Living Close to Family: Why It Matters

Living close to family can bring many blessings. Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

At one time, it wasn’t uncommon to spend your entire life in the village in which you were born. Then came the marvels of modern transportation, and suddenly most people began to live far more mobile lives than their ancestors. Modern transportation provides many advantages, of course, but one downside is the way it can separate families. Today, in our nomadic society, siblings who grew up together are often spread across the country, sprinkled throughout states, and can only connect in person after many hours on the road or in the air.

Many legitimate factors contribute to atomization. Someone might go to college far from home, meet their spouse, and settle down in that area. Another takes a high-profile job in a big city on the opposite coast. A third pines for adventure and independence and lives the life of a digital nomad. In a family with strained relationships, distance may be a healthy thing.

While various circumstances can make this geographic drift necessary or desirable, something should be said in defense of sticking close to home and family. Certain benefits—like family bonding and support, shared memories, and generational rootedness—accompany a life lived in close proximity to extended family.

Tight-Knit Families

My wife and I are fortunate enough that our parents and all but one of our siblings live within an hour’s drive of us. We both grew up in tight-knit families and these relationships have remained strong into adulthood. In many cases, our siblings and in-laws aren’t just bonded to us by blood. They’re also our closest friends and the people we rely on most in the ups and downs of life.

From a practical point of view, living close to family brings great blessings. In my experience, it’s not uncommon for a group of brothers-in-law to help each other with a remodeling project or a vehicle repair. Grandmothers, sisters, and sisters-in-law assist one another with harvesting and canning vegetables, decorating for celebrations, and babysitting one another’s children. The family shares skills and resources freely.

Families that remain geographically close into adulthood have the opportunity to deepen the familial bond over time. They can more easily share memories, including the most significant life events like the birth of a child. Of course, significant life events can be shared from afar, but something about geographic proximity and frequent interaction aligns family members more closely.

These families will share not just an important moment here or there, but the very rhythm of life. Our physical nature makes it impossible to share the same intimacy with someone far away as we share with someone close. Sometimes, the most powerful memories and long-lasting bonds aren’t formed during “significant events” or the yearly holiday celebration, but rather in the quiet, seemingly inconsequential moments. These are moments like cracking open a beer together on the back deck after working side by side on a fence all day, or dropping by for an impromptu evening visit after the day’s shopping. It’s these casual moments that form the fabric of daily life where we often discover the most about one another.

A quiet, offhand comment leads to a deeper conversation, and authentic vulnerability that might never have occurred otherwise. You never know which experiences will become memories replete with meaning. By sharing more ordinary moments with family, we increase the odds of extraordinary memories.

Close Family Helps Us Understand Ourselves

Such moments also help us understand our loved ones and ourselves. Indeed, many people today suffer from questions about their own identity. Who am I? What do I stand for? What is my purpose? While family and family history can’t fully answer such questions, it remains true that our identity is partly formed by our family. Remaining in touch with those roots helps us better understand who we are.

A 2023 study conducted by Brigham Young University found that adolescents with the strongest sense of identity had greater knowledge of family history. “Researchers found that individuals who had the healthiest identity development—both a sense of connectedness to family and adherence to their own beliefs—also had high levels of family history knowledge.”

Many of us struggle to feel stable and rooted.Some of that instability may derive from losing touch with our family tree, both present and past. It’s through family that values, principles, and customs are passed down. Contact with family members may help us preserve those good family values—even if, sometimes, certain values have to be discarded. The maintenance of shared values is important not just for familial cohesion, but also for national cohesion —something the United States could use a little more of these days. It begins in the basic unit of society, the family.

In the past, connection to family also meant connection to place. Generation after generation was born, lived, and died in the same region, maybe even the same property. My wife’s brother’s house has been in her family since the Civil War. Many generations were united to one another around the shared experience of the place: they know the same nooks and crannies of the house, the same groves of trees lining the fields, the same arrangement of sheds and outbuildings. They love those things with the same affection from familiarity. They share the same sense of “home” and all that powerful word implies.

That old farmhouse has seen generation after generation of skinned knees, loose teeth, beloved toys, birthday parties, Christmases, arguments and reconciliations, separations and reunions, teenage drama, heartbreaks, losses, and loves. The walls are steeped in it. The shared multigenerational family experiences make that place truly a home, and the shared home deepens the family experiences. Even now, most of us sons and daughters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, refer to the property simply as “The Farm.” Much of the family’s activity orbits around it. This is rootedness, and it provides a deeply satisfying sense of belonging and stability.

When I consider the deep divides and polarization currently afflicting our country, my mind goes back to family atomization. The health of familial relationships isn’t a bad indicator of the health of a nation. That’s because a nation is,or ought to be, a large network of families. If we can’t remain bonded to our brother, sister, mother, father, how can we maintain a bond with a mere neighbor or friend? If we can’t do that, how can we continue to share comradery with our fellow citizens, though we may disagree on important matters? The dissolution of family bonds removes a traditional incentive and means for smoothing over disagreements, reconciling, keeping the peace, and standing together.

Geographic proximity alone can’t cause strong family relationships, or increase solidarity in society at large, but I do believe it can help. It may lend us deeper stability and aid us in seeing all our fellow Americans as brothers and sisters.