More than fifteen percent of US children—over eleven million—live in doubled-up households, sharing space with extended family or friends. These households are even more common among low-income families, families of color, and single-parent families, functioning as a private safety net for many in a country with extremely limited public support for families. Yet despite their prevalence, we know little about how shared households form and how they shape family life. Doubled Up is an in-depth look at the experiences of families with children living in doubled-up households.
What does “doubled up” mean in the context of your book?
Hope Harvey: Doubled-up households, also known as shared households, are those that include an additional adult besides the householder and householder’s romantic partner. These households extend beyond what we might think of as the stereotypical nuclear family household (i.e., parents and minor children). Nationally, over 15% of children live in doubled-up households. Multigenerational households, in which a child coresides with their parent(s) and grandparent(s), are the most common form of doubling up, but other doubled-up households are formed with other relatives or non-kin.
Doubled-up households typically include a “host,” who owns or rents a home that they share with others, and a “guest,” who lives in the host’s home. In the U.S. about half of doubled-up children are in host families and about half are in guest families. In the book, I draw on data from a series of in-depth interviews with parents with young children who lived doubled-up – some as hosts, some as guests, and some as both a host and a guest at different times – to show how doubled-up households form, how they shape families’ daily lives, and how families experience household stability and dissolutions.
How did you come to study doubled-up households?
HH: While interviewing families for a study of residential decision-making, I was surprised by how many of the parents I met relied on their extended family or friends for housing or shared their home with others. National survey data confirmed that doubling up is an increasingly common housing arrangement for families with children. Moreover, talking with these families showed me that doubling up was more than just a housing arrangement; it shaped key aspects of their family life, including their economic security, family structure, childrearing practices, and physical and social aspects of the home environment.
Scholarship on families has traditionally focused on parents and their romantic partners, which fails to capture the full household composition of many families with children – especially families of color, families of lower socioeconomic status, and unmarried parent families, all of whom disproportionately live doubled-up. This book sheds light on the dynamics of doubled-up households, which have important implications for parent and child wellbeing. Moreover, understanding doubled-up households is critical for effectively serving the many families who live in these households as they apply for means-tested benefits, attend public schools, and interact with a range of other service agencies and programs.
What was it like for families living in doubled-up households?
HH: Doubled-up households provide a crucial private safety net, often filling in for gaps in the limited public safety net in the U.S. Parents use doubled-up households to give and receive support in the face of high housing costs, precarious labor markets, and unaffordable childcare. Doubled-up households are often a response to precarity, but this private safety net “solution” also introduces new challenges of its own.
Doubling up reshapes family life for parents and children. The doubled-up families in my sample had less privacy and control over their home environment. Sharing intimate household space also complicated relationships, requiring household members to negotiate questions such as how much authority hosts had over the home and how residents should interact with one another’s children and romantic partners. Guests were subject to hosts’ rules about how they could use the home, how their children should behave, and even whether their romantic partner could coreside – though attempting to enforce rules was taxing for hosts as well. While doubling up often brought more resources into the home, this benefit was limited since doubled-up households rarely acted as a cohesive economic unit. Sharing a home could simultaneously mitigate some forms of material hardship while putting families at risk of others, and uncertainty and disagreement over finances could leave household members feeling economically precarious. The constant invisible labor of navigating shared space and complicated relationships absorbed doubled-up parents’ time, energy, and mental bandwidth on a day-to-day basis.
Did doubling up sufficiently address families’ needs for support?
HH: Doubled-up households were often temporary, but many families experienced limited payoff to doubling up. Most households dissolved quickly, often pushing guests to another double up or unaffordable housing and at times leaving hosts struggling to meet their material and care needs. Household instability also introduced new challenges for families, requiring them to adapt to a new household composition, a change in household resources, and for guests, a new residence. Thus, temporary doubled-up households often perpetuated, rather than solved, the precarity families faced. Stable doubled-up households helped families cope with day-to-day needs long-term, but these households also took a toll, especially on guests, who typically hoped that doubling up would eventually enable them to achieve their economic and housing goals. The private safety net was rarely able to overcome the systemic, often compounded challenges parents faced in the housing, labor, and childcare markets, and even years of living doubled up left many families little better off.
So is doubling up a poor solution?
HH: Not exactly. Given the multifaceted needs for support that many families with children face, families who double up to receive support are relatively advantaged in some ways. Not all families, especially lower-income families, have social ties they can turn to for support. Doubling up provides support that is typically imperfect and insufficient to meet families’ needs, but it may be better than not having access to support at all. Currently, the design of some public programs can penalize families for doubling up; given that doubled-up households are an important way that families give and receive support, such disincentives should be removed where possible.
Rather than thinking of doubled-up households as the problem themselves, we should focus on relieving the precarity that so many families with children face. There is no reason that the nuclear family household has to be the archetypal household form. In my sample, some parents, such as some hosts of older adult relatives, were more satisfied with longer-term doubling up, even if they experienced challenges of sharing space. However, many families in my sample felt coerced to double up, either by their own needs or the desire to support needy extended family members or friends. We need public supports and housing and labor markets that give families alternative paths to pursue their goals, rather than leaving them reliant on doubling up, so they can more freely choose their household form.
About the Author
Hope Harvey is an assistant professor at the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Kentucky and a research affiliate at the Center for Poverty Research.