Are boys becoming men later? In recent decades, the markers of adulthood have shifted for young American men: they are almost twice as likely to be single, less likely to go to college and more likely to be unemployed. Most significantly for their parents, they are also less likely to have fled the nest, with the term “trad son” springing into social media lexicon in recent months. In the 1970s, only 8% of Americans aged 25 to 34 were living with their parents, but by 2023, that figure had jumped to 18%, with men more likely to live at home than women, according to a Pew survey.
But not everywhere in the US has the same rates of adults living in their familial home. The living arrangement is least common in the midwest and most common in the north-east. Topping the list was Vallejo, where 33% of young adults live with their parents. How were they making it work?
In Vallejo, Jorge, a 30-year-old personal trainer at City Sports Club, told me he was in no rush to move out. Neither was Kimani Cochran, a 31-year-old model, actor and bar attendant, who had settled into the rhythms of an intergenerational home. Edward, a 28-year-old government employee, had reached his limit with cohabitation, while Daniel, a 25-year-old union worker who dreams of becoming an electrician, felt ambivalent about the prospect of leaving his family behind. (Some of the men spoke to me on the condition that I refer to them by their middle name only.)
‘My definition of my home is my family’
About an hour from San Francisco, Vallejo is a waterfront city, where hills of pastel-painted, wood-pannelled houses overlook an industrial shoreline. Home to the first naval station on the west coast, large numbers of Black, Filipino and Hispanic workers flocked to the city throughout the 20th century, making Vallejo at one point the most diverse metropolitan area in the country. Today, food stalls selling fluorescent cups of agua frescas pepper the roadsides, while the waterfront has become a local hangout, speckled with quiet breweries and bars. There are fewer young people than the average California city, according to census data: Vallejo has a median age of 40, California’s is around 38.
Today Vallejo’s population is evenly split between Latino/Hispanic, Asian, white and Black communities, a diversity which is sometimes cited as part of the reason behind the high occurrence of intergenerational households. Across the country, Asian, Hispanic and Black young adults are more likely to live in a parent’s home than their white peers. “It’s mainly traditions,” Jorge, who is Mexican and lives in Vallejo with his sister and parents, told me. “My definition of my home is my family and so I want to keep them with me as much as I can.”
After college, Jorge had a stint of living apart from his family, who would tell him stories about shootouts or drive-bys in their neighbourhood. It didn’t feel right, being miles away from them. Worried about their safety, he moved back home. Since Donald Trump’s re-election, that feeling of wanting to protect his parents has only amplified. “Everything that’s going on in the political atmosphere, it creates some sort of fear on my end,” he says, “knowing that my dad is out there and tormented at anytime by ICE.”
Jorge is single. You might expect that living with his parents in his 30s affects his romantic life, but he says that coming home to them each night is a “blessing”. “It motivates me to have that genuine understanding with my partner,” he says. He plans to stay put until he wants to have his own children, at which point he hopes his parents will come to live with him.
“I don’t care if I don’t have my own things. I don’t care if I don’t have the bachelor pad,” he says, “I want my family to be safe.”
Across much of the world, living in the familial home is not perceived as at odds with adulthood. Intergenerational households are the norm in countries from Italy to India to China. “It’s part of the culture,” says Edward, who lives in Vallejo with his sister and parents who immigrated from the Philippines. Edward cites the Filipino word hiya, denoting self-sacrifice and caring for one’s elders. “The family is more important than the individual,” he says.
But respecting cultural traditions is not always easy. “Recently [my parents have] been pushing all these people from the Philippines, these girls, trying to set me up with them, and it’s just annoying.” About two years ago, Edward said his mom went on his Facebook and messaged a girl from high school he had mentioned in passing. “I felt violated,” he recalls. “I said: ‘OK, that’s it. That crosses the line.’” Now Edward says he wants to move on. “I have to get out of here,” he says. “I’m not gonna be happy if I keep on living their choices and I can’t live for myself.”
