20% of Millennials and 68% of Gen Z-ers still live with other family members
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For example, There's some one to take care of the elder members, and someone to take care of the kids.
The American Way of moving out from your parents' home ASAP to be so-called "independent" at any and all costs is not the only (or even best) way.
I know my neighbours have sex and I'm OK with this, but that doesn't mean I want to lay in bed and listen to them have it.
it probably was before like that. Now days, young person starting on min wage not necessary can afford all life necessities.
It's very, very commonplace for LGBTQ children in America. Their Christian parents kick them to the curb as soon as they possibly can and disown them. There's constant postings on Reddit about it, from these poor kids who don't know where to turn for help.
I don't think reddit is a reliable source for pretty much anything, especially making country-wide generalizations
And especially once adult children have their own children, it seems unthinkable to have a baby and a recovering mother in the house without help from grandmother and aunts.
What Bible are you referring to? That is not in the Jewish/Christian Bible.
I've always found it strange that American parents immediately kick out their children at the age of 18
So I was told the same thing when I was young that when I turn 18 I would have to leave. It was stressful to be honest but overall I am not sure it is a bad thing. The old adage of a baby bird will never fly if it isn't kicked from the nest seems to best encapsulate this idea and how it was present and executed to me. While jarring and terrifying it is ultimately for their own benefit.
But I've literally never heard of kids being told they had to leave home at 18, unless it's the foster care system where kids "age out" (even then, laws have changed recently to extend this to 21).
As a parent, I cannot imagine telling my kids they have to leave, especially at a relatively very young age/maturity. Our kids leaving home comes up occasionally in conversations, most commonly perhaps with the typically exasperated parent retort of the genre of "well you can decide differently when you live on your own!" But even then, my kids have said things like "what if I don't want to live on my own?" And we always follow up with: "Then you can stay here as long as you want. This will always be your home."
I really don't feel like our attitude in this respect is different from most other parents we know. But of course families can be very different, and I'm now aware that your experience may be more common that I previously thought.
Thanks for sharing.
I stayed in my house one year after I turned 18, and it was a huge mistake, especially since I was commuting almost 2 hours a day to university, but also...well, rent wasn't that high back then...I found a room for $215/month near UW in 1994.
These days I don't think that value proposition exists anymore.
There is also the societal pressure to find a place of your own for privacy.
Also if you’re in university you might only have guaranteed room and board first year. I know I didn’t have a choice after my sophomore year. No matter how much I protested I was required to find off campus housing.
I moved out as soon as I could, and if I hadn’t I don’t think I would have had half the life experience. It’s just hard to do that without any privacy.
It’s not that my parents were tyrannical. It’s more like a chilling effect.
Is this an American thing, or a northern European thing?
China is listed at the #2 dynamic economy and it is common there.
Singapore is listed at #6 and it is common there. Singapore is also substantially richer than the US.
I can understand the appeal - no rentals to pay, way lower cost of living if the parents live in a non-metropolitan area, and - if you have kids - you have someone to take care of them during your meetings.
I don't think that is really true, at least for kids going to university. In fact, lots of kids virtually move out before they are even finished with high school because boarding schools are so much more common there. After they graduate from university, it is very very common for young adults to live in another city, visiting home maybe once or twice a year.
Americans really tend to look at a lot of things from other cultures that they haven't experienced personally with rose tinted glasses. That's because people rarely talk about what they implicitly consider normal. For most people in my culture (Russian) everyday verbal and psychological abuse was and still is just norm of family life, and physical abuse is probably too for almost the majority.
However these kids aren't living in their mom's basement because the culture has changed but because the economic and social outlook is collapsing.
Our society, that is our neighbors, our cousins, our brothers, our children are being strangled.
The headline advertised a colossal shift in "norm" over just ~15 years.
Except that it's silly bait. Millennials are ~15y older than Gen Z. Of course more Zoomers are at their parents' home, they're practically still kids.
This is accounted for further down the page at "what they did at 34/22". The increase is actually very slight. Far less than the headline suggests and immediately understandable based on the house price and rent trends as percentage of income.
The headline, and the title here are bait.
My mom is an immigrant, and she has always welcomed her adult children to live with her (even to the point of insistence). I fully expect to go live with her when she reaches her elderly years. I'm even kind of looking forward to it. I live across the country from my whole family and this has been a very isolating experience, even if it was my choice to do so.
I don't think it is weird for adults to live with their family. I actually think it's weirder and more unnatural NOT to live near or close to your family.
My sister lived with her kids and husband under the same roof with my mother and the situation was extremely complicated because my sister always were to be a guest in a way.
