I think whether it’s a good or bad thing depends entirely on the situation. My parents were of the “18 and you’re out” school. That didn’t stop my brother from living with my mom through his short time at junior college, or my sister from moving back in with my dad after she quit her job, spent all her money traveling and came back with no money, no job and no place to live. For my brother, I think it was fine because my mom lived very near the college and housing prices in the bay area are totally ridiculous. For my sister, I think it was a bunch of bullshit. I could sell everything I own, quit my job and travel until I was dead broke, but I wouldn’t, because I have a greater sense of responsibility than that, I value my career and have no wish to delay success, and because I would HATE having to live with either of my parents ever again.
The 20-something who lives at home and doesn’t work or contribute at all is a spoiled brat. The 20-something who graduates from college and has to live at home until he/she gets on his feet is a victim of circumstance. Of course there is a wide spectrum in between, but ultimately it depends from situation to situation.
I don’t see how wanting to stay at home so you can party and work a McJob is “staying involved in a community”. It’s not.
I believe the problem with this is a sense of entitlement. My brother called me last night, to tell me his financial problems got solved… his grandfather (my step-grandfather) paid off his car entirely.
He didn’t see anything wrong with that.
Just like he (and our other brother) didn’t see anything wrong with being over the age of 25 and still living at home. Both dropped out of school, joined the army, got kicked out of the army and moved back home.
The older-middle one still lives at home, and is unemployed. He talks about going to school, but fails to follow through, and when he does sign up for school he’s always doing trade school (ITT Tech, or Hi Tech College, or similar).
I am the only one of us to move out at 18-19 and stay moved out. I’ve pushed through hard spots and financial disaster on my own.
The fact that I borrowed $200 from my dad for books is still bugging the CRAP out of me.
To many people I know in and around my age are just like my brothers. They have poor jobs, and little drive. They live at home, or their homes are subsidised by their parents.
When crap hits the fan, they have no skills to deal with things. And this is a detriment to them, and to society as a whole (in the long run).
I left home when I was 17 (to spend a year in college, on my own money) then moved to california with a friend and my boyfriend. That first summer I was the only one who had a job for a couple of months, and we lived on shared saved money, my salary, and tortillas and cream cheese from the discount supermart. It was an experience that I think more people should have. That first time when you go out and live on your own, knowing that help from your parents isn’t an option (for various reasons, poverty on one side and dissaproval on the other), its a great experience.
I can’t imagine ever living with my parents again, but I think thats more a function of being married for 7 years. But, after a few years working I went back to school, and now that I have transfered to a very expensive university, my parents are helping me out a little.
I think the main problem is that it is hard to delay going to college right out of school, universities don’t know how to deal with that in my experience, and it can hurt your chances of getting in. I think that more people should be encouraged to get out at 18, take that plunge and learn life before going to school. I know the second time around I had way more drive and skills to handle school.
I tend t agree with the OP and Tristan as to the scope and nature of the problem. My question is, has anyone else noticed the gender imbalance of this phenomenon? In my experience, 95% of the ‘deadbeat’ 20, 30 and 40-somethings I know are guys. And their mothers are perfectly happy to keep them at home- doing laundry, cooking, cleaning for them. And these guys expect the same from their eventual mates as well. This might be more of a Southern phenomenon, but I see a lot more guys looking for a keeper than a wife.
Very true for me as well. I went for a semester, dropped out, got a job, lived in an apartment, then went back to school and found it a breeze.
Kimstu, a “hydro” bill is for electricity in Canada, or at least in Ontario.
The notion of responsibility is not vague. The word derives, of course, from “response” and “ability.” When a bill arrives, who will pay for it? I have the ability to respond because I’ve traded my skills for money. Bills don’t just arrive, of course. They’re the result of my having received value from someone in exchange for a promise to pay. Had I done so (used my credit card, for example) without having a job, that’s irresponsible.
“Responsibility” is both a skill-set and a mind-set - each set is developed with exercise. Like a pianist repeatedly playing boring scales, or a basketball player running lines - building muscles and habits that increase their response ability - there is no substitiute for committing oneself to just doing it. Like a muscle, not using it and it atrophies.
