Why Do Twenty-Somethings Move Back Home?

Ann Hulbert in Sundays’ New York Times Magazine had an interesting article on young adults —“Post-Teenage Wasteland?” Hers was one of the few to acknowledge that not all young adults are slackers. We can add a little more "background" to her column and respond to her question wondering how young people feel about being “lumped together in a limbo for laggards.” The Network has interviewed about 500 young adults in five sites across the nation. Like Hulbert, we have found little to support the claim that young people today are reluctant to grow up, but there is lots of evidence that a growing number of barriers block a smooth transition to adulthood. Here's some of them.

Why Youth Move Back Home
Compared with the generation who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, adulthood certainly comes later, but the youth who came of age a half-century ago faced vastly different circumstances. Back then, well paid, unionized jobs for working-class youth permitted a swift passage into the labor market; cheap and abundant housing, subsidized by the federal government, permitted young couples to set up their own households; and many youth with just a high school education could enter the middle class.

Today, most middle-class jobs require a college education. Secure, well paying jobs with benefits are hard to find for youth in their late teens and early twenties. (Young adults are more likely to receive health insurance in college than in the workplace.) It has become imperative to climb several rungs up the job ladder before young people are ready to establish a family.
The hazards of early marriage became all too clear in the middle of the last century when many young adults formed families before they were ready to settle down. The good news is that 20-somethings now proceed much more cautiously. They enter unions, but put off marriage until their relationships are time-tested.

Finally, many college-bound youth lack the funds to go straight through school. The cost of college has risen significantly in the last decade and the proportion of students who need financial assistance has also increased significantly. Families are footing a much larger share of college costs (college loans grew more rapidly than grants). Many youth begin college in a local institution and stay at home while they and their families put themselves through school. Add to this the rising costs of housing and the time-honored practice of moving out of home after high school has become more difficult. Living at home essentially subsidizes the costs of going to school or low-wage, entry-level jobs.

How Parents and Youth Are Adapting
How do young people and their families think about the longer period of semi-autonomy required to become self-supporting? There is no single answer. While some parents and youth welcome a slower transition to adulthood, happy to help out in the face of steeper educational and employment requirements, others lament the changes and wish that young adults could speed up the transition to adulthood, even if they recognize that the problem lies not with the motivation of their children but the support provided by the larger society.

Of course, some young people find themselves stuck in the parental nest, and some parents are resentful of their child’s inability to move out on his or her own. However, there is no evidence that this is a common issue for many families. The vast majority of youth are working or in school (or often both), hardly signs of a failure to take themselves or their circumstances responsibly. Those young people who get stuck frequently are those who would falter whether or not they were living independently of their parents.
And, we must not forget about those youth who lack the family support to help them while they acquire education, work skills, and find a foothold in the labor market. A growing number of young adults are being released from the foster care or juvenile justice system with no place to call home.

What to Do: Self-Reliance coupled with Social Supports
Independence is highly prized in American culture. We are a nation that believes it is up to individuals to make their own fortunes. Hence, we are inclined to put the blame on those who too readily accept help—even from their own families—and we are inclined to castigate parents who provide help to young adults who in an earlier age might have been out on their own.

There are considerable advantages to our cultural emphasis on self-reliance and our abhorrence of dependency. At the same time, perhaps the balance in American society is now so skewed in the direction of individual motivation that we are missing the huge shift that has occurred in the social ecology. It is almost as if we have lost perspective: individual motivation and social support are not opposites, but rather work in tandem to reproduce the social order. If our institutional support for young adults relies exclusively on the family’s good will, we are likely to overtax the capacities of families while we undernourish the next generation of workers, family members, and citizens.