Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone

by Settersten, Richard; Ray, Barbara E.

  Today’s young adults want freedom and autonomy—but living under the same roof leaves relationships between parents and grown children rather murky. Yet very few of the young adults in our interviews were “deadbeat” children, living at home out of laziness. They instead divided into two general camps: those who experienced a serious blunder and had to return home to recover, and those who were earning credentials or saving money to ensure more positive futures for themselves.

  Sarah is a good representative of both camps.6 At age twenty-eight, she only recently moved out of her mother’s home. Sarah and her mother have a tight-knit relationship; they see each other several times a week and talk most days. The two grew close after Sarah’s parents divorced. The two of them moved from the suburbs to the city, sharing a smaller apartment and carving out a new life together. Sarah’s idea of a perfect weekend, in fact, would be to spend it with her mom, traveling and shopping. The two of them still do “the family vacation thing” each year.

  Sarah has shuttled between living with her mother and living independently several times. She first moved back home during college, when she was unhappy living in the dorms at the local university. She eventually quit school for what she intended would be a semester to gain some clarity about her future and what she wanted from life. Instead, she married and began working full-time. When her marriage hit a rocky patch, Sarah moved home because she did not want to be alone. She left again when she and her husband temporarily reconciled. However, the marriage could not be sustained, and Sarah returned home after the divorce. Her mother was very supportive, and Sarah used the cushion that living at home provided to return to college full-time.

  She felt a little embarrassed about living with her mother, but she regarded it as a temporary situation—and felt she had good reasons for moving back again. “Part of why I moved home to go to school full-time was that she let me live there for free. I just had to pay for my car and health insurance, and she paid for the roof over my head, she paid for the groceries I ate, she paid for the TV I watched, all that stuff. She was still providing me with that, and emotionally, obviously, she still supports me in that way.” Sarah makes it clear she is not a “deadbeat child.” She had a goal while living at home, and her mother was completely supportive of her as she worked toward finishing her degree. Asked whether her mother enjoyed her company, she says, “I’d still be there if it were up to her! She’s single right now, so she loves having me around.”

  Many people assume that the relationships between parents and adult children are seriously strained when children stay at home or move back. They also assume that there’s something wrong with the children who do this—that they are either lacking in character or in dire straits. But as Sarah’s case shows, parents often permit and even encourage it. When a young adult lives at home with his or her parents, there can surely be downsides. The squabbles that come with living under the same roof, or discomfort—for both the child and the parents—with the situation can test relationships. However, the benefits typically outweigh the costs.

  The benefits from the young adults’ perspective range from not having to pay rent, make meals, or do laundry—often said with a guilty laugh—to being able to save money or to get back on track after life has thrown a curveball. Young adults with children also often mention the benefits of having help with child care—usually young women getting help from their mothers. It also gives them a reprieve while finding a good fit in the job market, which can take longer in a less stable workforce. No matter what the benefits are, young adults generally do not take their parents’ hospitality for granted. They truly seem to appreciate it.

  For all of these reasons, when living at home is done strategically, it can ensure more positive outcomes for kids who would likely be treading harder or sinking faster during the early-adult years. This is particularly true in working-class and poorer families; living at home can help young adults emerge with stronger skills and richer resources to get them launched.

  In-House Adulthood

  We shouldn’t assume that parents resent the support they extend to young adult children. It’s natural to focus on what kids are getting from parents and lose sight of what kids might also be giving to parents. When parents get emotional and practical support from their children, it leaves them feeling good. In fact, parents suggest that they get more emotional support from young adult children than children admit to, or are aware of, giving.7 Relationships are a two-way street.

  A look at young adult children from immigrant families demonstrates how much they are giving back to their parents and families. Cultural traditions in many immigrant families emphasize responsibility and obligation, such that young adult children may be required to contribute financially to the household, assist family members, and remain at home until (or even after) they are married. In 2008, large percentages of second-generation young adults (that is, children born in the United States to immigrant parents) between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four co-resided with their parents. Some groups have especially high rates of staying at home—between 64 and 74 percent of young adults from Indian, Dominican, Chinese, Filipino, and Salvadoran/Guatamalan backgrounds still lived at home.8 Many of these young adults remain in their parents’ homes out of a sense of family responsibility or obligation.9

  As the nation becomes increasingly multicultural, norms about when to leave home, when to stay, and who gives and gets in these relationships may change. Immigrant youths in interviews were much more at ease living at home than native families, as doing so is more culturally acceptable; it’s even expected. This longer co-dependence is clear in cases like Valentina’s. Her family migrated to the United States from Belarus when she was ten, and she helped her parents navigate a new culture and a new set of rules and bureaucracies. Their close bond, forged by their struggles in a new place, is apparent today and they continue to lean on one another. Yet even young people in native-born families can find themselves providing significant levels of emotional or practical support to parents, such as Jerome was doing for his mother. This latter situation is typical for youth from families that are experiencing financial hardship, the breakup of parents, or unexpected ill nesses or deaths.

