I’m at uni, and only live with my parents during the holiday. That alone is enough for me. I doubt I’ll go back to live with them when I’ve finished uni.
Living at home well into your 20s is extremely common in Australia. Unlike the US experience, the majority of kids go to a university in their home cities (possibly because this is an intensely urbanised country with only minor rural populations). Very few students live on campus; most commute daily from home. This makes staying at home with the family a much simpler decision to make: it’s cheap and it’s unnecessary to move away to get a higher education. I’d say that even in my final years at uni, most of my fellow students were still at home with their parents.
After graduation, living at home is less common, but hardly unusual. There’s not much of a stigma attached to this choice. In my first job as a graduate, six months into full-time work, four out of the six grads on my intake were still bumming off their parents. This wasn’t because they couldn’t afford to live away from home–they were all earning more than the average adult–simply it was a decision based on convenience and the ability to save money.
Wasn’t that uncommon (and isn’t that uncommon) in my age bracket. I’m 37.
I have 35-40 year old cousins who live at home. Some of it is economy and circumstance (divorce with children - living with mom a not bad idea which is the case with one of my cousins. I have a friend who lived with his widowed mother until his late 30s). Dated a guy nearing 40 who lived with his parents (he was an underemployed attorney). Some of its cultural (seems to be fairly common in the Italian side of my family).
When I graduated in 1988, I spent 2 years office temping and another year or so being a secretary before I moved into administrative IT. My husband spent several years doing underpaid odd jobs (coffee shop, freelance desktop publishing) while living in a cheap rathole apartment. My sister graduated in 1995 - pretty darn good economy - with honors in Biology - and was a file clerk, than worked retail in a ski shop before becoming a manufacturers rep for sporting equipment after nearly decade of floating around. Friends have sold cars, Tupperware and waited tables with their college degrees. I know someone who tutored Math in a prison with his masters (putting it to use, but not really where he thought he’d be). And a high school Math teacher that waited tables for two years before getting a job.
The only people I know in my age bracket who have been consistantly employed since graduation in their field is nurses.
The funny thing is, we all thought we’d walk out of college with job offers and immediately go to work in our fields as well. One of the things college doesn’t prepare you for is the real world - that a Bachelors (or even a Masters) in English Lit doesn’t bring job offers, that people with degrees and years of experience pound the pavement for months looking for jobs - and in a bad economy, sometimes years (a friend was unemployed for two years with a Masters and ten years management experience). The real disadvantage your generation has is that you started college (particularly that close to the Valley) where there was negative unemployment, signing bonuses for anyone who could spell PC, and big salaries and stock options - setting expectations even higher than us naive children of the 1980s (or the 1970s - who’d watched recession hit and may have had more realistic expectations than either of us) - the economy now isn’t the outlier, the economy then was.
What you say?
I lived with my dad and stepmom for six months after graduating college. He charged what he thought was market rent, which he then put into a savings account for when I would move out. It turned out that his rent was much lower than market, but I wouldn’t have expected him to know that. 
I eventually did move out, but that was mostly because I couldn’t stand living their life (which is basically what I was doing).
I have 4 children, the oldest being 26 and the youngest being 18. The two middle ones have left the family home. The oldest lived for some years away from the family home, but has now moved back. The youngest is still there (in his first year at university). Nothing odd there, you’ll say – except that the parents have moved out, and are now living on the other side of the world. (The family home is in Australia, the parents now live in the US.) As I often say, it’s the usual story: the kids grow up, and the parents move out.
I ended up boomeranging back home when I graduated college as well.
It was quite disheartening as I had a BS in Computer Engineering from a very well respected university in the field, great internship at a very well respected (and very, very large and well-known) company in the field, and international study experience. What more could an employer want? Of course, I graduated in May 2002, which was quite possibly the worst time ever to try to find a job in that field.
So, since I was living at school in central Illinois without much in terms of job opportunity for me there, I figured I’d return back and live with my mom and stepdad since I didn’t want to be stuck in a lease for a year while I knew I was trying to find a job that could be anywhere in the country but there.
My parents let me live for free in their house. But of course, I did my fair share such as repainting the entire interior and fixing everything else that needed work. I ended up with a temporary job at the family business as well (my dad’s family) where I ended up pretty much computerizing everything they did and training all the employees on the system as well.
I did this all for less money than I was making in my restaurant job I had back in high school! Now how is that for depressing?
But finally, six months later a ray of hope came and now I’m finally completely out on my own, and might I say doing very, very well for my age.