By his early 20s, and frankly sooner, a healthy human being wants to have his own life. He doesn't want to live on his parents' dime. Healthy parents also don't want their children in the nest anymore either, and it is their duty to, proverbially speaking, kick them out. What "leaving the nest" means in a given culture may vary (the article in question seems to be talking about the US), but in any healthy culture, there exists the same basic psychological emancipation from parental dependence, an emancipation willingly embraced or imposed by necessity. Loving parenting is a process of progressively removing training wheels and clipping tethers. The goal is to lead someone to becoming a man or a woman: in short, an adult. This means truthful and honest feedback instead of deceitful complements or excuses, upping the challenge, and being increasingly and accordingly demanding, so that by the time someone does leave the nest, the significance of the transition is largely in the symbolic act, not a change in responsibility they can't handle. Parents and adult children should be able to relate to one another as adults. If that's not happening, something is wrong.
In short, we have a problem with Peter Pan syndrome. An infantile, therapeutic culture of narcissistic self-indulgence makes this very easy. Mental illness is to be expected.
Nope. Things are just too expensive. Why move out a party extraordinary amount in rent when one can stay home, contribute to the bills for less, save up for a house and then move out? Make no mistake, there is such a think as unnecessary struggle.
No way. It's definitely the first.
When I was 22 years old in 2004, I was making $13/hour and the rent on my 1-bedroom apartment was $600/month. I have a friend that still works there, and he says the pay is now $21/hr, and the place I was renting is now $1,475/month. In 20 years, the pay is up only about 60%, but rents are up nearly 2.5x. He had to get a roommate to be able to afford rent.
It's ridiculous that a country as rich as the USA has had the standard of living DROPPING over time.
I would suggest to anyone that growing up in an alcoholic family doesn't do anyone any favors. My parents so neglected their health that they both died before I turned 20, and before they reached 60. Unfortunately for me, neither had any savings, retirement, or life insurance.
So yes, that was meant in a sympathetic way. And my dad too died young, but not quite that young.
I did find them very neglectful. I had needs and they didn't do a great job in getting them met. This reinforces the idea that your needs aren't important, and you instead become a people pleaser later in life, in an attempt to "win" the love of others. That's very sick thinking.
I'm not for helicopter parents or anything, but there sure is a happy medium somewhere in there. I'm finding out now that I have very obvious learning and attention disabilities, and probably a touch of the 'tism. That should have been picked up relatively easy by the fact that I'm highly intelligent but had a complete lack of being able to do any homework, what-so-ever.
I did not read about that or search it though. But it is an interesting idea.
That's of course not to say that this is the only benefit from living with family (if true).
I think it is also economically makes sense because in many of these countries it is very hard for young people to find a housing where they live specially in the big cities where there is more opportunities.
Also because of the centralized economy around capital city and a few cities it will but pressure on the housing market. Not like the US when there is much more diverse and spread economy.
I really miss living close to my extended family and be like 1 hour from most of them. Where I never been alone in any circumstances. But here is the US, I feel lonely and I don't think I am the only one.
Tuition and health care are also problems, but housing cost disease is the one that is most pervasive and affects the most people.
The root cause is mostly a supply problem due to bad zoning, bad regulations, and NIMBYs. This is exacerbated by prolonged extremely low interest rates flooding a constrained market with cash.
If the economy is bad then you can't move out. If the economy is good well then it is just about to get bad so you can't move out either.
There was never a time in the past that renting didn't eat up most of your money. I didn't know anyone who moved out when I moved out that wasn't also dead broke. This was in the mid 90s though and it was the most magical time to be on your own and young. I don't think I would bother moving out now though if I was young because why pay so much more money just to fuck off on your phone in your own apartment instead of your parent's basement?
The economics are pretty much the same. The culture though is night and day different.
They may not have wanted to?
It all depends on the individuals, one family member still lives with their parents and everybody seems to be just fine with it. Not everybody wants to start a family of their own and not everybody looks to get away from home right after they turn 18.
While this clearly never applied to all of the US it applied to a significant part of it.
Now if culture would have massively changed wrt. how family constructs are seen that could explain the increase but AFIK there was no such change.
So in my opinion it's pretty clear that a main driving factor of this increase is that living in your own household has gotten dam expensive. Too expensive.
And yes you can re-frame it as "they don't want to" (because it's to expensive). But that misses the point.
There's efficiency in living under the same roof (unless you hate each other's guts). Especially when you consider how huge and wasteful USA single family homes are.
Scroll down the article a bit and you'll see an age-aligned comparison. The percentage of at-homers has only grown 7% since Boomers stole all the jobs and land.
The relative cost of property/rent to income makes this trend really simple to understand.
In the future, we expect to "live with our parents" again, but it will be because they will move in with us as they advance in years and need additional care. So, idk, the article seems to start with the assumption that living with family is undesirable and a result of financial stress. That's true for some, sure, but it can also just be the way people prefer to live.