The harm, therefore, is both the loss of time and potential of these arguably wasted years, followed by the crash course catch up required of people who must simultaneously unlearn a bad mind-set while acquiring new skill-sets.
This, and the rest of your post, gives me pause. As I mentioned earlier, it seems the farther back you go the earlier the onset of adulthood. Why should I be surprised, therefore, if the trend continues today? Extrapolating, I suppose, to even earlier in the evolution of humans - if other animals are any indication - there may have been a time that offspring were self-sufficient after a few short years. Surely that evolution has been good - is this not a recent form of that evolution?
That may very well be. Kimstu has a good point: we don’t know enough of the demographic. I started this discussion with a belief that most of the reason for this trend is the sense of entitlement problem - arriving at this belief from my own observations. This is unfair to the extent that it’s inaccurate.
I submit, though, that evidence of a growing trend to entitlement is generally apparent, along with a parallel “instant gratification” trend. It is reasonable to expect a causal nexus to the “adultescent” trend. I’ll try to find some studies that shed light on this and I invite both more personal stories (I’ve found those already posted both interesting and enlightening) as well as any studies anyone may find.
Unfortunately that statistic isn’t very helpful because the range of years is fairly large. It would be interesting to know how the statistic differs at, say 32 years of age compared to 25.
Even so, it’s an appalling figure. It’s such a natural urge to want to get out into a place of their own that I find it hard to believe that the bulk of the 41% (or 50%) wouldn’t do so in a heartbeat if they had the means.
Here is an interesting study of this phenomenon (from Australia, 1993). I wouldn’t call this a particularly new trend, it’s been creeping up on us in Western society for a long time. In fact, I can clearly remember from my own childhood in the early 80’s newspaper and magazine articles bemoaning the trend of kids staying longer and longer at home and “how on earth do we get them to leave the nest” and so on and so forth…
Things that leap out at me from this study…
A certain degree of gender imbalance:
A variety of different reasons for staying rather than going - there doesn’t seem to be just one underlying trend that can explain all this:
The trend seems to be supported or at least accepted by the parents as well as children
Basically, it does seem that a certain proportion of adults-living-with-parents may be “deadbeats” or lack the skills to cope by themselves, but you can’t assume that - it all depends on how the living situation is managed. Warning signs, to me would be:
living at home spending a good deal of money on luxuries rather than saving - basically living at a level that you couldn’t possibly sustain once you move out.
not doing a certain proportion of the household tasks - or worse, not even knowing how to do them.
a situation where the parents were uncomfortable or resentful of the living arrangements.
There doesn’t seem to be much research out there dealing with the prevalence of these sorts of factors
From what I’ve read in books, the popular name for twixters in the 60’s was “Hippie”. Sure, they didn’t live at home, but then again, they didn’t seem to live anywhere; and mom didn’t do laundry for them, so they became dirty Hippies (and eventually damned dirty Hippies). Their financial sensibilities led many to believe that communalism was a good idea, and their desire for responsibility could best be summed up as, “I hope I die before I get old.” I’m sure our generation has its fair share of aimless 18-25 year olds, but probably no more than any other generation post 1960.
Thinking back on my graduating class, the rest of the twixters are likely more reflective and driven than the current economic conditions allow them to show. They don’t just want jobs, they want a career they care about, and many are content to enjoy their youth until that opportunity presents itself. Older generations see this as a lack of ambition, immaturity, or both. Some, such as my Grandpa, don’t understand why they can’t stop dreaming, take what job comes their way, and “start their life.” This is a fair point; however, you must remember you are talking about a generation that has no concept of serious economic adversity. We have never seen the effects of a prolonged recession, and have only an academic understanding of inflation. Although we saw the bubble pop while we were in college, there was a sense among many that that was an anomaly, and things would return to normal prosperity by the time we graduated.
