Generation Kidult: Why 34-Year-Olds Are Still Living With Their Parents
Across the rich world, more and more young adults are living with their parents. Is that a bad thing?
Like having your first beer, your first job, or your first real relationship, moving away from home is a rite of passage. It doesn’t matter if you’re moving into a rat-infested slum or a glamorous big-city penthouse; what matters is the independence. You’ve grown up, flown the nest, and now you’re a real adult with all the freedom and responsibility that entails.
But that story is becoming increasingly rare around the world as exploding rents force those adults to return to their childhood bedrooms, and as soaring house prices convince people to live with parents longer in the hopes of saving up to buy a first home.
Many young adults moved in with their parents during the pandemic, but the story didn’t start there. Globally, it became particularly pronounced in the years leading up to and after the 2008 Financial Crisis. In the UK, for example, the proportion of 23-year-olds living with parents went from 37% in 1998 to 49% in 2017. In the US, 52% of those aged 18 - 34 were living with parents by July 2020, compared with 29% in 2007 and 33% in 2015.
Those numbers are absolutely shocking. In countries where an extended stay with your parents was traditionally mocked as “living in mother’s basement” and seen as a sign of failure, it has now become normal to do exactly that. Such a remarkable societal shift should make us sit up and investigate further:
who’s staying and who’s leaving?
is the difficulty all down to property prices, or is there more to the story?
are more people voluntarily choosing to stay at home?
what will be the long-term consequences of this shift?
Who Is Actually Living With Their Parents?
In the US, everyone. Dr Bella DePaolo of Psychology Today puts it this way:
The size of the increase varied with different demographic groups […]
The overall trend, though, of a rise in the number of young adults living with their parents, has been true for all major groups: women and men; Hispanic, Black, Asian, and White; urban and rural; Northeast, Midwest, South, and West.
Put another way, this isn’t a trend purely driven by one demographic, like immigrants.
However, one relatively striking data point is that in virtually all Western countries, the number of men who are staying at home is significantly higher than the number of women, which might be because women are more likely to go to university, or might be because women expect to find greater scrutiny on their romantic lives or greater pressure to do chores or caretaking duties if they stay at home. In surveys, young adult men are more likely to cite the non-economic benefits of staying at home (mothers who cook for and clean up after them).
In Europe, there’s an extremely wide range in the number of young adults (18 - 34) living with parents, from 17% in Sweden to 77% in Croatia as of 2021. The economically weaker countries of Southern and Eastern Europe are likely to have a higher proportion staying at home, but economic difficulty isn’t perfectly correlated with living in the basement - the Irish and Polish are more likely than the Turkish or Romanians to live with family, and there are more Swiss homestayers than Estonians.
Believers in the Protestant Work Ethic will be smug to know that the 6 European countries where young adults leave home the earliest (Sweden, Finland Denmark, Germany, Estonia and the Netherlands) are all historically Protestant nations (as is the US, which would rank between Germany and Estonia).
By contrast, 7 of the 10 countries on the other end of the chart (Croatia, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Spain and Ireland) are Catholic-majority, while the other 3 are Orthodox (Romania, Bulgaria and Greece).
In the countries where people leave home early (like Germany and Denmark), a relatively low number of people are homeowners, suggesting that they leave earlier because they aren’t saving as seriously to buy a house. The countries where people stay longest (like Italy and Spain) have close family bonds, and it makes sense that you’d live with your family longer if you genuinely like them.
What’s going on besides rising prices?
It should come as no surprise that houses are extortionate to buy or rent today, but there are other factors worth considering, such as the fact that jobs have simply become worse.
In the 1990s, jobs were significantly more stable than today. The rise of the gig economy, of Uber and Fiverr, of McJobs and permatemping and zero-hour contracts, have all introduced new uncertainty into the labour force. Even if you’re earning a decent wage, you mightn’t have the consistency of income to get a mortgage or to feel secure starting a family.
It’s also true that the overall environment of economic uncertainty is much greater than for prior generations. A 30-year-old today will remember living through the 2008 Financial Crisis and the Coronavirus lockdowns, both of which were more shocking than any global economic event since the 1970s Oil Crisis. That will certainly make you more cautious about leaving home to make your own way in the world.
Finally, there’s the dramatic rise in further education to think about. In some countries (the US and UK, mostly), graduates are more debt-burdened than ever before. In other countries, particularly those where most students study in their hometown (like Italy and Romania), the increasing popularity of postgrad education is delaying entry to “the real world” of professional work and independent living.
Are some people actually happy to be staying at home?
As mentioned earlier, there are certainly those who like staying at home because they prefer mom’s home cooking to microwaved ready meals. It could be that as younger generations become increasingly ill-prepared for the tough parts of independent living (whether that means doing your own laundry or changing your own car tires), they are staying at home willingly.
Let’s consider relationships too. Starting a family has always been one of the greatest motivators for leaving home, and record numbers of young people have no interest in raising kids or marrying. Furthermore, younger generations are less interested in drinking or having sex than older ones. if you’re not planning to bring anyone back home, then one of the biggest drawbacks of living in mom’s basement is barely an inconvenience anymore.
Finally, in places where the demands of the modern economy have become too intense, increasing numbers of young adults are just abandoning the formal economy, moving back home, and doing odd jobs for their family to earn their keep. Most notoriously, China’s 21% unemployment rate amongst urban youths (16 - 24) is persuading some to become “full-time children”, who do chores like shopping, internet admin and looking after elderly relatives in return for a roof over their heads and some pocket money.
What does this mean for the future?
The driving cause of this trend is the failure of our governments to ensure affordable accommodation for younger generations. People should be (and are) angry about this. Many people who experience frosty or even abusive relationships with family have been forced to return home.
Those who enjoy good relations with their family might also find it humiliating, even infantilizing, that they can’t afford to live alone. There are many people with excellent reasons to have their own space, and they should have that right.
But if we were looking for a silver lining, here’s what I would suggest: the Homestay Crisis is forcing a lot of young adults to spend emotionally valuable time together with their families.
For most of human history, people have maintained close relationships with their parents and wider family throughout their lives. The modern Western Dream (that one should leave home at 18, visit family for a week or two during holidays each year, call every other Sunday, and toss the old folks into a nursing home when they get old) is utterly bizarre from a historical point of view. How could that possibly be good for the soul?
For all its faults, this crisis might accidentally push some Western nations into a healthier balance between family life and independence, after decades of family ties eroding.
Good article. And it fits with our personal experiences of having adult children live with us. We actually enjoy each other and generally find the arrangement mutually beneficial. But I also know that there’s much to be learned by living on one’s own. I’m glad you ended the article on that historic note…this really isn’t that outside the human experience.