  Many countries in Europe have already experienced the lengthening transition to adulthood and are becoming more accustomed to the slower march to independence. In a Network-commissioned study, Katherine Newman and Sofya Aptekar examined the co-residence of young people and parents across Europe. In countries where this phenomenon is fairly new, living with parents is associated with less life satisfaction. However, the more the practice becomes widespread and stigma lessens, the more satisfied the children and parents become. In some countries, general well-being and satisfaction seem to be enhanced by longer stays in the family home, and the family can be a critical, and welcome, buffer in the face of economic instability, tight housing markets, and other limited opportunities.10 Europe, and perhaps the United States to follow, might be witnessing a new developmental stage, one the authors term “in-house adulthood.” This stage is structured less in terms of an authoritative parent and submissive child, and more as co-equals who reside together, enjoy each other’s company, and provide mutual support. More than one-half of all Europeans, the authors point out, approve of adult children living longer with parents. Both parents and children feel that the main disadvantage of leaving home is emotional loss, which seems an indication that young adults and their parents share close bonds in other Western nations, too.

  Hard to Say Good-Bye

  After such intense involvement for the first eighteen years of life, both children and parents have a hard time letting go. A divorced mother from the Bronx writes to Lisa Belkin in The New York Times about the empty nest she is facing as her son strikes out on his own:

  My 19-year-old only son is moving into his own apartment this weekend. He’s responsible and smart, so I should be happy at his independence. But I’m scared for him and worried that he is not ready
. He knows that I moved out on my own at age 18, so I think he partly feels he’s keeping up the “tradition.” Outwardly, I’m very supportive and positive about his move. Inwardly, I miss him already. With the winter coming, how will I sleep not knowing if he’s paid his utility bill? Did he turn the front eye off the stove before going to bed? Will he remember to call me? I’ve been divorced from his father since he was three; so it’s been just the two of us for so long. I’m proud he wants to spread his wings on his own, but I admit I’ll be lonely at first.11

  The experience of Diana, whom we interviewed, reveals just how emotional departures can be for kids and parents alike—especially parents. Diana’s father cried when his daughter left. Diana was an only child and a “daddy’s girl.” “On the one hand,” she says, “we were very close—closer than most people are with their fathers. But on the other hand, our personalities were kind of too similar, so we would clash.” After college, Diana returned home for two years while she saved money and moved up the job ladder. The best thing about living at home, she says, was that it was free, she never had to cook, and her parents gave her the freedom to do the things she wanted. As nice as that was, Diana was “utterly ecstatic” when, as a Christmas present, her father gave her enough money for six months of rent. When Diana “did the happy dance,” her father choked back tears, stung that she was so excited about leaving. When she jokingly said that he must really want her to leave, he burst into tears. It was a horrible Christmas, she remembers.

  In the end, her apartment was close to home, and she and her parents continued to see each other regularly. “If they really wanted to check on me, they still could,” she says, “so that transition for them, that emptiness thing, was probably easier.” Moving out strengthened her relationship with her father because distance limited their arguments and they learned to appreciate each other more. She and her mother have remained close, and they still meet a few times a week on Diana’s lunch break and every Saturday for shopping or an outing. “So, it really wasn’t any different for her, except that she didn’t see me every night. But I still talked to her on the phone every single day, as I still do. It got to the point where I put my phone on forward at work because she was calling me a little too much and it was driving me nutty.” Diana has since married and started a family, and her mother frequently visits Diana’s new home to help with her son. Diana still talks to her father by phone about three times a week, and she visits her parents once a week or so. Her parents have been and remain her “constant source of inspiration,” and she knows they will be there to catch her should she ever fall.

  Diana’s family is not unusual. Many of the young people in our interviews say their parents felt more pain in letting them go than they did in leaving. That is not to say that leaving is easy for kids. But for children, leaving is the moment they’ve been working toward, even if they’re very close to their parents. For many parents, particularly if they’re close to their children, it is the moment they’ve been dreading after all of the time, energy, resources, and attachment they have invested in getting their children this far. However, the majority are happy to know their children are ready to fly the coop. Indeed, we have more reason to be concerned about the number of young people, particularly those from less privileged backgrounds, who are not getting enough guidance from parents—whose parents are taking a hands-off or hard-knocks approach to getting kids launched into adulthood.

  It’s a Hard-Knocks Life

  Working-class and poorer families more often take a sterner approach to parenting, giving children little guidance, or insisting that they must make it on their own and learn from their mistakes. They encourage or even demand that their children leave home early. Eighteen and you’re out is a frequent rule in these households. Unfortunately, these parents are telling their children to play by old rules that at best no longer apply in today’s world, and at worst may be detrimental to them.

