How do families manage when it's too expensive for children to leave home?  Kitty Holland reports on one family's experience.

Every year Jacqueline Finney wishes she could postpone Christmas just for a month or so. "There's so much to get done, there's never enough money to get everything you'd like and, in this house, well, it's hectic. But I love Christmas. I do love it," she says. Sitting in the bright, spacious family home outside the village of Castletown, in Co Meath, she explains that her husband, Michael, built it with construction-trade colleagues last year. The home has changed her life. "We have seven bedrooms here, so the kids have a room of their own. In the last place we were all on top of each other. It was tidy, but it was chaos."

She and Michael have seven children: Jenny (20), Michael (19), Laura (16), David (15), Damien (12), Emma (11) and Conor (18 months). And recently arrived to the home is Jenny's daughter, Amy (three months). "In the last house it was stressful, yes, and I'm sure Jenny would not have been able to stay after Amy was born if we'd still been there."

Jenny nods on the opposite sofa, cradling Amy as she feeds. She has taken a year off from her accountancy studies, in Dundalk, to care for Amy and feels she will be living at home for three or four years. Amy's dad, Cathal, lives nearby, and the couple hope to set up home when they can afford to.

The family had been living in a former council house in the village that they had bought under the tenant-purchase scheme. "We asked about building on two bedrooms to that, but we would have lost our garden. So we sold it, for €135,000, and borrowed €70,000. We were five years looking for a site. All the work was done by family and friends. It was literally started in May and we moved in in August."

Although no statistics have been gathered on households with three generations under one roof, awareness of the "long family" phenomenon is such that the Central Statistics Office proposes to include a question on it on the next Census form, for 2006. The main factors behind the rise in long families are property prices - the average house now costs almost €250,000 - the cost of childcare and, more recently, changes to the Department of Social and Family Affairs' rent-supplement scheme.

Mick Rush of the Centre for Family Studies, at University College Dublin, points out that although the three assumptions underpinning family policy are that most adults will quickly become part of a couple, that both will be working and that childcare will be a private arrangement, in fact people are postponing marriage, if they marry at all, and are investing in childcare rather than in property.

"So young people are having to live at home longer. We are also seeing young mothers staying at home with their parents while the father of the child lives elsewhere. While we used to associate that with social disadvantage it is not an unusual arrangement in middle-class households. Obviously, that is putting pressure on these young relationships."

So are the living arrangements difficult for Jenny and Cathal? "Not really," she says. "He is here a lot of the time and stays over quite often. He's very good to both of us," she adds, smiling down at Amy. "I have one more year to do in my studies, and after that I'll be working. I'm very lucky to have my mother to mind Amy. I never have had to look for anyone else to mind her, so I don't know how much childcare costs. But I see the costs on the news and in the newspapers, and, well, if I didn't have mum I wouldn't be able to go back to college."

Jacqueline smiles when asked how she feels about looking after Amy as well as Conor, who toddles around as we chat. "Ah, I love her, but, yes, it is more work for me. I mean, I'll be OK with Amy, but what if grandchild number two comes along? I'll never be finished changing nappies," she laughs.

The implications of the growing number of long families, says Rush, are that the extended family is becoming even more relevant than we thought. "And a huge factor is the value we place on unpaid labour in the home. We know very little about these women - because it is mainly women - what they are doing, whose children they are caring for as well as their own, what voluntary work they are doing. They are not the focus of either policy or research. One estimate has put the value of their contribution at 60 per cent of GDP. And their 'love labour' - reading the bedtime story, for example - cannot be commodified. Love labour is absolutely at the heart of social health."

Jacqueline says there should be more support for young families, for them buying their first home. "I think also there should be more recognition of the work women like me do in the home, just keeping the show on the road. I don't go out to work, because there is just too much to do in the house here. I'm washing and cleaning and cooking non-stop. And budgeting. I'm always on the lookout for bargains. I lie awake at night worrying about money and how we'll make it stretch." Scooping Conor onto her lap, she says there are "so many difficult times ahead" as children grow into adulthood. "I just feel you have to give them the best and most secure childhood you can. Love," she says, placing a kiss on Conor's head, "costs nothing".

The rise of the 'long family'

How many?

Cannot be quantified, as Census has not gathered data on them. The Central Statistics Office proposes to include a question in Census 2006 to gather such data

The main issues