‘I don’t even have time for myself’
In the 1990s, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, then a psychology professor at the University of Missouri, began conducting interviews with Americans in their late teens and early 20s. He noticed a trend: young adults in the US were delaying the traditional milestones of adulthood such as getting married, having children and moving out their parents’ home. In 2001, Arnett published Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties, putting forward the case that 18- to 25-year-olds belonged to “a new and historically unprecedented period of the life course”.
Emerging adults, he wrote, are in a life period categorised by identity exploration and feelings of in-betweenness. Twenty-five years since the book’s publication, Arnett says that the phase of emerging adulthood has become even longer. “The whole decade of the 20s now is quite unstable in terms of employment,” Arnett, who is now a professor at Clark University, tells me. Emerging adults today are spending even longer in education and having children even later. “I thought things would probably plateau by about age 30,” he says, “but it’s still going up.”
Job security is a key factor in the dating lives of young men in Vallejo – of the 10 men I spoke with aged 19 to 31 living in their familial homes in Vallejo, nine were single, and several emphasised that they were focused on work as opposed to dating. “Back in the day, maybe [women] were settling for less. I feel like times have changed,” says Christopher, a Vallejo resident who lives with his parents and two brothers. He said he was currently prioritizing his welding apprenticeship over meeting a partner. “They want a guy with a job. They want a guy with a car. A provider.”
Multiple young men said that being seen on a dating app in Vallejo was embarrassing, while others described romance as a distraction from achieving their goals. The picture echoed national dating trends indicating that young adults are engaging in less “risky behaviours”, such as casual sex. One survey, conducted by DatingAdvice.com and the Kinsey Institute, found that more than one in three (37%) gen Z adults reported to be celibate in 2025, with inflation cited as the main reason why.
Kent Fortner, the owner of two Mare Island Brewing locations in Vallejo, says that, in his estimation, only a quarter of his clientele are in their early 20s, compared with about 35% a decade ago. He reckons this is because going to college is so expensive, which makes young adults more focused on work. “If you’re going to spend a quarter of a million dollars,” he says, “you don’t want to be screwing around while you’re doing that.”
“If it was financially possible,” Edward told me, “I would have more time for social circles.” Edward makes less than $3,000 each month – a salary that feels incompatible with rising Bay Area rents. And spending about three hours each day commuting from Vallejo to his office in San Francisco and back, he feels wiped out. “With all that time spent commuting and working, I don’t have time for personal relationships,” he says. “I don’t even have time for myself sometimes.”
‘Nobody wants to be a man’
There are other reasons why young adults in Vallejo may be experiencing adulthood at a different pace. Crime in Vallejo is above the national average, and the fear of violence trickles into some men’s intimate lives. “It’s hard to find a healthy relationship, especially in this type of lifestyle,” says Daniel, who lives with his parents in a suburban house decorated with Christian iconography and framed family photographs, with a back yard filled with animals: three white, fluffy roosters, two big, boisterous dogs, two hens and two pigs.
“Basically everyone I know lives with their mom, or if they moved out, they moved back in,” he says. “Back then, the American dream was like: you start a family, you get a job … you get your own house.” Today things are different. “I don’t know one couple that has bought a house and started a family out here,” he says, “Everyone wants to be tough Tony … A lot of people think that they’re not going to be nobody until they get violent. Nobody wants to be a man.”
Research has linked young men living at home in their early 20s with an increased risk of violence. Rayvon Williamson, a program manager at IHART, a Vallejo-based mobile crisis response unit, says that his team is called in to mediate a parent-child conflict at least once a week, and disputes involving young adults are frequent. He said a common pattern is young adults moving out the family home but not having enough skills or experience to get a job and support themselves financially, so they move back in, feeling defeated, embarrassed and ashamed. “That’s always a tough dynamic: how do I stand in my adulthood when I’m still so dependent on my parents?” Williamson says. “You just revert to what you understand manhood to be.”
Daniel says that most of his friends are in long-term relationships because in his social circles meeting new people comes with risk. Once, he says, a girl wanted to meet up with one of his friends, and was “acting like she liked him”, but ended up robbing him when they met up. “If my friends meet up with a girl. They’re going to send me their location,” he says. “If you don’t know their family, if you don’t know where they live, you do not trust them.”
