The Lifestyle Ratchet Is Hard to Avoid

Changes in the culture make opting out of lifestyle upgrades difficult to pull off

I grew up in a small house without air conditioning where I shared a bedroom with my younger brother.

I remember how awful it was on hot summer nights in August. I put a box fan turned to high on a chair about three feet from the edge of my bed to try to get cool. But other than that, growing up there wasn’t bad.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, lots of people did not have air conditioning, or only had bedroom window units. Sharing bedrooms also wasn’t uncommon.

Things have changed today. While plenty of people don’t have AC or have children sharing bedrooms, these are now almost entirely a result of lacking the money to get them.

Air conditioning and one bedroom per child have become socially normative to the point that it’s a point of parental contention to choose differently.

There was a recent interesting article “Why Do So Many Parents Think Kids Need Their Own Bedroom?” in the Atlantic addressing this very point.

When I ask my husband what it was like to share a room as a kid, he shrugs. He didn’t consider it that big a deal. But many parents I’ve talked with who live in metro areas with high costs of living feel the same as I do. Some are stretching their budgets to afford a house with more bedrooms; others are reluctant to grow their families without having more space. As I mull this over, I wonder: Why do so many of us prioritize giving kids their own room?

Over the past half century or so in the U.S., the practice has become what the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau calls a “normative ideal”—something that many aspire to, but that not all can attain. It’s gotten more common in recent decades, as houses have gotten bigger and people have been having fewer kids. From 1960 to 2000, the number of bedrooms available for each child in the average household rose from 0.7 to 1.1, according to the Stanford sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld’s calculations using U.S. census data. It’s held fairly steady since, the University of Washington real-estate professor Arthur Acolin told me. Recently, Acolin analyzed 2022 American Community Survey data and found that more than half of all families with kids had at least enough bedrooms to give each child their own (though it’s not certain that all of them do). Even among parents whose children share rooms, more than 70 percent say they wish they could give everyone their own.

Economic, technological, and social changes affect the availability and norms of society in ways that make it difficult to avoid adapting to them.

I want to dial in on cultural and social expectations. Because these can put pressure on people to upgrade their lifestyles in ways that might be possible to resist, but which are difficult to do so.

One kid per room is an example of such a standard. When I was a kid, I obviously would have preferred my own room. I knew that kids from families with more money did have their own room. But there was nothing unusual about sharing one.

Over time, as one child per bedroom became seen as the norm, not having that would mark a family as an outlier. The kids might feel poor rather than simply not rich - a big difference. As the article indicates, families might even decide to avoid having more kids if they can’t afford an individual bedroom for each one.

It’s similar for air conditioning, which is now seen as standard. When we were looking for a house, I don’t recall seeing a single listing for a house without air conditioning - and having grown up without it this is something I explicitly look for.

Air conditioning is expensive to install and run. But let’s be honest, once we’ve lived with it, how many of us can really want to go back to living without it? To say nothing of what it would do to the value of our home to not have it. And do you want your kids to be the rare ones without AC at home?

Or think about all of the consumption patterns of the upper middle class. Fancy coffee. Gourmet foods. Designer furniture.

Not all of this is expensive. You can get furniture from Ikea or something. At the same time, they do cost money. And they aren’t entirely optional either. These are class markers that help demarcate the in group from the out group.

It isn’t precisely required to engage in all this stuff, but if you aspire to be a professional in a corporate setting, you’ll set yourself apart from your prospective colleagues if you don’t live at least something of this lifestyle. Top talent or other high status people can get away with flouting conventions. Most people can’t.

People understand that most upper middle class people realistically can’t deliberately go against many social trends, such as by explicitly rejecting Black Lives Matter or DEI. But similar effects are true for some consumption activities as well. If you want to avoid them, you have to somehow frame it as aspirationally higher status, such as by saying a spartan lifestyle is all about the environment or something.

The net result is a society that pushes people towards conformity with higher consumption norms, and to embrace patterns of life that might even be unhealthy (such as kids having smart phones).

I see a lot of arguing on the internet that seems to suggest that the root of people’s inability to afford things like a house is simply overinflated expectations of how big a house people need or the amount of money it takes to raise kids today.

Surely some of this is real. But some of it is not. It takes real effort, and entails real social costs, to buy a much smaller house than the ones other people are buying today (if you can even find one in a good neighborhood).

Not spending all the money on the same activities for your kids as other kids are getting spent on them probably will have some effect, even if most of these activities don’t actually do much in terms of real development.

Not doing what other families are doing, especially similarly situated families socio-economically, also will mark your kids out as weird - which is unpleasant for them, and in at least some cases will involve your kids resenting you for it after they grow up. It’s one thing to do this out of moral principle, but another to simply refuse to buy things you can afford.

I believe that Americans do need to reduce our level of consumption. I aspire to do that personally. It’s very hard to go backwards in consumption once you’ve rebaselined to a higher level, however. That’s especially true when you’re trying to do it voluntarily. Every year I talk a good game of how I’m going to hold off on turning on the air conditioning until later in the year. But wouldn’t you know it I had mine on in late April. (Fortunately for me, I did already go through the process of painfully deflating my lifestyle after leaving the corporate consulting world).

But even if we can overcome that, there are very real social forces that make it difficult to go against the grain of what everyone else is doing by refusing to take part in certain consumption patterns.

There’s a collective action problem. If we all stopped buying certain things, then the social pressures would ease. Sometimes rule making solves this for us. Florida passed a law banning smart phone use in classrooms, for example. This solves the collective action problem. But we aren’t going to pass laws to ban consumption in the US.

In many ways today, our society actually promotes questionable or even dysfunctional behaviors (pot smoking and sports betting, anyone?) Avoiding these, even if it’s just as simple as consuming less by having a smaller house and not running the AC all the time, requires special effort to go against the tide. And it entails social costs. Realistically, most people aren’t going to do that.

Most of you reading aspire to live differently in at least some ways. But we should be aware that successfully doing so isn’t cost free.

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