We live right next to my parents. They babysit for free and I love how close my kids are to their grandparents.

• My home backs my parents’ home in San Francisco.
• My kids get to have an authentic relationship with them.
• The kids can come and go between the houses, but my parents need to ask to come into ours.

I’m almost 40 and still live with my parents. Well, not with my parents — but with my husband and young kids in a home that backs up to my parents’, in Presidio Heights in San Francisco.

Our homes open to adjoining private gardens connected by a gate. A weathered, carved wood sign, a Christmas gift from my kids, points the way to Gigi and Papa’s.

Intergenerational living is nothing new, but our approach to it is. I don’t know anyone in San Francisco who has a living situation like ours, but it works for our family.

There are many perks

The perks are many: free babysitting for date nights, someone to watch the kids at the drop of a hat, and my parents taking the kids to school each morning. When we leave town, we don’t have to look far to find a pet sitter or hire someone to water the garden and fetch the mail.

What’s more critical for us is that our kids have authentic, quotidian relationships with my parents. They don’t just get together for holidays and special occasions. They know each other in a natural, casual, everyday way — an opportunity few modern families have. This is particularly important to my husband and me as his parents are deceased and will never know our kids.

It’s not that I’ve never moved out and had some kind of epic failure to launch. I left home at 14 for prep school and lived abroad and all over for college and graduate schools. When my husband and I were living in LA and knew we wanted children, we moved back to SF to be close to family.

Having two extra sets of hands in our lives to share the load is a tremendous help.

But there are also drawbacks

As you might imagine, there are drawbacks. Not everyone wants to live with their in-laws. My husband is a good sport, and my parents respect our space and independence. Nevertheless, it’s been more challenging to establish myself as a parent and head of my own separate household. Free childrearing advice often comes whether we like it or not.

Establishing boundaries between our homes has been an imperfect process. One rule is while the kids can come and go from either house as they please, my parents must ask to come into our home.

A month before the pandemic hit in 2020, we moved in. Locked down with a 6-month-old and 2-year-old, we relished visiting my parents’ house just to vary the monotony. It was comforting to be close to my parents during such uncertainty. We had dance parties and movie nights and celebrated half-birthdays. We were all in the room when my daughter took her first independent steps — tottering out of my father’s arms and into my husband’s.

I’m unsure if this living arrangement will last forever, but I treasure it for now. At the end of my life, when I look back on what made me happy and what was important, I think lazy Sunday afternoons in the garden together, barbequing as the kids dart back and forth, will be at the top of the list.