I am not a “fan” of adults living at home with their parents, exactly, nor do I currently live that way, but I think the American trope-mockery of “so-and-so lives in their parent’s basement typing on 4Chan” overlooks the real, pragmatic benefits for some people of staying at home (for some time) even after reaching full-fledged adulthood. Also, this attitude is very much an American phenomenon; there are many non-American places in the world where it is culturally common for two or more generations to be living within the same residence or in close proximity.
In many regions, the cost of living, especially housing, is sky-high. Assuming the adult in question is educated, employed, mature, and chips in to cover and contribute to household expenses, there is no reason to mock such a living arrangement - it is cheaper for people to jointly pay 1 rent/mortgage than it is for them to each shoulder a separate, individual rent or mortgage of their own in their own right, and this also saves on groceries.
There is the issue of independence and privacy, and also this isn’t something you’d want to last longterm, but for, say, a Millennial graduate fresh out of college with a heavy student-loan burden still trying to get their feet underneath them while living in an expensive place like Boston or San Francisco, it makes perfect financial sense to live with parents for some time and chipping in financially so that one pays, say, $500 per month for housing instead of $1,300.
Or, they could get two roommates like people used to do before people started thinking they deserve everything right out of college that their parents worked 30 years for.
When someone is makes fun of another by saying they still live with their parents, it’s a shortcut to say they’re not educated, don’t have a job and generally put so little effort into life that they need their parents to support them.
They’re generally not implying that the person is close with their parents or caring for older parents or has some other non-selfish reason for still living ‘at home’ well into adulthood.
Who of us is in a position to make the assumption we know the reasons another lives under that arrangement? I think the OP is laying out a dislike of those kinds of assumptions. Sometimes it is evident why.
A decade ago a friend of mine moved back in with his parents when he was 24 and stayed there almost a year until he got married. This came on the heels of him getting a notice for being behind on rent while he was being somewhat cavalier with keeping up on his payments. He has since become responsible with budgeting and deferring gratification when necessary. The reality is while I wouldn’t say anything about it to him or make fun, I did internally judge him for it because he is a bigoted libertarian type who is comfortable thinking he can solve just about anything with the pull yourself up by the bootstraps ethos. If your professed values entail being responsible and the reason you live with your parents is directly tied to a failure to be as responsible as you could have been, a distaste for the hypocrisy is understandable.
My brother has spent the last decade+ living quite literally in my parent’s basement, due to financial constraints derived from his evil ex-wife and the cost of supporting the child they had. (Who he now has complete custody of, and gets no child support for.) His financial situation was not helped by the fact that as a devoted father he eschewed traditional employment in favor of odd jobs/self employment that allowed him to rearrange his work hours to spend maximum time raising his daughter. Now though he’s gone and gotten a real job and is aggressively seeking a good home to rent, because he’s damn tired of his entire life being shoved into two bedrooms and three storage units.
As far as I know nobody around him ever stigmatized him for living with my parents, because we all knew his situation. He’s not the stereotypical ‘layabout slacker without a job’, though.
Two of the young engineers in my group graduated with 6-figure school loan debts. Both live with their parents in order to maximize what they can throw against their loans. Good for them, I say.
My daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter are all living with us - it’s been almost a year now and the end is not in sight yet. Lots of reasons, medical issues not the least among them. They’re not crazy about the arrangement, and my husband and I miss the more serene life we had, but you do what you have to do for family. They don’t live in the basement, but we’ve turned over a portion of the basement to them for their own living room (plus it keeps their cats away from our territorial felines.) For my selfish self, I do enjoy having lots of time with the baby.
My youngest sister moved in with our mom a year ago. Mom is 85 and doing well, but she is 85. My sister has had multiple knee operations and is on disability. They can watch out for each other, much to the relief of the rest of us sibs.
On the other hand, some years back, I had a friend who absolutely refused to acknowledge that her son was no longer her baby. She did everything she could to keep him from moving out. Last I heard, he’d finally cut the apron strings and moved to another state. You never really know what the family dynamic is like.
My son elected to move to Oregon when I did and we took a house together for a couple of years–he wasn’t living with me, we were roommates and split the costs equally. He, my daughter and I are exploring the possibility of pooling our resources to get a chunk of land and put our separate tiny houses on it, living communally and sharing expenses and responsibilities that would otherwise be onerous for any one of us singly. And why not? We know we get along well together, we know how to live close without being all up each other’s butts and it gives the grandkids a nice place to be with plenty of supervision and family love and care. It also gives me peace of mind that if I fall and hurt myself it won’t be weeks before someone notices. I’m getting on in years, that’s a concern, and living like this means I can stay independent longer. It also means when I kick off that there’s no issues with how to divide my property since it will already be incorporated into a family trust and the kids can decide what they want to do after I’m done with it.
Multi-generational households were the absolute norm up until maybe 75 years ago, societally we’re just moving back into an extremely practical and sensible arrangement after an experiment in doing things differently that proved not to be as beneficial for everyone as it was assumed it would be.
When my daughter and her fiance decided to move back to PA, there was a period of close to a year during which he was completing medical school and she had yet to find a house. I talked to my gf and then we offered my daughter our spare bedroom/bathroom.
Having her live, as an adult, with me a really cool experience.
The stigmatization comes from complaints from parents about being stuck with kids - which you don’t get when there are good reasons.
Is there an end date? A transition plan? Is the kid paying rent and supporting the household? In the stereotyped situation, none of this is true.