I was definitely more broke working as a pizza guy and then at a university, but I valued my freedom much more. Lived paycheck to paycheck with very finely tuned finances, no savings just student loan payments. I survived on a diet of library media, books, torrented video games and super cheap beer. The interesting part was I felt relatively happy. Threw crappy parties where we'd all chip in to buy a bunch of 40s, and someone would dj. I didn't really start to "have some money" until I was about 30~ from university job, and then I quit for industry where I 3x'd (I cried that day, as I made more money than anyone in my family!)
I think now it's much easier to feel aspirational about money and hard to be happy with you lot when you're getting firehosed about how everyone is having a better time than you are and they have more money. Things are also much more expensive, especially after the pandemic.
There is value in coming home to your own couch and knowing the space is yours, and yours alone. Maybe tastes have changed. I know that in my life, every time I tried to outsmart and skip a step I feel like life threw me a set back to learn the lesson I tried to not learn :D.
- Since baby boomers were born, the US has gotten a lot more diverse.
- This is meaningful, because in a lot of cultures, multigenerational homes are the norm. There is a lot less pressure to move out just because one is an adult, and there's more emphasis on the family unit.
- It doesn't seem like a coincidence that diverse places like LA and NYC are more multigenerational. Yes of course they're also a lot more expensive, and it's not just a cultural thing.
Also multi generation home might be a red herring. Because in just about every country adults are supposed to support themselves. Multigenerational means you support your parents not that they support you. So the type of multigenerational homes we see rising today might not be reflective of different cultural preferences explainable by rising diversity
China, India, and Latin America make up an extremely large portion the world's entire population, and families from there have had a growing presence in the US. Multigenerational housing is the norm there, and is absolutely not a red herring. Additionally, the focus is on supporting the family unit, not supporting in one specific direction.
I definitely agree that high prices (housing in particular) are contributing to this, but so is culture.
It's traditionally not made up of adult children who are unable to support themselves. Instead it's made up of adult children supporting parents in their old age.
That's not the same thing we're seeing in the US where lots of millenials are staying home due to being unable to support themselves
This does not necessarily mean the parents are supporting their adult children directly, it also means mutual support.
An example: Parents will argue "Why move out and pay a lot to a random landlord when you're welcome here and can save money?".
It is not a free ticket to freeload, the child is expected to contribute in some manner to household (Pay rent, split bills, help with chores etc.). Parents from these aforementioned backgrounds actually encourage children to stay as long as they want, or at least until marriage. It is not seen as shameful that they're past 18 and still at home.
I'm not arguing that economics don't play a factor, but I believe that's only part of the reason.
it is not clear there is severe shortage of housing in general, but there is another factor: houses were used as investment vehicle by rich people during 20 years of low interest rate, which drove price up significantly, and also decreased available(not total) inventory.
the problem is that investors want not one, but say 10.
> This requires building a lot more than there are today.
first link in google says there are 144M housing units in US. Is it not enough for 350M population?
Investors wouldn't want 10 if prices were stagnant because there was plenty of supply.
>first link in google says there are 144M housing units in US. Is it not enough for 350M population?
If housing isn't where people are, then no there isn't enough. About half the US population lives metropolitan areas.
yes, and prices were not stagnant because many rushed to buy with low interest risk free loans. And now they don't want to sell, because they can rent it for high.
> If housing isn't where people are, then no there isn't enough. About half the US population lives metropolitan areas.
even if 80% lives in metropolian areas, which I would totally believe, do you have any evidence that houses are not there too?
Were investors buying 10 cars at a time with low interest loans and regular people forced to buy/lease from them before the chip shortage? Why did cars only shoot up in price when it was difficult to obtain one?
Why does a country like Japan, with its declining population and plenty of housing not have a flood of investors buying tons of homes at once and flipping/renting them back to its population? Could it be because that would make a terrible investment?
That housing is an investment vehicle and not you know, just a home to live in, is the evidence. Homes aren't rising in prices where populations have declined and buyers aren't competing.
I wrote already: low interest risk free(because of foreclosure) loans. So this is risk free leveraged investment and even with tax benefits. I don't know anything else like that.
I answered this too already: inventory indeed is not high enough to satisfy all investors.
There, the part of this that makes the bare stats mean anything whatsoever.
Labor participation rate is another thing to track, more of GenZ is attending college rather than embracing independence and going to work than all other cohorts so its not surprising.
I guess my instinct is that all worthwhile pursuits require sacrifice and childrearing, being the most worthwhile pursuit, should reasonably take the most sacrifice. And I revel in the fact that, through decades of schooling and job experience and saving, I can keep my wife home with the kids and live in reasonable material comfort, just a little below the median income for equivalently sized households in my state.
If you know where I can find safe and dependable roommates, HMU.