Personally, I was a bio major, and will soon be one of the twixters “pushing adulthood even further into the future” by going to graduate school ( :rolleyes: yeah, cause like the lab is like one non-stop party). Currently: even though I make ~$6,000 less than the average starting salary for a college grad, and live in one of the most expensive real estate markets in country, I live on my own. This makes me real skeptical of people who say they can’t find affordable housing. I almost instinctively translate that to, “I can’t find a spacious apartment in the thriving downtown area that I could afford without having to give up <such and such luxury>.”
Hi Elmer, welcome to the SDMB. (I seem to be saying this a lot lately; are there really a large number of first-time or almost-first-time posters that I’m replying to, or have they been around for a while and I just keep missing them?) Anyway, I think this is a very interesting point. From what you say, careers are starting to be viewed more like marriage, so to speak.
After living in India for a year or so, I would often explain typical Indian views on “arranged marriages” by saying that they were sort of like Western views on careers. Many Indians assume that once they finish school, they and their parents will start a serious hunt for a marriage partner that will end in marriage to the most suitable candidate within the next year or two at most. The idea of just hanging around single until you happen to bump into somebody that you fall passionately in love with, if you ever do, seems rather absurd and wasteful to them. It would be like a recent American graduate saying “Oh, I’m in no hurry to tie myself down to a job just yet—I’m waiting till I find the perfect career that’s really the right one for me. I don’t care if I have to wait a few years till that happens.”
But now it seems that a lot of young Americans are in fact saying exactly that about careers! We’ve already adapted our social expectations to the “love marriage”, where young people are not expected to seek out matrimony for its own sake but instead wait until they find a spontaneous mutual romantic attraction to inspire it. Are we now going to have the “love career” as a social norm, where financial independence for its own sake isn’t enough to motivate starting a career if you don’t really love your work?
Frankly, I don’t understand why graduate school should automatically be seen as a sign of twixterhood. I worked my first post-college job for four years while being self-supporting, living on my own, and saving up some money to help fund future graduate study. Then I spent six years in grad school, still being entirely self-supporting and living independently. Grad school was just like holding down a job, except I worked three times as hard and had about one-eighth as much money! It was definitely not a time of financial irresponsibility or ease or letting other people take care of me.
This gender imbalance is really fascinating, since it seems to be entirely the reverse of the traditional gender imbalance in, say, pre-1950’s joint families. It used to be that young men were much more likely to get jobs and their own “bachelor quarters”, while young women frequently stayed in the parental home till they got married. Now it’s the young women who are leaving home and the young men who are staying! I wonder why? Are young women more likely to have the necessary domestic skills or tastes required for running one’s own household? Or do parents tend to have different expectations about daughters’ social/dating lives than about sons’, so that young women have to move out on their own to get a little more liberty? Is there a holdover from the women’s movement that makes young women more likely to feel that they ought to be living independently? Are parents (mothers?) just more willing to go on taking care of sons domestically?
This is definitely a very interesting trend in a number of ways, and we still don’t seem to know very much about it. Thanks for raising the subject, Nature’s Call (and also for explaining what “hydro” is!).
I think someone who wants to be “lazy” (I’m not sure how common this really is) by living at home would be more likely to be male than female. Not because males are lazier, but I would guess that females are expected to help around the house, do their own chores, etc. more than males. And females are (again, I’m guessing) probably expected to contribute to the family’s care more than males. So Suzy finds that when she lives at home she not only has to do her own laundry, she has to do all the laundry, while Tony doesn’t have to do either.
This doesn’t have to be a parental expectation. It could be Suzy and Tony doing it to themselves, but I’d speculate that living by herself means less chores for Suzy and more chores for Tony.
Do we know anything about those people not living with their parents? Are they living independently, or with roommates, or boyfriends/girlfriends?
I think the gender disparity isn’t because young women are working so much harder than young men, it’s more that some young women are dating older men (or at least ones who have a job and an apartment) and move in with them, rather than staying at home. Young men without a job are, possibly, less likely to date someone with a job and thus find a place to stay.
I don’t really see a problem with the 20something who lives with the parents as long as the 20something is contributing in some way to the household.
There are some families that treat this situation as if it’s a roommate-type situation, where the 20something is paying rent and contributing to bills/groceries/etc and handling his or her own expenses which are separate from the other members of the household.
