More young adults staying home

Paleolithic hunter-gatherers organized in bands that included several families and consisted of 20-30 people, although some bands were larger. This closeness afforded protection and a survival advantage. When a couple married they usually lived in the band of one of the spouses. Bands included all generations from infants to the elderly. With the advent of civilization and the protection provided, living in nuclear families, or alone, became possible.

Modern life provides vastly greater opportunities for young adults than the Paleolithic era, yet the path to those opportunities is predictable. For the typical boomer it included high school, college or a job, marriage and having children. Moving out of the family home was a mark of adulthood. However, more recently, many young adults are staying home.

Michelle Fitzsimmons, writing for Salon, asks: “They're unemployed, living with their parents and waiting longer to get married. What happened to young adulthood?” In her article, Fitzsimmons discusses the new book, Not Quite Adults, by Richard Settersten and Barbara Ray, and interviews Ray.

“One half of 18- to 24-year-olds have not left home, a 37 percent increase since 1970. And it’s not just the fresh-out-of-college set: 30 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds live with their parents.”

However, most young adults living at home are still moving forward with their lives:

But while they sleep in their childhood bedrooms, they are also paying off debt, experimenting with careers and preparing for the time when they are ready to leave the nest and enter a hyper-competitive economy that doesn’t take kindly to failings and missteps.

The traditional path, “graduate high school, move out, go to college and/or find a job, get married and have kids all before 25” has changed and is now “much more meandering. The biggest reason for the slowdown is the job force has shifted a lot more dramatically in the last 25 years.” Divorce has been another factor for some:

They saw their parents get divorced, which makes you think twice about marriage and now you don’t have to get married right away or at all. People are creating independent lives before they get married, which wasn’t the case 25 years ago.

Ray also believes parents have changed:

They’ve been much more involved in their children’s lives from the beginning, they are much closer to their children, and children are much closer to their parents.

Ray suggests strengthening alternatives to a college education:

We’ve totally decimated our vocational schools. That’s wrong. We should elevate those jobs and make them easier to get to.

There are different paths where people are fulfilled and happy in their careers. If we provided clearer alternate paths earlier on, we’d be saving these young people a lot of time and money.

More importantly, being judgmental is to be avoided:

There is still this cloud and guilt parents feel because their child moved home. No one wants to be up for judgment and say that they actually enjoy having their kid back at home. When I go to parties and I tell people what the book is about, someone will always say, ‘Well, my 21-year-old son is living at home, and I really enjoy having him there.’ And someone else will chime in and say that too. Once it’s OK, and it’s clear that it’s OK, they feel like they’re not judged. The social norms haven’t quite changed fully, yet.

While the bands of the Paleolithic have not been recreated, the nuclear family is remaining together longer. 

Comments

[red_locker]

This has elevated a bit of shame and fear that I get from not moving out of my parent's house yet, though I am experimenting with my interests to see what would be a good career choice and how to go about things.

Thanks for the article.

[Dr. John]

Thanks for your comment. Keep in mind that some believe the boomers (of which I am one) have rigged the game in their favor. Here is how Barbara Beck puts it in The slow farewell in the print version of The Economist, Special Edition: The World in 2011.

“Critics claim that the boomers have bagged too many benefits, and that their children and their grandchildren will end up paying for them. Today’s young people can no longer afford to buy the houses that have made so many of the boomer generation effortlessly rich; and they will have to stump up for their parents and grandparents’ generous defined-benefit pension schemes. The contract between the generations - under which people of working age pay to bring up the young, who in turn will look after them when they get old - has broken down.”

“It seems a bit much to accuse the boomers of deliberately setting out to rob their children, but the problems are real enough.”

Power will steadily shift to the younger generation. Hopefully they will use it at the ballot box.