hmm… I lived with my parents after graduating from university and looking for a job… and while going to a career training institute. A little less than two years, when I was 23-25 or so.
Got very firmly encouraged to leave and get my own place within a few weeks of landing a good 9-5 job… (at the time, my mother was getting ready to put the house up for sale, since when she has moved into her own condo.)
I sympathize with EnginNerd, although my experience was somewhat different. I already live in an industrial state. Aside from the automotive indistry, Michigan also has Dow Chemicals and other plastics companies.
Sending resumes to all of these guys accomplished nothing. Nobody was hiring, and in fact most of these companies had laid off people recently. I could, possibly, have moved down to Texas and tried my luck with the oil companies. But I’d have to pay to move all my stuff down there (which, being fresh out of college, would mean borrowing the money from my parents), plus get an apartment somewhere (again, using money that I didn’t have), and then search for work in a region that I am totally unfamiliar with, 1000 miles away from my family and frends. And there was no guarantee that I would be any more successful than I was here.
Instead, I expanded my search, sending resumes to companies that were somewhat related to my field of study. That’s how I found my current job. It’s in materials testing, and it’s not what I want to do for the rest of my life, but it’s a start. I lived with my parents for a year, and then I got my own apartment. I still need a roommate, as I’ve said above.
As an aside, we had a job opening at my company recently. The job requires an engineering degree. My employers put one (1) classified ad in a small county newspaper, which doesn’t even cover Detroit, and got over 50 resumes within a week. Had they put the ad in the Detroit Free Press, they would have gotten hundreds and hundreds of resumes.
Yeah, this isn’t uncommon. I see alot of it now, especially when jobs dont work out, or marriages don’t work out, or educations don’t work out. I"m terrified of when i graduate with a chem BS, i fear not finding a job. i figure i can always get a 1 year degree at the community college if it comes to taht. I’m cheap (cheapness runs in my family) so hopefully i’ll be ok.
For me, i would accept money from family but i sure as hell wouldn’t want to live with them if I could help it (this is due to the fact that i hate the town they live in, not them personally. If they lived in a different town that would be different). Luckily i live in the midwest, rent goes as low as $150/month for a room in a 4 room apartment here. I even have a friend who has a house with a $230/month mortgage. My share of that would be $80/month to live there. Throw in $80 for utilities and $120 for food and I get the same stuff i’d get for free at home (shelter, utilities, food). its not like i live in Boston with $900 rent or anything.
i’ve heard Italians are the same way, the kids live at home until they are married. I saw a report on 60 minutes once on the subject. Leslie Stahl was interviewing two Italian guys, and making fun of them i might add. Sucks that a 60 year old woman with a face so crinkled that looks like a mans armpit can laugh at others in public. Had i been one of them i would’ve really tore her a new asshole for that.
I’d like it if that caught on in the US. I love to see families stick together and take care of each other. here in the US its socially appropriate that kids are more or less abandoned at 18 or 22, and parents are abandoned from day 1 by their kids. Thats one of the few good things about poverty and kids being born out of wedlock, that the whole family helps raise the kid and not just the parents. My brother’s wife’s sister has 2 kids and isn’t married. SHe lives at home and her whole family helps bring her kids up. Thats totally unlike me growing up, i only saw my relatives on holidays and it was just ceremonial meetings.
http://www.kcua.org/news.php?Sequence=27
According to the United States Census, 18 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 live with their parents.
I can’t find info on how many million 18-34 year olds there are in the US though.
Plus those numbers are easily false. My home according to the Census is with my parents but i dont live there. However they do pay my rent where i currently live.
I fit the “boomerang kid” description to a T.
During college, I lived in the dorms my first 2 years, moved back home (college was about 30 min from home) in the summers. Third year I transferred and got my first apartment. Dropped out of college that year and moved back home. I was… 20 I think. Lived at home, worked, took classes part time and then went back full time the next year and lived in the dorms one year, then got an apartment off campus the next.
