The share of adult children who live with their parents has ticked up in recent years. This just in: The parents don’t like it. A recent Pew survey found two-fifths of dads believe parents hosting adult children is bad for society, while only 12 percent think it’s a good thing. Moms agree, albeit to a lesser degree.
The share of adults ages 25 to 34 who lived with their parents reached historic highs in 2020, Census figures show: 22 percent of men and 13.4 percent of women.
The numbers have retreated since then, but not far. In 2022, 19 percent of men and 12 percent of women in the 25-34 demographic cohabit with their parents.
“We talk in psychology about emerging adulthood as a new stage in life,” said Carol Sigelman, a developmental psychologist at the George Washington University. “It’s this sort of in-between land.”
A grown child with a good job can maximize the benefits of living at home, amassing savings and retiring debts while paying little or nothing for food and shelter.
Returning to a childhood home can also trigger a waking nightmare of rehashed arguments, violated boundaries and unattainable privacy, not to mention the inescapable sense of being treated like a child.
“Multigenerational households really are very productive and useful,” said Jerrold Shapiro, a professor of counseling psychology at Santa Clara University. “But there are some issues. The biggest one is, as soon as kids get back with their parents, no matter how old they are, they regress. And the parents regress. They do it in tandem.”
Returning from college to the twin bed and One Direction posters of a childhood bedroom is a well-established, if vaguely humiliating, rite of passage for America’s young adults. More than half of men and women ages 18-24 have lived with their parents consistently since 2011, Census numbers show. They sit at the vanguard of a decades-long trend, spotlighted by the pandemic, that has transformed the American household.
In the first four decades of the 1900s, long before the term “failure to launch” entered the cultural vocabulary, more than two-fifths of adults under 30 lived with their parents in multigenerational households, often sharing chores on a family farm, according to a Pew analysis of Census files. The share of young adults living with their folks peaked at 48 percent in 1940.
The cohabiting population plummeted in the 1940s and 1950s, an era of war, prosperity and urbanization, bottoming out around 30 percent in 1960. It has risen slowly ever since. (SOURCE)