I have a friend who does this, and his parents are really just more like roommates that he knows he can trust than they are in the role of parents. It seems to be working out well for them, and he gets to take care of things like school loans so that he can be more financially stable and then get his own place.
Another possible reason for the gender imbalence is that in our homophobic society, women are more likely to live with a same-sex roommate, and that makes moving out more economically feasible.
Remember that in the halcyon days of responsibility, unmarried people who moved out on their own most likely lived in boarding houses where some other woman did the cooking and cleaning. College students lived in dorms with strict rules and colleges acted in loco parentis- and people fought tooth and nail against that changing. People could not vote until they were 21.
About careers- the careers aren’t there. When my great-grandma was young, she got a job at a soup factory and worked there until she retired forty years later. When my grandpa was young, he worked at a aerospace company and bought a house in the suburbs and the kids remember going on lots of company picnics. When my mom was young, she got a job with the state, which she is still working.
But now, 50% of the department she works in is actually temp work. Entire state agencies- once the bastion of a “dull but stable” job now only hire on a temporary basis or contract out to temp work companies. There are “seasonal” employees out there that get furloughed one week of every year so that they don’t have to be hired on on a full time basis. My college teachers had a strike because 50% of the teaching staff (who did everything you would expect a teacher to do) were officially “lecturers” who got miniscule pay and no contract at all- and were regularly fired just before they’d go to tenure review. I myself work for a very good and generous company. But I still write them an invoice every week because I am an “independent contractor”, not an “employee”. But you didn’t know secretaries now consulted. Of a daily office staff of twelve people, the company has three “employees”. And this is a company that is dedicated to following “standard valley practices”, not some anomaly.
The idea of a job you get and work in until you retire is gone. Hell, we all know we aren’t even going to get to retire. The idea of getting a low-level job and working your way up is also gone- those jobs are outsourced to temp agencies or hired on a “no training, no promotion” basis. I live in an at-will state where any employee without a contract can be fired at any time for any reason. The future is scrappy “get it while it’s hot” temp work, contracting and a constant, mind-numbing job search. The lucky manage to get health benefits now and then. The smart save for retirement on their own. But it’s not a pretty scene for labor. And now your blaming us because we can’t get jobs that arn’t there, because we can’t buy houses the cost half a million dollars, because we can’t deal with our countries fucked up healthcare “system” that fucks over everyone who hasn’t managed to land one of the few “salaried with bennies…” jobs left.
Remember that in the halcyon days of responsibility, unmarried people who moved out on their own most likely lived in boarding houses where some other woman did the cooking and cleaning. College students lived in dorms with strict rules and colleges acted in loco parentis- and people fought tooth and nail against that changing. People could not vote until they were 21.
About careers- the careers aren’t there. When my great-grandma was young, she got a job at a soup factory and worked there until she retired forty years later. When my grandpa was young, he worked at a aerospace company and bought a house in the suburbs and the kids remember going on lots of company picnics. When my mom was young, she got a job with the state, which she is still working.
But now, 50% of the department she works in is actually temp work. Entire state agencies- once the bastion of a “dull but stable” job now only hire on a temporary basis or contract out to temp work companies. There are “seasonal” employees out there that get furloughed one week of every year so that they don’t have to be hired on on a full time basis. My college teachers had a strike because 50% of the teaching staff (who did everything you would expect a teacher to do) were officially “lecturers” who got miniscule pay and no contract at all- and were regularly fired just before they’d go to tenure review. I myself work for a very good and generous company. But I still write them an invoice every week because I am an “independent contractor”, not an “employee”. But you didn’t know secretaries now consulted. Of a daily office staff of twelve people, the company has three “employees”. And this is a company that is dedicated to following “standard valley practices”, not some anomaly.
The idea of a job you get and work in until you retire is gone. Hell, we all know we aren’t even going to get to retire. The idea of getting a low-level job and working your way up is also gone- those jobs are outsourced to temp agencies or hired on a “no training, no promotion” basis. I live in an at-will state where any employee without a contract can be fired at any time for any reason. The future is scrappy “get it while it’s hot” temp work, contracting and a constant, mind-numbing job search. The lucky manage to get health benefits now and then. The smart save for retirement on their own. But it’s not a pretty scene for labor.
