Not everyone that lives at home is living that way because they are incapable of taking care of themselves: it’s a trade-off, with costs and with benefits. The benefits vary enourmously: if you have, say, cool parents with whom you have a mutually respectful and loving relationship and a living situation that is not imposing on anyone else, it seems like the act of a " financially retarded imbecile" to move out simply out of pride or the inability to delay the gratification of having your own place. Much better to stay home and build up a next egg. Now, not everyone has such an adventageous home life–but those that do may well be doing the adult thing when they take advantage of it.
I hate it. I’m 26 and I’m living at home. I’m also unemployed and seriously thinking about heading back to school. One degree (an English one) apparently does not cut it these days.
I get to take prerequisite classes before I even go to vet school. Whee!
From my own experience I would think that the at-home rate would be about 50% - half of us live at home, and we date the other half who have their own place where we can shag!
Huh…I was just being facetious but I just realized that I dated guys with their own places the entire time I lived with my folks. Then as soon as I moved out, I started dating a guy who lives with his parents. Weird.
Was there ever a time when a bachelor’s in English did anything very useful but qualify you for grad/law school or teaching English?
There are plenty of fields in which one degree cuts it. They’re just usually in technical fields, which are arguably harder to get into and out of successfully.
It’s hard to be a college student and work enough hours to afford that kind of rent, especially if you have a major that requires a lot of work and studying outside of class (such as the sciences, engineering, computer science, or pre-med). Those kinds of majors can be a good investment in the long run, but in your early 20s the work required for them is going to seriously cut into the time and energy you have to put into a job to pay for housing and tuition.
At the University of Maryland, where I did my undergrad degree, I was (among other things) a physics major. The upper-level classes for physics majors were an incredible amount of work. I sat down and calculated it once, and most of us in those classes were spending about 20 hours per week per class doing homework, studying, labs, and so on. You generally took at least two upper-level physics classes per semester in your last two years as a physics major- that’s a full-time job right there, and that doesn’t include any other classes you were taking (they were 3- or 4-credit classes, so two of them wasn’t enough to bring you up to full-time student status) or any work you were doing to earn money. It was easy to be spending 70-90 hours per week working and on classes, even if your paid job was only 10 or 12 hours per week.
Exactly, it seems to me that the people who left home early all had a really bad relationship with their parents. Those of us with happier childhoods see things differently, and we mostly decided that staying at home and saving our money for a few years was a much better course of action.
“My body is my tomb”…dare I say it? LOL
I’m starting to see that, plain as day. The job market here is abysmal. The jobs that are open require 5-10 years of experience, and a specialized degree. Even any technical writing job I’ve ever seen.
Bleh.
If I could do it all over again, I’d pick any other major. I liked learning and thinking about things analytically through my studies, but it’s unfortunately done NOTHING for me yet. Working in/running restaurants has got me more than my degree has, which is very sad. The worst part is, I love school. I’d like to learn everything, but I’m too poor and I’m already 26 and feeling like a failure.
The dangers of having multiple windows open after you leave your computer and return after a long time…that post was supposed to go in the “Michael Cera” thread. Could someone report it to the moderator?
I moved into an apartment with a roommate when I was 18 in Lincoln Nebraska for my first two years of school. My Sophomore year, my parents moved to Nevada. I had decided I was going to pursue a degree in Geology. I wasn’t happy with what UNL offered and looked into the Geo department at UNLV.
I made a decision to move to Nevada to finish my degree at UNLV. I moved in with my parents when I first got here, just to look for an apartment. Holy Shit the apartments here were so freaking expensive. I was paying 1/2 of a 450/month rent in Lincoln. For a 1 bed 1 bath set up here in Las Vegas started at about $600/month not including utilities. Since I had just moved here, I didn’t have any friends. The dorms were really expensive too. So I decided to live at home, (which ended up being for almost 4 years) until I was able to make enough money to be able to pay for my tuition and a place to live. I had part time jobs that paid about 5/hour and was working anywhere from 10 - 20 hours per week.
I don’t think I was lazy or unmotivated. I just made about 50 to 100 a week. Tuition cost about 80 or 90 a credit hour, plus all the fee and parking permits associated with just taking classes. But I was till putting in tons of hours for course work. If someone would have called me lazy back then I would have totally snapped. I was wound pretty tight back then.
When I did move out I was working two jobs (one with the water district and one with the computer science department at the university) and making almost 2 grand a month, and taking anywhere from 2 to 4 classes per semester. Between school and work, I was probably putting in 80 to 100 hours a week.
I also had to be able to save money up for when I wouldn’t be working when I wold have to be out of town for field work, anywhere between 1 and 4 weeks at a time.
Ok, that was a bit more pissy than I meant it to be, but I am not retyping it to sound better. :o 
The general trend is that people are waiting longer to move out of their parents house. I don’t have a cite, but I did read it in a few magazines like Time or Newsweek.
20 is not out of the ordinary. Most people don’t graduate college until 22 or so. I went away to college but I lived at home during the summers and that was pretty typical.
A lot of it is cost. If you take a job in Manhattan at 23 as anything other than an investment banker or other high paying job, you pretty much have to room with three other people in a 2 bedroom. And if you work someplace where housing is cheep, chances are there aren’t a lot of jobs for new grads.
I don’t know, I have an English degree and didn’t run into many problems (note: this was in May 2000, so times are different now). The first thing I did was go to job fairs and talk to every company that allowed English majors (that included companies that simply advertised for Liberal Arts Majors). I talked to two companies there, got offered two jobs. I ended up working in marketing and shifted into a more analytical role. So keep your eyes open, you’ll do fine. Just make sure to not limit yourself to English-y type stuff because your degree can get you other stuff, as well.