I moved back in with my folks when I was about 23 after a relationship broke up and I had to get outta the apartment. I moved to CA shortly after, and when my company went under, I moved back home to RI and moved in with my folks. Got an apartment again, and after about 6 months of scratching to make ends meet, had a nervous breakdown and moved back home again at the age of 26. Lived there about a year, getting my feet back under me and my panic disorder under control. I moved out again in January of 2003 and have been “on my own” ever since.
I used to think of it as a “failure” when I had to move in with my parents, like “Why can’t I survive on my own as an adult?” Then I realized how lucky I was. Not everyone has the option to go back home again.
My brother is 25 and just graduated law school–he’s lived at home since he graduated from college, in order to save money, as law school is hella expensive. Once he gets a job and all that I presume he’ll move out. We also have my dad’s brother living with my parents, he’s got a strange form of cancer and is out of work. So, I’d better not need to move back home–my room’s been taken over!
Well, I wonder if people’s perceptions are self-selecting - I posted that I don’t have any non-student friends that live with the 'rents (well, except for one that I remembered when I thought about it; however, he’s living there to help out his mom and is actually paying her mortgage, so I suppose she’s really living with him.) Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is, I enjoy a certain standard of living - when I go out with friends we typically enjoy doing the same thing - out for a nice dinner, theatre tickets, a new show opening down-town, whatever. None of these things are particularly cheap, and I imagine if someone couldn’t afford to move out they probably couldn’t afford to go for $50 dinners once a week.
Same as how I don’t hang out with many jet-setters that fly to France on the fly - I just don’t have that sort of entertainment budget.
I lived at home for 6 months after I graduated college for a number of reasons, the most important being that I was still having seizures and couldn’t drive, and the public transportation in Evansville, IN sucks. Once I got the go-ahead from my doctor that I could drive again after my last seizure, though, I was outta there and moved to where I am now.
Actually it seems to me that people are saying “hmmmm, that seems believable - and probably isn’t very different from what it was a decade ago or two.” And then saying that cultural difference, individual setbacks, plus the economy are all factors.
I’ve heard a lot about “boomerang” kids lately, and I’m reminded of “cocooning” back in the 1990s. Faith Popcorn came out and said there was this huge movement towards professional woman deciding to stay at home with the kids. In Susan Faludi’s book Backlash, she points out that - well professional women did choose to stay at home with kids, the statistics at the time did not point to their being any change over recent historical data. (I’m doing this from memory. I don’t keep my copy of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women" at my desk at work - scares my male coworkers). What is sometimes described by the media as a trend is actually some journalist (or in Ms. Popcorn’s case “marketing futurist”) noticing something that has always happened - but it has to be new to be news.
Asian culture is the same way. In fact, the oldest male sibling is supposed to stay home and take care the parents when they get older. Hmong families here in the twin cities are very extended. You get the younger generation that moving progressively away from that now. But there’s still alot of moma’s boy around.
I’m one of them. Cough Im 27 and still live at home. I moved out when I was 19 and bounced around til I was 23 and have been home since. In my defense, I did get laid off twice in 3 years. Took me 4 months to find another job after 9-11, and by then I had racked up some impressive bills which I was going to pay off before I moved out again. School loans (I have a useless Art Degree), my car and insurance payments, etc… Then right as I finished paying them off, I got laid off again.
I was going to move out again, but my grandmother, whose lies with us, suffered a stroke early this year and now needs care. My mother gave me such a big guilt trip when I was going to move out, I decided to stay until the fall.
I’m back in school currently and saving up money. I don’t pay rent. But I do buy the food. My mother hasn’t done my laundry since I was 8, when my parents got divorced.
I lived away from home from a reasonably early age, but speaking for my friends in their 20s who did–or do–live with their families, they still bring their assorted partners home. They all have double beds and separate bathrooms and their parents are okay with their kids screwing under the same roof (or merely resigned to the fact).
(Come to think of it, I’ve been one of those randoms brought back to the family home after a night out. A trifle awkward in the morning bumping in a parent in the kitchen, but bearable. 
)
My mother, who in the last year has lost her sight due to macular degeneration, and had hip replacement surgery as well, lives with us. She can’t live alone.
What rent do you think I should charge her?
stupid character count thingie!
$150/month sounds about right. That should cover her share of the utilities and groceries.
You don’t wanna gouge her, though. She’s your mom.