While I was living at home after college, it was very depressing. I felt I just wasted four years of my life since I was doing work I could have easily done before I graduated high school. Most of the desperation, though, was because I had no idea how long I’d be in that situation. I didn’t want to move out and commit to a lease since I knew I’d have to be ready to move if I ever got a job I wanted. But now, looking back at it, it was a good opportunity to spend a lot of time with my family before I ended up moving 1000 miles away, and really I treasure that time now. (of course, it would have been much more enjoyable had I known I would be getting a job after 6 months…)
I graduated from college in 1984 and a goodly percentage of my friends who graduated around the same time lived with their parents - some all through college, and some came back when school was over and stayed until they got married. Some got good jobs shortly after graduating and some didn’t. I really don’t think there’s been all that much change in that situation over the years. I do think that there are higher expectations from recent graduates, though. As my mom says, it seems more and more that kids expect to get out of school and be able to immediately obtain what it took their parents years to acquire. There’s more stuff around to spend money on now too - cable TV, cell phones, Internet service, personal computers … most/all of these probably seem indispensable to 20somethings now, and we didn’t have any of that stuff to worry about, or pay for.
This is a serious question, not a criticism at all.
When you recent college grads (particularly engineers and scientists) say you can’t find anything, do you mean in your area, or anything at all? I see chemical companies in rural Wyoming that, while not exactly a wonderful place to live, probably have entry-level jobs for Chem-E’s. A couple years of experience in a rathole (sorry, WY residents, but SCentral WY isn’t garden country) might get you that local job you covet.
Same for other undesireable locales - say oil co.'s in Louisiana or chemical co.'s in NJ, maybe a military contractor working overseas? Most jobs do require one to start at the bottom. There are only so many Wall Street positions for new grads, especially if you aren’t “connected”.
So I guess my (honest) question is: Are you really wanting to start a career, or are you looking to stay near home and hope for the best?
I dunno - this seems like a strange interpretation of this particular statistic - if 25% of 18-34 year olds live at home, that means that 75% of them DON’T live at home.
Further, I would imagine that a greater percentage of 18-24’s live at home then 24-34’s, although I don’t have a cite of any type.
None of my non-student friends live at home, nor have any of them for quite a number of years. At 25 when I bought my place and finally moved out of the 'rents house, I was a bit of an oddity.
Maybe it depends where you live?
I do know that the Canadian economy is doing a bit better than the US economy currently - perhaps that has something to do with the difference?
Who are you to make that decision for me and my family?
Anyway, I live at home at the age of 25 with my brother (who is 23) and my mom. We are both still in college, because the four-year-plan really didn’t work out. Life got in the way of graduating on time at 22. I work retail and my brother is a server, so there is no way we could comfortably support ourselves, even if we lived together.
I’m on track to graduate in July and to sit for my CPA in the spring, but that is absolutely no guarantee of a job. I keep reading about the “recovery”, but I just haven’t seen it around here. After I graduate, I’m staying at least one day a week at my retail gig and going hunting for a “real” job in order to pay down my student loans and credit cards; even after I have a job in the field, local wages are so depressed WRT the housing market that I will not be able to live on my own anyway, so why go roommate hunting when I’ve got two already in the house I live in?
As to the living situation, we are all tenants-in-joint on the house, and we live as roommates on an adult level – I do my own laundry, cook my own food, and clean the common areas of the house myself, so it’s not like I’m living like a teenager.
I had the same reaction as spooje. I even wonder if part of the issue is associating “home” a little too strongly as “with my parents” instead of “wherever I set myself up.”
Anyway…
I’d say that the proportion of 20 to 30 years olds I know that live with their folks is a lot higher than 25%. But this is nothing new. My Cypriot relatives have been moving in with their parents and parents-in-law for many, many generations. And just talk to many Indian families about multi-generational living arrangements!
pan
I have only one friend who lives with her mom. It’s not an economy thing, she’s just waaaayyyyy too attached to her mom (she’s 31 and won’t leave her mom for more than a day).
A few of my other friends (a very few) lived with their parents just after school, for a few months, but they all paid a fair market rate for rent. (Except the aforementioned friend, who is still there rent free and doesn’t even pay her own phone bill!). My parents absolutely told me that they did not expect me to return home after school, but if I did it would be lots of rent for me. They would have rather lent me the money for an apartment than have me live there. And I wouldn’t have stayed, anyway! All my friends fall in the higher end of the stats in the OP, so I thought it was actually a lot less than 25%.
Well, I can speak for my experience, which I’m sure is very different from other people’s.
As I mentioned above, I have a computer engineering degree. I did not limit my job search to my home area, as there is absolutely no technology companies whatsoever near rural northwestern Illinois. So even if I did want to limit myself to home, I could never find a job I wanted.
I did get the criticism occasionally that I should just suck it up and take an entry-level job in the industry. Well, most people are not quite familiar with the semiconductor industry. I worked my butt off to be able to do hardware/digital logic design and verification of microchips – all the ‘entry level’ computer jobs are for help desk or system admin type jobs. These are typically not with companies that even deal with semiconductor design or fabrication in any way, so taking one of these jobs would not have made sense. I would have had to relocate to a new area for a job I’m not trained for that is quite different from what I had studied (I just happen to be good with computers - you deal with them all the time in my field, but fixing and administering them is not what I do for a career) with no possible way to ‘work my way up’ within the company to the job I want to do, since these companies simply don’t have the job I want to do.