That’s usually what I’ve witnessed as well. People that left early could not stand their parents. Usually because their parents made them do dishes or do yard work. The horrors! Not only that though, but also just couldn’t get along with their parents in general with other issues, and/or wanted to shag under their own roof. Which is totally understandable, but don’t get all self righteous about it and think that those who stay at home are losers because you chose to leave early to be a “grown up”.
Also see: At what age are you considered a loser if you still live at home?
I read an article that partially attributed it to how laid-back the Baby Boomers are. There’s more of an open dialogue rather than “my house my rules”, so everyone gets along better and there’s less incentive to leave. The article also mentioned it was an ego-boost; the Boomers feel young and needed because the kids still hang out with them, and they see it as a sign of having raised a tight-knit family.
I’m 24 and a large chunk of my friends are still living with their parents (definitely more than 14%), although everyone seems to be making plans to move out. My fiance and I bought our own place at 23. We still feel bad that we were living in my parents’ house rent-free, but because of their help we saved in 8 months what would otherwise have taken us 5 years.
A couple of my friends do fit the big-spending, aimless Gen-Y stereotype mentioned in the OP - they’re doing extended degrees, travelling overseas, spending all their income - all of this subsidised by their parents. I know a guy who is in his late 20s and still gets his parents to reimburse him for petrol and bus tickets. But many other friends are saving as much as they can so they can break into the housing market.
WOW way to generalize. Some of us had some pretty serious emotional and/or physical abuse going on at home and had very good reasons to get outta dodge.
I love my parents and they love me. We have a great relationship, and I know that if I’m ever in a bind, my parents will come to my rescue in a minute.
But…
My parents never encouraged any of their kids to live with them after they reached adulthood. They never said, “Do not come back ever again”, but they didn’t advertise themselves as a boarding house either. It’s funny how all four of their kids came to this realization pretty independently. None of us have returned to the nest for longer than a summer break between semesters.
I don’t begrudge a person in their young to mid 20s living with Mom and Dad. I think times are really hard for young folks to make it on their own nowadays. I’m just realizing how expensive it was for me to live on a post-doc’s salary in Miami, now that I’ve moved to a less costly city. I can only imagine how hard it is for a person just starting out on $10-$14/hour.
I apply to every job I like. It doesn’t matter if I’m not qualified or not. I figure that if I’m in the pile, I have to be taken out of the pile. It’s also not my job to take me out of the pile. I figure that the worst thing that could happen is that a few people apply, they aren’t enamored with anyone, and they give me a call or two.
Sometimes I send emails with my resume telling them that I know I’m not qualified for the job that’s listed, but I’m very interested and motivated and if there’s anything they have, I’d very much like it.
I think in the past 3 weeks, I’ve applied for 40 or 50 jobs. I check Monster.com every couple days and apply for what I like until the 10th page of jobs or so. I’ve got exactly one phone call and a card in the mail that said they got my resume. I don’t think that the world owes me a living, but I figured a degree would be a door into getting SOME job somewhere.
Hey, Hey, HEY…Once I come up with a good response to that, you’re gonna get it, oh yes you will…
I moved away for college, moved back in when I graduated college for a year until I knew my teaching job was stable, moved back in four years later because I was sick of an apartment and wanted a house, moved out two years later when I had enough money to comfortably buy my house. Lots of reasons to live at home. Hell, I actively encourage my students who can do it to do it. Save your money, milk what you can, and then start a new life debt-free and with some money socked away.
I love my parents. But we’re just two very different types of people, that should not be living in the same house. We get along fine now that I don’t live with them (although if they visit for two weeks or more, we start getting on each other’s nerves toward the end).
I lived at home until significantly longer, but it was because my mother and I were both penniless and I didn’t even know anybody I could be roommates with (plus she was away 4 nights a week which helped). Still, I would have thought the number would have been much higher than 14%- not a statistical sample I know, but certainly more than 14% of the people I’ve known have done so.
I also don’t see anything wrong with it so long as parent(s) and child(ren) are both jiggy with it. And as for “what’s happened the past” few decades, well, there was only a window of a few decades when this was the norm: if you’ll check out Census records from 1930 (the last “name census” currently available) and backwards you’ll see no shortage of unmarried kids of both genders living at home way into their 20s and older.
A good friend of mine was born in Rome and still has family there. She said her family’s house in Rome would be considered a mansion by some and would sell for a fortune, but it really isn’t: it’s the home of about 20 of her relatives and if sold it would never bring each of them enough to buy a nice house and the amount of upkeep it takes is beyond the means of any single nuclear family that lives there (currently it’s her aged aunts, her sister, her sister’s grown kids and two of their spouses, some grandchildren, a bachelor brother and a widowed cousin and her daughter). She said in Rome it’s very common for people to marry and have children before they are able to afford their own home.
While I’ve no desire for an Algonquin longhouse type deal and freely admit my mother drove me crazy at times (not because of generation gap or anything but because she was mentally ill and high maintenance and possessive), I think having multiple generations under the same roof or at least in close proximity can be a very good thing. My nephew and niece barely knew their grandparents and didn’t know their great-aunts/great-uncles/cousins/etc. while I knew most of mine and it really somehow grounds you, even when they’re all dead. We lived in extended families for tens of thousands of years before suddenly saying “you’re 20, you’re through with high school, buh-bye!”