We are in a similar “nice but expensive” area - the draws are great schools, great transportation to city and jobs, lots of activities and social opportunities for young families and their kids. Downside is taxes. Many recent empty nesters such as ourselves are moving out. I would be happy to stay if I was sure our kids were going to return with their families and live nearby. I would love that. But we have four and it’s unlikely they will all come back (two currently live on the opposite coast.) One thought we have tossed around is moving to more of a vacation area - we love lakes and mountains - to give our kids and their families an incentive to come and spend holidays and vacations with us. But my husband would much prefer we were “day-to-day” grandparents, not just vacation and holiday grandparents.
I’m sure you and your dh are lovely people, but I would NOT have wanted my in-laws to have been day-to-day grandparents.
We moved away from dh and ds’s home state to live at the beach. Ds has no plans to return to his home state. No doubt we will be vacation grandparents. We live on the opposite side of the state from the mouse, but it’s only a couple of hours to WDW. I think that is going to help, too.
It absolutely is a reason for a medical intervention. Call it an abortion or surgery or whatever. I would have died if they hadn’t operated immediately, but I was only 4 weeks pregnant, and most ectopics are found before there is a heartbeat.
Ideally I want to be less than an hour away from my adult child and her family. I don’t want to be down the street or on top of them. I don’t need to see them daily or weekly. I just want to be able to participate in their lives. I want to attend birthday parties, games, recitals, barbeques. I want to be able to provide backup childcare.
We had dinner last night with the architect who is doing our renovation. Owner of the firm and very well-known. Apparently, a couple of years ago, when her kid was living in Brooklyn (like half of the spawn of our friends), I said that her kids would probably gravitate back to her city if there were free/cheap real estate. So she bought a triple-decker and the kid moved from Brooklyn to one of the apartments in the triple-decker.
More generally, I think the parents probably convey to the kid a set of aspirations. In some families, parents convey that they want their kids to do the best possible thing academically and career-wise. Others convey the sense that the kids are expected to live in the area. I grew up in the first kind of family. My parents’ generation were the first in their families to go to college, but both families must have conveyed that attitude. My mother was studying for a PhD about 600 miles from home and met my father who was a professor (she was in languages, he was in theoretical physics). They were happy for each of us to go off to other parts of the country, especially for grad school. Two ended up near my parents, two much farther away. We have conveyed the same to our kids. Both are now on the West Coast while we are on the East Coast. Our son will likely stay there – he is a Silicon Valley tech kid who did his grad work there and hence much of his professional network is there. Our daughter may come back and inadvertently we have the real estate for her. Long story short, we tried to downsize from the house where we raised our kids and found an extraordinary lot right on a river in the same town. Alas, the house on the lot was more than 50% larger than our previous house. The former owners were a family and the parents of the family who had a huge in-law suite. But, there is an entire wing for a family in a very nice town with very good schools. Maybe, like my architect friend, the real estate will be the lure.
The family’s expectations of the kids are only one factor. The strength of the local economy, the economy in the region where the kid went to college, the desires of significant others, opportunities that are sector specific (a relative got a PhD from Harvard in a humanities field and told me that there were only three teaching jobs in North America in the field in her year; she was fortunate to get one; some of the biggest opportunities in tech pre-pandemic were in the Bay Area, in biotech in Cambridge MA, in oil and gas, perhaps Texas).
We moved away for careers from our parents and they did from our grandparents, without big inheritances, opportunities dictate where you end up living, not everyone is privileged enough to make decisions based upon strength or weakness of the familial bonds.
Both my husband and my entire family live in the same city, with the exception of my 2 kids and a couple of cousins. Before my generation, no one moved away. Both my kids went away for college. My son stayed for grad school, attended medical school at our state school, and then returned to his college town; I can not imagine he and his family every living elsewhere. My daughter moved to DC for a job, then a stint in the UK where she met her now husband. When they decided to move to the states, they moved with her company where she had worked with this team and made a few friends.
I believe neither kids want to be in the same city as either set of parents, but want to keep a close relationship. They both have toddlers, so the pandemic has made visits a bit more difficult. My daughter recently mentioned how hard it has been without family to help out occasional; they are having a tough time with WFH and parenting a toddler. While I think she would consider moving to our city, I don’t think my SIL is ready for that; our family can be a lot! D knows we would babysit anytime and have the kids spend the night; my kids spent many a night at my parents.
While husband and I would love to live closer to the kids, we both have living mothers, and I am the only child to help my mother; my husband is one of 4.