It's all in the 'ohana for Hawai'i households
| • | Advertiser special: Hawai'i's Census 2000 |
By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer
The Matias family in Halawa Heights fits the description of the typical Hawai'i-style 'ohana household. They are three generations living under one roof.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser
Michael Matias, 28, who works for his father as an electrical contractor, helped build the three-story structure six years ago as a dream home for his parents, his wife, his three children and his sister.
Michael Matias, standing behind his family, built his three-story Halawa Heights home 'ohana style, complete with accommodations for his parents as well as for his wife and children. The Matias family includes, from left, 11-year-old Mitchell, Jennifer (holding 17-month-old Melissa), Michael, Orlando, Edel and Mary Grace, with 5-year-old Jessica in front.
Their multigenerational, intact family is an example of what the rest of the country is not.
Overall, in the United States, "Married With Children" is being outnumbered by homes that look more like living arrangements from the movie "Singles" and TV show "Friends." But Hawai'i is once again bucking the national trend.
Here, married-with-children households continue to outnumber single people living alone. But it may not stay that way for long.
Hawai'i homes occupied by single adults increased from 40.9 percent in 1990 to 46.4 percent in 2000, the latest census numbers indicate. If that trend continues, most Hawai'i households could be "unmarried" well before the 2010 census.
"Americans, if given their own choice, like independence in living," Honolulu divorce attorney Brad Coates said. "It's definitely where the world is headed. Census does not lie."
Matias and his father are electrical contractors. His mom is a nurse. His wife is a teacher. They could afford to live apart. Yet they choose to live together in the home owned by his father, Orlando.
It is a choice that is mostly cultural. And in that way, Hawai'i's 'ohana households are like other Asian, Hispanic and immigrant pockets across the country, where traditional two-parent families are still the majority.
It's a cultural thing
In the six-bedroom, four-bathroom Matias home, independent living takes on its own meaning.
Finding an open bathroom usually is not a problem. Family members eat dinner in shifts and, most of the time, they like the togetherness, Matias said.
He likes the idea of saving money to send his children to private schools.
More than that, he likes the idea of his children growing up with their grandparents.
"It's not really a financial thing for me," he said. "It's more of a cultural, family thing. My dad, he feels really young when he's around my babies. It's good for us, and it's good for the kids."
Across town, in Kaimuki, Pamela Kapana lives in a four-generation household.
The family doesn't believe in nursing homes. So Kapana expects her 83-year-old mother to be with the family for the rest of her mother's life, and she expects that the family will take care of her as she grows old herself.
Kapana, her mother, husband, two daughters and grandson live on Wilhelmina Rise in a three-bedroom house with a converted garage.
They come from generations of people used to 'ohana living, she said. Her husband used to sleep on the porch with the dogs at his old house because there were nine people and only two bedrooms, she said.
When fewer people are living at home, they rent the extra space, like the downstairs being rented by a family of four.
While Kapana sometimes misses her privacy and complains that the house looks messy with everyone's belongings, she said the benefits of living in a large household outweigh the drawbacks.
"I love having my kids with me," she said. "I'm one of those people who could hold onto them forever," she said. "Your kids learn to love and respect the grandparents, and you help one another."
The realists
Coates, author of the 1998 book "Divorce with Decency," gives how-to seminars about keeping marriages intact — and earns his living when they fall apart. He is watching the latest census numbers to spot trends about relationships.
He is an optimist, but he is a realist. And his prediction is that marriages in Hawai'i will continue to fall apart, 20-somethings will continue to wait longer before marrying, more and more people will live together instead of waiting for marriage, and an increasing number of grandparents will help raise their grandchildren.
If the cost of living was lower here, we would follow the national trend more quickly, he said.
"It's too expensive to live alone in Hawai'i," he said. "That's why we have boomerang kids moving back in with their parents."
As long as people have money, they will live as independently as possible, he said. "It is definitely much more disjointed, but I think that's not the end of the world."
The "Ozzie and Harriet" era of the 1950s, when 78 percent of America was home to married couples, is over. People living alone now make up 26 percent of the nation's homes and 22 percent of homes in Hawai'i.
The next debate will be in the political arena, as unmarried taxpayers fight for tax advantages, insurance and employment policies, Coates said.
Marcia Hartsock, a faculty member at the University of Hawai'i's Center on the Family, wonders whether the Hawaiian and Asian influences, and even the economic ones, will help keep families together.
"I feel like our families have some of the strength that you don't have elsewhere," she said.
She will be looking at census data to track grandparents raising grandchildren as the shift of more single parents and smaller households happens here.
"We do tend to mirror changes as they occur in the larger American society," she said, "even if it's at a slower rate."
Families in transition
Across the country, regions with the most immigrants account for more couples with children than the average American household, according to statistics from the 2000 census.
They are homes like Carmelo Bonilla Sr.'s.
Bonilla, 67, came to Hawai'i from the Philippines, where he expected to retire after a career with the Department of Health. Instead, he brought his family to Hawai'i, where he got his citizenship and a state job with the Department of Accounting and General Services.
He pooled his money with his sons to buy a house in Hawai'i Kai about six years ago. He lives in the six-bedroom, two-bathroom house with his wife, four sons, a daughter-in-law and grandson.
But he acknowledges it is more than cultural influences that keep them together.
If he had his choice, he would live more independently.
"This is more or less for necessity sake," he said. "If I could afford a home for myself and my wife and my adopted son, then we would have our own. This is the house we were able to buy because of our means."
Bonilla still hopes to retire in a year and count on his sons to pay the mortgage.
"It's the American dream," he said. "I'm trying to find it still, though I don't know if I'll ever fully find it."
If society continues to search for the American dream and the traditional American family, it will come up short, said Frances Goldscheider, a sociology professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and an author of two books on demographics of the American family.
Instead of thinking of the American family as a thing of the past, she said, today's American family needs a new definition.
