12:22 PM on December 23, 2015

If you get along with your family, this is actually very lovely.
Yes, I used to live within a 5 block radius of a sister, a niece, and 3 friends. It is nice to be within walking distance but not share a wall.
posted by soelo at 12:28 PM on December 23, 2015

1200 miles, November through April
7 Miles, May though October

Avoiding THE FAMILY HOLIDAY EVENT DINNERS is a huge relief, but I miss seeing their cats during the winter months. Otherwise, there's the pleasant weekly phone calls for staying in touch.
posted by Auden at 12:30 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

My 93 year-old father lives ~5 miles from where he raised us and my little sister still lives in that house, I live about 40 miles from them. Older brother lives ~200 miles and older sister lives in a nearby state.
On my wife's side, she lives ~10 miles from where she was raised (both parents deceased).
One of our daughters lives a few states away, the other lives ~5 miles from us.

I guess we average out.
posted by DBAPaul at 12:45 PM on December 23, 2015

There's a typical American?
posted by BWA at 12:46 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

If you get along with your family, this is actually very lovely.

For me, it's less a matter of getting along and more an issue of getting to be myself. It wasn't until I left the shadow of my parents behind in my small town that I got be me. Not someone's daughter, granddaughter, or cousin, just me.

Then again, I think it's also a difference of living in a large city vs a small town. If I were from someplace like New York or Chicago, I could live down the street from my folks and have enough people around to still be at a distance. When there's 6000 people in your town and most of them either had your dad as a teacher or were arrested by him, you can't escape that shadow.

I love my parents dearly and I miss them. But I find that in order to let them have fun and a good time, I have to not do a great deal of things that make me feel whole. I just can't sustain that for an extended period of time.
posted by teleri025 at 12:47 PM on December 23, 2015 [4 favorites]

My wife and I moved across country to within a mile of my parents right before my son was born. We lived very close to each other for 6 years until my father got sick and passed away. I'm so happy that my son and father got to spend so much quality time together, and that my son has real memories of his pop-pop. I'm an only child and I am also glad I could be there to support my mother and father during those final months of his life. In retrospect it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. It's nice being close to loved ones when raising a child. That said, who knows what I would have done if I weren't close with my parents.
posted by askmehow at 1:18 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I live 4,000 miles from my parents, which is fine by me.

My brother lives in the same town as they do, though. The fact that he has children (I do not) was a factor in how close he lives to them, although in this particular instance they were the ones that moved after retirement, to be closer to him and his family and help out.
posted by kyrademon at 1:53 PM on December 23, 2015

One sister in LA, one in SF, one in TN. I'm in NYC. Mom's in FL. Dad: TN, but spends a lot of his time lately in Scotland. I grew up in NC. So, none of us, not even the folks, live within 18 miles of "home."
posted by eustacescrubb at 2:10 PM on December 23, 2015

I am four provinces away, and hate my home town. I was guilted to go back for xmas because mom's health is shit, but i think this is the last time, no matter how much i love my mother
posted by PinkMoose at 2:15 PM on December 23, 2015

This reminds me of a concept a friend told me about vis-a-vis distance from one's parents/in-laws: The Donut Principal. That is, one's parents/in-laws should optimally live in a "donut" of some radii (that varies from family to family) such that they aren't close enough to just stop on by at random times, but that they are close enough that when they do come visit that they don't stay overnight.
posted by noneuclidean at 2:16 PM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

I live 1241 miles from my mom's ashes.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:48 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

most of them either had your dad as a teacher or were arrested by him

Man, I'm glad my teachers didn't have that kind of power.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:50 PM on December 23, 2015 [4 favorites]

I live 1,300 miles from my mom. Still not far enough.

This, exactly.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 3:07 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I am solidly in the 84th percentile - my mom lives 550 miles away (and still in the same state.)

She is in good health at 83, volunteers four days a week at a local Goodwill, is a 50 year member of the community concert association, has a group of friends that go out to supper one night a week, reads to kids at the library, has an amazing yard of flowers and is a lady of the church. She is a model of how to have a good retirement.

We had "the talk" about what to do if she is no longer able to live in her own home. She wants to stay in her town and I agree. She has an amazing social support circle there and knows no one in my town. She was a well-loved elementary teacher for 30+ years and would be taken care of by the kids and grandkids of former students. That's the nice thing of a small town where everyone knows everyone.

If you live a long ways from your parents and haven't had "the talk," do it now, not in a crisis.
posted by ITravelMontana at 3:22 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I live around a 1,000 miles from my parents. I'd be very happy if they were closer, both because I like them and for the mutual support network, but there's no way in hell I'm moving back to a small town in Indiana where the best jobs are being a guard in the prison or making truck bed liners.
posted by geegollygosh at 3:26 PM on December 23, 2015

I wish they had a per-state statistical breakdown because something like 27-ish% of California residents weren't born in the state which I assume puts their moms farther away.