Street violence has shaped Daniel’s trajectory, too. Two and a half years ago, on his first day at a new job as an electrician, he found out a close relative and a friend had been shot and killed in a double homicide. Heartbroken, he didn’t return to work. Daniel had been gunning to move in with his girlfriend by the time he was 25, but amid all the pain, they broke up. The couple eventually got back together, but he’s still living with his parents. “I feel like it’s affecting my growth,” he says, “like you can only grow as much as your surroundings.”
Before the double homicide, Daniel and his friends would ride around Vallejo on dirt bikes and go to “side shows” – street events where drivers do stunts like doughnuts and burnouts. These days their lives have slowed down. Vallejo once had one of the most violent police forces in the US, and while police-involved killings have declined in recent years, locals say harassment is common, particularly for people of colour. A few months ago, Daniel had his licence taken away for an incident in which he said police “had confused me with someone else”.
“It makes me feel like I’ve got to work harder,” says Daniel, who is Hispanic. “I feel like I have to dress more appropriate of my age, like if I just wear a hoodie or some shit, someone’s gonna think I’m doing something bad.” Without a licence, Daniel says he is not eligible for the jobs he wants to do, and without a job, he doesn’t have the money to move out. “I can’t do anything,” he said. “They’re gonna win either way.”
Daniel dreams of becoming an electrician again. “I know, as a man, that I need to jump out the nest soon,” he says. “Sometimes I do want to come home and it just be me and it just be mine.” But striving for stability sometimes feels like a sisyphean pursuit. “I want to get an apartment out here, but it’s like, there’s no point. I feel like I’ll just get in trouble or some shit.”
‘This is actually peace’
According to Arnett, one of the main reasons why American men are completing adult milestones later than women is a shift from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy, which has left many men displaced from the workforce. “It’s happened so fast that we really haven’t made the adjustments yet,” he says. “We need to do better at educating young men,” so we’re not “paying for it later” in unemployment benefits, incarceration, substance abuse treatment and domestic violence, he says. “We should think of them as investments.”
But at the same time, Arnett emphasises that delaying certain milestones of maturity is not always a bad thing. “Young people of the past were constricted in a variety of ways, from gender roles to economics, which prevented them from using their late teens and twenties for exploration,” he writes in Emerging Adulthood. Social and economic shifts have provided today’s emerging adults with “an exceptional opportunity to try out different ways of living and different options for love and work”.
With so little research into patterns of youth habitation, there is still a lot to learn about how living at home intersects with young adults’ sexuality, religion, dreams and desires. But it’s a place, like many US cities, where adulthood was something that was being constantly negotiated through the daily patterns of cohabiting. Daniel’s, for example, has become a hub for his friends to hang out in – and his friends have a warm, banterous relationship with his mom. “I just feel like I have so many sons now,” she told me. She doesn’t mind what the boys get up to, as long as they’re home. “It doesn’t matter. They’re safe.”
Kimani Cochran returned to his chosen parents’ home two years ago (the couple took him under their wing when he was 16), after he had struggled to find acting work in Los Angeles during the writers’ strike. He does not think being there stifles his growth. These days he works at a bar in Vallejo, and regularly has groups of friends over for barbecues or games of Uno in his back yard. Cochran is gay, and while he is not dating at the moment, he does not think that living with his parents impacts his romantic life. “My parents are literally the most open-minded humans you will ever meet,” he says. “They’re like, ‘Whatever you do is your business.’”
Cochran’s biological dad was in and out of prison throughout his childhood and his mom was often unable to pay rent. It meant he was constantly moving house, so he would keep his possessions in a single box, ready to move on short notice. “Now I’m in a space where I don’t pressure myself to flight,” he says.
Being an adult might look different from what he expected, but Cochran appreciates the freedom living with his foster parents has given him to slow down. “It took me a minute to realise that this is what a normal family feels like,” he says, “seeing what Black love could be and what love is.” For the first time in his life, Cochran has made his room his own, filling the space with vinyls, paintings, photos of his biological dad and his grandparents. “This is actually peace. This is home,” he says.
Additional reporting by Sebastien K Bridonneau