I have the hardest time explaining to people outside of the industry that there is a huge difference between fixing/adminstering computers and designing microchips. It’s almost as if people think chips design themselves! (or they assume I’m too stupid to handle something so complex, that has happened on occasion) Even though they both involve computers in some way, there is almost never a career path that leads from one to the other.
Plus I would have been working way under my earning potential for my degree. Sure, you may be thinking that working at a job that pays half as much is better than none at all. Well, that is true, but I would have had to deal with relocation expenses to get the first job, and then most likely again when I did find the job I really wanted. So in the end, I’m sure I came out ahead, plus I might have felt bad about leaving a job I just started so soon for something better, and that would look bad to potential employers (And again further down the road should I be looking again). Plus I’m eternally optimistic and was quite sure my dream job was right around the corner (it did eventually show up 6 months after graduation - see, I probably would have been more geographically limited if I did take one of those entry level jobs)
Not that at the time I was looking even finding a sys admin or help desk job would have been easy, mind you.
Almost all of my friends that graduated at the same time as me went through the same sort of thing. Targeted applications to companies where your skills and experience perfectly matched their requirements would not get a single response. I had tons of phone interviews that seemed to go very well, but would never hear from the companies again no matter how much I started to badger them (within reason, of course). I know I was a good candidate too, as when I finally managed to get some on-site interviews (somehow I got 4 at the same time from various companies), I ended up with 3 job offers out of the 4 possibilities… Just getting your foot in the door was nearly impossible!
Whew, that was long-winded, but as you can imagine, I’m still a bit flustered by the experience!
Reminds me of a Men Behaving Badly episode. Rob Schneider was talking to his roomate about the roommate running into a buddy from high school. Schneider and his roomate are slobs and live in a hovel. They have no ambition and make little money. The paraphrased dialogue went along these lines:
Roommate: I ran into Chuck today.
RS: How’s he doing?
RM: Turns out he’s rich, made a killing in the dot coms. He drives a Jaguar, owns a large estate with a lake and is building a house for his folks on the property.
RS: He lives with his parents?
RM: Yeah.
RS: Loser.
RM: Yeah.
That said, (I’ll probably be ostracized for this) I’m 44 and live in the same house as my parents. My brother is 41 and lives there too. My sister, the youngest in the family is the only one who left home and stayed gone. My excuse is that I have run up a large credit card debt and am trying to pay it off. I do pay some rent and I’m hoping to eventually be able to buy a home. Yeah, the love life sucks, I’m embarassed to tell people, especially women, my living situation right now. and there is a great lacking in personal space for all involved. Sometimes I feel lower on the socal scale than The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy. At least he has his own business.
I often lament about not going beyond junior college and getting a real degree. But from the sounds of things, I might not be any better off than I am now. I work for a government contractor as an electronic technician. I make better money than a lot of the degreed people mentioned here. My wage is determined by the contract though, so there is no incentive for merit. The only chance for a raise is when the cost of living determination decrees it.
The living situation is a “Catch-22” situation for me. About twice a year, I have to get away and go out of town for awhile, which ends up setting the credit cards back from the goal of paying them off. Why don’t I get an apartment? Rent here is often higher than a mortgage payment. And the apartments around here aren’t built much better than motels are. Why put up with the hassles of unwanted neighbors and mutual walls when at least I’m used to the family I live with?
I understand that it used to be common for even married children to move back in with their folks. Nowadays though, the popular media makes someone like me look like a loser nerd to the nth degree.
It sounds like Sven put up that statistic “25% of 18-34 year olds live at home!” and most of you dopers went, “hmmm, that seems low.”
Part of the fun of being in your 20’s is being broke and living with psychos in rat-infested poop-dumps. The summer after my freshman year at college was the last time I lived at home. I love my folks and all, but holy crap, I couldn’t have lived with them.
For starters, the only thing on my mind thoughout that time was getting laid. How do you bring a girl home at that age?
So your parents are what–in their 60s? 70s? What kind of income do they have that they can still support two children? If it were me, I would rather help support them than the other way around. My definition of ‘some rent’ is ‘not very much at all;’ do you buy the groceries, pay the utilities, etc. Why don’t you and your brother get a place together?
Be careful all you guys and gals out there living with the folks. I have two sibs, 45 and 47, still living with the units. And if you think they’ve saved a dime in all these years you’ld be wrong. Between the two of them I don’t think they could come up with a security deposit for an apartment. :eek:
These are the people I went to college with. Most of my co-workers don’t have that kind of family support to fall back on. Two of my co-workers just got kicked out of their parents’ house (one because his living there was a lease violation, one because she came out as a lesbian).
Congratulations! You’re in the bottom quartile of your age group!
Do you honestly think that this is a new thing for “your generation?” Many of my peers were doing this 15-20 years ago too.
Haj
There may be a cultural component, too. During my dating years, I went out with several Indian girls who had graduated college and moved back home. Several of my cousins in India (male and female) were the same way. In India (and I suspect a number of other places, too), kids remain attached to the nest for a LOT longer than we would consider normal here in the U.S.
Depending on how widespread this phenomenon is across different cultures, it could help explain part of the numbers.