The 2021 census already confirmed it: more adult children than ever are still living with their parents. But the Financial Times has recently revealed just how drastically the scales have tipped: about 40% of 18- to 34-year-olds now live with their parents, making it the most common domestic arrangement for this age group. Previously, it was living as a couple with children.
It’s not just an epidemic of Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum – I’ve moved back home twice since graduating in 2018, and I know plenty of young well-to-do professionals who have felt obliged to do the same, or not moved out at all. There are also plenty of people who are unable to live in their family home due to distance and perhaps wish they could.
And even though it’s framed in terms of the housing crisis, so long as you’re not trapped in an abusive household, being able to live at home is an immense privilege – it helps you to save and means you have more money for recreation. But beyond the column inches on the state of the housing market, there is also the question of what this situation means for the state of family relationships, and if it damages them or is a welcome reprieve from “empty nest syndrome”.
Parents are typically happy to alleviate their children’s housing costs if it will help them to set up their future, particularly in an economic climate so different from the time when they themselves were finding homes and building families. And sometimes parents are all the better for keeping their children home. Of course there will be tensions and frustrations, as there are whenever adults spend extended periods of time together, but with the loneliness and emotional distress of empty nest syndrome often cited as a cause of marital breakdown, there is some light to be found in staying at home longer.
Also, if your parents are single or widowed, like my mother, it can introduce the possibility of maintaining an adult relationship in the home that they have been missing. Certainly, while I have radical views on the housing market and resent that I’m forced to live at home due to the cost of everything, it has brought my mother and I closer in a way that may not have been possible if I had been living away from home for an unbroken period during the past six years.
People often speak of a sadness they experience watching their parents age, but there is something to be said about being able to adjust to it by witnessing it more gradually, rather than being taken aback by their advancing age at each periodic visit.
But the feasibility of staying home often relies on how well you’re able to get along with your parents (and other adult siblings) and whether or not you’ll rub each other up the wrong way. For some young adults – particularly those who have spent three or more years living independently at university – it can feel like a regression into childhood dynamics – nagging about dishes, the blue or pink paint of your childhood bedroom, having to confirm what time you’ll be home and feeling guilty if your parents have waited up for you after a night partying.
Then there are the privacy issues. Everyone has heard an icky horror story of a parent coming into their child’s bedroom and discovering lingerie or a sex toy. And if your parents aren’t as liberal as Regina George’s in Mean Girls, you might end up either forking out a fortune on hotels just to be able to have sex with a partner who also lives at home, or restricting liaisons to when your parents are away.
One flip side to remaining with your parents is the rush to partner-up and move in together so you can split bills while recovering some privacy, or finding yourself more attracted to a person you would typically overlook purely because they can accommodate you. The romantic consequences of which are picking a partner for the wrong reasons and splitting up quickly, or the relationship being undone by the early pressure of cohabitation, ultimately leading you back to your blue-walled bedroom again.
Regardless of the financial and emotional benefits, or the drawbacks, of living at home, that this has become the default arrangement for young people is troubling and consequential. Last year I was dismayed to read about two adult children being removed from their family’s social housing after their mother died suddenly from an aneurysm. Particularly if you only live with one parent, it can only take one incident for your security blanket to be snatched away – so you end up hyperconscious of the health of your parent.
It might be nice to spend more time with your parents as they age, and to have more cash for a holiday or nice things, but some unintended positive side-effects do not detract from the simple fact that cheaper secure housing remains a core demand for young people.
Jason Okundaye is a London-based writer and author of Revolutionary Acts: Black Gay Men in Britain