It is possible that the following is only true because I live in NYC, a place where literally no one I knew moved out of their parents’ home to a place of their own ( people moved out, of course- but everyone had a roommate/SO/spouse) but in my experience, people don’t get mocked simply because they live with their parents ( or because their parents live with them) in a mutually beneficial or roommate-like relationship. They get mocked because their idea of contributing to household expenses is paying for their own personal needs ( after all , the rent/cable/internet , etc is the same whether I live here or not) even though they can afford to contribute more. They get mocked when living rent free with their parents enables a lifestyle they can’t afford on their own - whether that is living in your parents’ basement with your husband/wife and four kids or taking multiple weeklong vacations while working at your 24K dream job. They get mocked when it’s open ended or goes on too long - sometimes so long that it turns into the parent living with the 60 year-old kid.
They don’t get mocked when it’s temporary , like a year or two after graduation or for a while between houses/apartments or for medical or real financial reasons ( there’s a difference between "I can’t afford my own apartment’ and "I’ll have to cut down on travel if I get my own apartment).
I don’t know what would happen if it was a roommate-like relationship- the closest I’ve seen to that is people who live in the rental apartment of their parent’s two or three family house. Who don’t typically get mocked- but there is an assumption that either they don’t pay market rent or get some other type of assistance from their parents. Because why would I pay $2500 to rent an apartment above my parents when I could pay the same $2500 a block or two away and have more privacy?
I lived with my parents after graduation and as a result I paid off a 20 year student loan in three years. My living expenses were only $500/month since I wasn’t being charged rent or utilities. It was a good financial decision.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with inflation in the cost of health care, education, housing, retirement savings etc. Combined with stagnant wages. It’s all entitlement.
Also sometimes roommates are crazy. Family are much more comfortable to be around than strangers. I had a roommate put vinegar in a gallon of milk I bought, family I lived with didn’t do stuff like that.
I think the stigma is real and should be pared back.
But I think there is a big difference between someone living with parents to save money while paying some rent and “adulting” for themselves (cooking and cleaning and helping with the household expenses) versus someone living with parents because they are stuck in prolonged adolescence. I think when people think of the “basement-dwelling neckbeard”, they aren’t thinking of the former. They are thinking of the guy yelling at his mother to bring more tendies. The guy who has never done an adult thing in his whole life, despite having normal intelligence.
That said, I think American Millennials need to be careful about pointing at what’s normal in other countries. Yes, it is normal in many societies to live with ones parents well until adulthood, but it’s also normal in those societies for adults to take care of their parents once they are established with their own property and family. I think most Americans would find that a bad trade-off. And it seems to me that while Asian kids often don’t have to worry about getting kicked out of the nest and being homeless, they do have to worry about their parents dictating every aspect of their lives and driving them nuts in the process. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d rather live with a couple of roommates and have some freedom.
Exactly. I’m 46, and it wasn’t at all uncommon for people getting out of college who got jobs in the same area as their parents (or other relatives even), to stay at their place for a period of a few months to save up a “war chest” for buying essentials for having your own place- furniture, TV, toaster, lamps, silverware, etc… instead of building up a lot of credit card debt to do that. It wasn’t even thought of as particularly terrible if you fell into some kind of hard times, and lived with your parents as a means of getting back on your feet. But it was always temporary…
But if you either never went to college and lived with your parents the whole time, or if you just permanently moved back in with otherwise hale and healthy parents, it was seen as a failure to launch- you weren’t quite a full-fledged adult. Which is a fair stigma, if you ask me.
I actually saw something the other day where they were designing homes that were actually designed to have three generations of people living in them. They were build almost like a two family home, but with more common areas. So essentially the grandparents live in one section and the adult children with their little children can live in the other.
Yeah, it’s so UNREASONABLE to expect to be able to get an education, find a decent job, purchase a modest home and start a family before your FIFTIES.:rolleyes:
The main issues that “people used to” not have to worry about were crushing student loans and soaring housing prices in the few regions where one could actually find jobs that could afford to pay off student loans and soaring housing prices.
I agree that the stigma should be dialed back. Independence is great, but there are real benefits for everyone in a multi-generation household. There’s a difference between being financially shaky and a complete failure to adult, for example. A grown ass man yelling “Yo, ma, what’s for dinner? And where’s my laundry?” should get ridiculed, but an adult helping do things an aging parent can’t do as well? That’s nothing to mock.
And it’s outrageously expensive to live in some parts of the country and not everyone can move some place cheaper. If you’re just starting out or starting over after a setback, you’re not pulling in big bucks.
With who? Some strawman you created? I don’t know anyone who thought they should be able to afford a home right out of college. Granted, I work in a city where rent for a studio apartment cost more than most parent’s mortgage payment for a house.
Mostly what I hear is “I just graduated college and I’m still a bartender / barista / same job I had before college with a gigantic student loan payment.”
My daughter is 37 years old, has a college degree, a full-time job, a car, a social life, no drug or alcohol problem, and spent a year in Japan. She does not have Downs’ syndrome, nor is she a high-functioning autistic. She buys and cooks her own food and does her own laundry. She pays us pretty much the same to live here as she would if she were living with a roommate. We don’t inquire too closely about her finances, but we know she’s contributing to her 401K, her student loans are paid off, she has no credit card debt, she’s never missed a car payment, and we suspect her savings account is in five figures. She chooses to live with her mother and me, and we do not use her as a caregiver.
The ordinary snappy comment here would usually be, “Any questions?” but I’ll just say it’s no one’s damn business but ours.