  This is not to suggest that the relationships in these families are always strained or distant. Rather, this old-style philosophy of parenting entails serious risks and more negative outcomes for young adult children. Many of them end up forgoing or cutting short training beyond high school and instead take the fast track to work and parenting. Many realize in retrospect that their lives could have taken a different, and often more positive, course had they had more guidance and advice, and even the cushion of support in a place to stay.

  Henry, for example, looks back and wishes his parents had been more involved. His parents were the hands-off type and were fairly traditional. He recalls, “You know, if you did something wrong, you were either going to get grounded or you were going to get spanked. You were going to pay the consequences.” His was a “normal” life, he says, full of summer vacations, family reunions, and Little League. Although far from hostile or troubled, the family did not talk much, and Henry never knew whether his parents wanted anything for him in life. “They didn’t really have plans for me,” he says, thinking back.

  He didn’t have any plans for himself, either. He was a jock in high school, and focused on his grades only enough to remain eligible for sports. He and his parents never talked about college, although Henry knew there was not going to be any money for it if he did decide to go. In fact, he and his parents rarely discussed his future at all. After graduation, Henry fell into a job for a food-delivery service and later a fast-food restaurant. After a year, he got a job at a pharmacy and eventually became a manager. He later moved to his current employer, first in a clerical job and now monitoring electronically controlled systems in a factory for just over minimum wage. All the while, he was still living at home.

  When Henry was twenty-two, his parents surprised him by announcing they were selling their house and moving to Florida. Henry had been spending more time at his girlfriend’s house, and his parents had begun to press him about his future plans. When he said the two were likely moving in together, it was all his parents needed to hear. They put their house up for sale and bought a place in Florida and a smaller summer home a few miles north of Henry’s childhood home. “It was kind of weird,” says Henry of his parents’ departure. “It was like, I guess I really don’t have my parents to fall back on right now. I’ve got to be my own person.”

  Henry landed on his feet. He eventually married his girlfriend, and they now live in their own condo with a baby on the way. In hindsight, however, he wishes his parents had helped him develop a clearer plan—that they had sat him down, given him guidance, and pushed him in school. He wishes, in particular, that he’d gone to college. “They just left it all in my hands, saying, ‘Well, if you’re going to pass, you’re going to pass. If you’re going to fail, you’re going to fail.’ ” The consequences for Henry were a “just get by” approach to his grades in high school, no thoughts of college, and only a vague idea that he would find a job. Like many teens and young adults, the easy route seemed like the best route to him. While Henry’s parents should not be faulted for raising children with the belief that life’s lessons are learned through the consequences of one’s actions, that approach can be risky in this era of the highly competitive arms race among the elite, with their highly structured childhoods and well-orchestrated paths through school. It can also be risky in this bifurcated economy of a low-wage service sector, which Henry landed in by default, and a more secure knowledge sector. As Henry says now, at age thirty, “I would have liked to have been pushed to think about the future, which didn’t happen.”

  Henry’s story illustrates that certain mistakes and costly detours can be avoided, mistakes from which young people may have a particularly difficult time recovering. A hands-off, hard-knocks approach can be damaging if young people are left to their own devices in a highly competitive playing field to make mistakes simply for the sake of learning a tough lesson.

  The Long Reach of Divorce

  Relative to a century ago, divorce, rather than death, is now the great disruptor of family relationships. Many of today’
s young adults had childhoods that were heavily impacted by the divorce of parents. The legacy is that some divorced parents find it comforting and less lonely to have their adult children at home, or to have close relationships with them. This is particularly true for mothers, as divorce tends to strengthen the relationships between mothers and their children, especially between mothers and daughters. In contrast, it often fractures the relationships between fathers and children.

  Sarah knows the strain that divorce can put on father–daughter relationships. When her parents divorced while she was still in elementary school, it was a life-changing event for her. She wishes her parents had stayed together “just for the family dynamic that would have given me,” including siblings and an extended family, because “a lot of times it was my mom and I.” With the divorce, she and her mother left their comfortable home in the suburbs for an apartment in the city, where Sarah was enrolled in public school, making new friends and starting over. The divorce was hard on everyone, she says, but luckily for her, her parents avoided fighting in front of her, and her father continued to support her financially after the split.

  While Sarah and her mother grew close, the distance between Sarah and her father continued to grow, both geographically and emotionally. After the divorce, she saw him on weekends. When he remarried a few years later and moved to the Southwest, she only saw him during the summers. When we last spoke with Sarah, she had not seen him in two years. “I’m not close to him like I am my mom. He didn’t get to see me grow up and be a part of my life.” With some tending on both their parts, their relationship has recently “blossomed,” and they are beginning to communicate more and find common ground. “We’re friends,” she says.