A better route to a decent relationship? Keep it mellow. “Conversation is more likely if it can happen casually, when everyone is relaxed,” says Bobby Sue Hood, a San Francisco architect. She found that one of the best places to talk to her children was in the car, going to or from school or to a sports practice.
But car trips only last so long. How can you maintain contact outside the four-door vehicle as well?
If you live in a modest-size home or apartment, you’re halfway there. Like the weekend-cabin phenomenon, everyone is forced to talk because they’re together in a small space. That’s the situation for Skip and Michelle Walker, who live in Annapolis, Md., in a community of small cottages that were built as summer vacation houses. At 1,000 square feet, their house is tiny when compared to the homes of most suburbanites. Its two bedrooms open off the main kitchen-dining-living area, and when the bedroom doors are open, “All the rooms are within talking distance of each other,” Walker says.
After growing up with six siblings, he chose a small house for his own family. “I always wanted to create a closeness a lot of families don’t experience,” he says. “We have learned to get along and to understand each other because we constantly interact. We bump into each other. We talk. And the opportunity to talk is key.” And now, the intimacy he and his wife created when their two children were young has carried over into their teenage years. “Compared to my friends, I have a more relaxed relationship with my kids,” he says. “And we know more about the friends of our kids than other parents do. When you live that close, there are no secrets. You know who their boyfriends and girlfriends are.”
While a small house can increase the chances of parental contact with teenagers, it’s still no guarantee. Some teenagers just need a separate space. For these families, casual contact will be infrequent and brief because the children, striving to be more independent, generally spend most of their at-home time in their rooms.
When her teenagers were still at home, Hood says “they wanted their own territory to be messy in, to talk on the phone or hole up with friends.” Living in close quarters with them during that phase of their adolescence “would have been impossible,” she recalls.
But beware: adding more space to your home just for the kids will even further change the family dynamic. With a bigger home, there’s even less opportunity for “social accidents,” observes architect David O’Neil. As the Massachusetts man’s children grew older and the family seemed to need more space, he added on a living room. For O’Neil and his wife, Barbara, the prospect of having a space for the adults and one for the kids was appealing. But they discovered “it was very possible to carry on two lives in the same house-the kids in one room with the TV and Barbara and I in another.”
Were he to do it again, O’Neil said he would have added space in a way that kept the family in the same part of the house. The issue was conflicting activities in the family room, not a desire to keep the parents and children separated. Given another chance, he would have added a media room next to the family room for his kids to use when they wanted to “watch television or gab to their friends on the telephone.” Though many homes have the TV and telephone in the family room, O’Neil finds those activities “isolating and intrusive.” More than once he said he’s found himself in surprising agreement with the assessment of his grandmother’s generation: a telephone in the family room was considered “intolerably rude,” and she kept hers in a tiny room under the stairs.
One final reason to focus on the spaces a family shares: in today’s newer houses, families have less contact than ever. A generation ago, four or five family members sharing one bathroom was not unusual. There was plenty of daily interaction in the morning and at night. Now, in many cases, each child has his or her own bedroom, as well as a TV and computer. With the blossoming of the “house within a house” phenomenon, it’s even more important to keep your residence feeling like a home.
