Here’s the bad news: The parents don’t like it. A higher proportion of adult children live with their parents these days. It has been found in a recent Pew survey that two-fifths of dads believe hosting adult children is detrimental to society, compared with 12 percent that consider it to be beneficial. A lesser degree of agreement is found among moms.
Several new articles advise parents on lightning-rod topics, such as whether their grown children should be paying rent and how to get them to leave. An unprecedented number of adult children returned to their nests after COVID-19.
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The pandemic has sent millennials and Generation Z progeny fleeing roommates and cramped apartments in thinly populated suburbs for spacious homes with full kitchens and laundry facilities.
Carol Sigelman, a developmental psychologist at George Washington University, describes emerging adulthood as a new stage. When a grown child has a good job, they can live at home, accumulate savings, and settle debts with little or no expenses. There’s this sort of place in between.”
An excellent job allows their grown child to live at home, save, and retire from debts for little or no cost. The feeling of being treated like a child can also make returning to a childhood home seem like a nightmare of rehashed arguments, violated boundaries, and unattainable privacy.
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A Pew analysis of Census files revealed that more than two-fifths of adults under 30 lived with their parents in multigenerational households in the first four decades of 1900, often sharing chores on family farms. During the 1940s, 48 percent of young adults lived with their parents.
COVID-19 triggered mass migration, with millions of Americans leaving crowded urban cores. Pew found that young adults are three times more likely to move than older adults. Since then, Americans have returned to normal. According to one estimate, two-thirds of boomerang kids stay with their parents.