When there are grown children living at home
It has been observed that patterns of family life differ from age to age, and from culture to culture but in general Australian young people have left home when they finish their schooling. In a number of European, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries it is the norm for the children to live at home until they marry, and not to leave at all if they do not ever marry. But in Britain, Western Europe, the USA and Australia, children have tended to claim their independence much earlier and set up their own homes by their early twenties.
However in the past decade or so it has been noted by the demographers that many children are not leaving home as early, or are leaving and coming back to live once again in their parental homes. This has led to a changed dynamic of growing up, especially for the parents who thought they were just about over the ‘empty nest syndrome’ and now have the kids back home again.
The experts suggest that in a time of economic insecurity people tend to band together, and children stay close to the fold, in order to save money. This pattern has been called “the boomerang kids”: they leave and come back, leave and come back, sometimes regularly over the years until they are capable of handling life on their own. It can happen after finishing university when the young adults have huge debts to pay off, between jobs, or after a marriage fails. There are endless variations on the theme, of course.
A Harvard Center for Housing Studies report found a direct correlation between rental prices and adult children’s decisions to live with their parents. Add to that the big increases in college tuition and fees, and the young adult may be saddled with huge debt before they have even earned their first pay. Typical Australian university students accumulate sizable debts, especially those pursuing medicine and law whose courses can add up to $80,000.
Parents are usually happy to have the children back, too, especially if they see that they are actively saving money for their future, to save for a wedding, for a down payment on a home, or to start a business. The Sun Herald Family Survey in 2004 found that 83% of parents did not want their children to leave home before they were 21; about half the adult children living at home were students and the other half were working; 44% contributed to the household income; and 80% helped out with the housework .
The New York based Families and Work Institute researchers were surprised to find that 25% of employed parents had children from 18 to 29 years old living at home with them at least half of the time. They also observed that families with middle and higher incomes were more likely to have children at home than were lower income households.
It appears that there is no longer an assumption about a clear-cut departure age. Demographers suggest that there needs to be a new life stage assigned to those between 18 to 25 who are past adolescence but not yet mature enough to be taking on the social and economic roles of adulthood. Many in this age group are delaying the usual stages of adulthood by going to university longer, marrying later, and having children later in life than earlier generations did.
This change of life pattern has affected the relationships between the parent and child generations, but researchers report that they get along very well. Today’s older adults are more accepting and more like friends than earlier generations were. In general it has been found that the parents liked having their adult children around. And, as one mother quipped, “They can live with me now, as long as I can live with them later!”