I would like to be closer than 2,500 miles from my mom, but I do try to call every weekend.
posted by GuyZero at 3:36 PM on December 23, 2015

I've moved to different cities, different states. I've changed my hair color, eye color, had my ears surgically altered, lived under assumed identities. I've had her fitted with court-mandated monitoring devices, but she always finds me, ALWAYS FINDS ME!
posted by Chitownfats at 3:40 PM on December 23, 2015

Fun fact: Wolfram Alpha will calculate distance for you AND give the amount of time it would take light to travel through a fiber optic cable that long. 1560 miles and 12ms, respectively.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 3:43 PM on December 23, 2015

Google Maps informs me I am 556 miles away from my folks. I never actually looked at the mileage before. But Mr. Tuesday and I both needed jobs in tech companies (we both work/have worked as technical writers and editors), so... it was either Research Triangle Park or Austin or (shudder) the Bay Area. There's just not much need for tech writers or editors in Orlando (where he's from) or Cleveland (where I'm from). My in-laws gave up on Florida a few years ago so we do live just 11 miles from one set of parents. Occasionally I fantasize about moving to England but it's not really going to happen. In conclusion, if you want to stay in town, you gotta do something that they need in town. Also, don't go to grad school.
posted by tuesdayschild at 4:12 PM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

In conclusion, if you want to stay in town, you gotta do something that they need in town.

Yeah I have to say I found this data surprising as the usual US vs elsewhere narrative is that people in the US have a lot of geographic mobility, moving more frequently to follow work opportunities. The US is the world's biggest free-trade zone. And a pretty large number of people manage to make it through the shitshow that is the US green card & work visa system, but I guess not enough to move the needle against a backdrop of 350M-ish people.
posted by GuyZero at 4:41 PM on December 23, 2015

Between me and my three siblings, the average distance from mom is 129km. If you remove me from the picture, the average distance is 22km.

I don't mind visiting, but I seriously cannot imagine ever wanting to live where I grew up. I have asked my sisters about it and it's clear that they just see the place radically differently from how I do. I have tried to see it through their lens, but it just doesn't happen.
posted by 256 at 4:45 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Additionally, for married couples, whose family do you stay close to?

By dint of where we live, I guess my husband's? Even then, when I moved to Canada, they were still eight hours away when we lived in QC, enough where visits would last five to seven days minimum, enough to drive us nuts. We live in Ontario now where they are three hours away and we figure that's as close to perfect as we'll get with them. They won't stay overnight unless they have to and a day trip is feasible. Works as well as it's ever gonna with me.
posted by Kitteh at 6:16 PM on December 23, 2015

Yeah I have to say I found this data surprising as the usual US vs elsewhere narrative is that people in the US have a lot of geographic mobility, moving more frequently to follow work opportunities.

The studies have been posted before, but the short answer is that the economic problems and growing inequality of recent years have resulted in markedly lower geographic mobility. People aren't moving as much, or as far, because they are smart enough to figure out that moving won't get them ahead in many cases. Our national mythos is still that of mobility, but it isn't the reality for most people these days.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:49 PM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

"The Typical American Lives Only 18 Miles From The Moon"

Lunar Georg, who lives at the center of the moon, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.
posted by moonmilk at 6:55 PM on December 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

Do you know the saying "It's better to be alone than to be around people who make you lonely"? That's why I live 3000 miles away - on the opposite US coast - from the family.
posted by bendy at 7:32 PM on December 23, 2015 [5 favorites]

Jealous. I wish I lived only 18 miles from my mom.
posted by Miko at 8:39 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

My goal in life is to be the kind of parent my daughter wants to live near. I'm an hour and a half from my family and always wished for the kind of family I'd like to live near.
posted by Pardon Our Dust at 4:34 AM on December 24, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm the weirdo of the family because I live 40 miles away. Most of my immediate/close family (mom, but also cousins and aunts, who feel like siblings and second parents to me) are within 10 miles of each other. Same thing for virtually all of my cousins' in-laws, too.

Really fantastic for young child care- there's always a relative less than 20 minutes away willing to take care of kiddos on short notice.

This might be skewed because there is a family business in that immediate area that many of them work at, too.

I kind of wish I lived closer, honestly.
posted by rachaelfaith at 8:05 AM on December 24, 2015

I'm 68 miles from my mom, 14 from my stepmom, and 6 from my mother-in-law. Only my stepmom has not moved since my/my husband's childhood. (Mom moved furthest to get out of the city to a nice small town.) My mother-in-law moved when we moved, to make her caring for our child easier for us. Weirdly, my mom also provided childcare, often spending the night so that the amount of commuting per day was more reasonable. I've asked her if she'd consider moving closer if she needs more care.

My husband and I are the children who live closest to all of these parents; we both have siblings who range from a four hour drive to a six hour flight away.
posted by Margalo Epps at 10:03 AM on December 24, 2015