The writer is a senior fellow at Harvard University and advises the UK Department of Health and Social Care
Families have been stretched into strange shapes these past few months. Parents have welcomed back adult children in lockdown; kids have missed granny; singletons have forged “pods” with random housemates, wishing for that most unfashionable thing — the nuclear family.
Even before Covid-19, multigenerational living was on the rise in many countries, such as the US and UK. Now, a landmark ruling by Italy’s Supreme Court has exposed the extraordinary extent to which some Italians have been clinging on to mamma, her lasagne and her washing machine, into their thirties and forties.