And now your blaming us because we can’t get jobs that arn’t there, because we can’t buy houses the cost half a million dollars, because we can’t deal with our countries fucked up healthcare “system” that fucks over everyone who hasn’t managed to land one of the few “salaried with bennies…” jobs left and stick with it forever because some “pre-existing condition” means they will never get health insurance again.
I wonder if there is more encouragement towards finding a career you will love, rather than a job that will pay the bills. Back in the day, most people did not go to college, so they didn’t feel especially entitled to a “dream” job. They took a job selling carpet at Sears or assembling winky-dinks at the factory and didn’t consider themselves failures for doing so, nor did they wonder if they were stuck in a “dead end job”. Every job was a “dead end job”. Nowadays, even mediocre students are enrolling in college and expecting a plush office job when they get out. It may not occur to these folks that they aren’t failures if they end up working the floor at Home Depot. They don’t have to go back to their parents’ and “regroup” if pouring coffee at Starbucks is their only option right at the moment.
I don’t think it’s their faults for believing otherwise. We are continually raising the bar of what constitutes success. “Regular” people used to work at factories, department stores, gas stations, and fast food places. Now these people are treated with scorn and/or pity. A “regular” person is the boss who sits in an office all day.
Perhaps twixsters feel like they are able to cope better financially and psychologically with their low-paying jobs if they live with parents. Yeah, they may run the register at Wal-Mart part-time, but at least they live on the “good” side of town, eat homecooked meals, and enjoy free satellite TV. Psychologically, living at home may also give them a sense that their condition is just temporary, that eventually the benefits of their middle-class upbringing will kick in and a dream job will land right at their feet. If you’re working full-time at McDonald’s, sharing a roach-infested studio apartment on the “bad” part of town, rubbing shoulders with “truly” poor people on the city bus, then it’s harder to believe you’re NOT just going through a rough patch and that your luck will soon change. But Mom and Dad and all the high school accolades lined up in the family den will remind you of this and give you strength to keep sending out the resumes.
As far as it not being good for society, I don’t see that.
So, let’s see. For the first 18 years of their lives, kids are told, “You can’t make your own decisions because you don’t know how to act in your own best interest. We’ll take care of everything for you, whether you like it or not.” The government takes every opportunity to enforce what should be house rules on kids, even when they aren’t at home. And now we’re surprised when these kids don’t suddenly start taking care of themselves the moment they turn 18? Maybe we should’ve let them practice first.
Good point. It is now widely considered unrealistic for, say, factory workers to expect to make lower-middle-class salaries with decent benefits. Good blue-collar jobs, which used to be fairly routine in the more unionized, less globalized mid-twentieth century, are now derided as “cushy”.
I’m surprized noone has brought up the factor of longer lifespans. If R&J and Alex had waited till after high school, college, and grad school to ‘do their thing’, they likely wouldn’t have been around to do it. Yes, I know that infant mortality has a lot to do with the statistics on lifespan, but the fact remains that in medieval times a person over 40 was often looked upon with respect just because they got to that great age. A woman over the age of 20 wasn’t considered a good choice for a first wife, because she didn’t have that many child-bearing years ahead of her. (Tho, if you had a houseful of kids left from previous wives who had died in childbirth, bingo, you hit the jackpot.!)
I think kids (and parents) are putting off growing up, because they can. Instead of being put on the shelf at 60 as “older-than-dirt”, people of 60, 70 and even 80 are starting new careers. This is an exciting time.
And I see the trend continuing. As lifespan and technology increase, a child won’t have to learn everything in a mere 12-18 years (I’m talking about everything * - walking, talking, chewing gum -heh!), but can take the time to get it right.
That is, of course, if kids and parents use the time for learning to live in the world as it is.
*This would be a different thread, but I know that legend, at least has it that great inventions/insights come from the young (especially in math & science). I wonder if that will change?