Layla Ahmed is, by any measure, a responsible adult. She works at a nonprofit in Nashville helping refugees. Makes 50k a year. Saves money. Pays her bills on time.
But there’s another measure of adulthood that has so far eluded her. Ahmed, 23, moved back in with her parents after graduating college in 2022.
“There is a perception that those who live with their parents into their 20s are either bums or people who are not hard-working,” she told the Today, Explained podcast.
Being neither of those things, Ahmed and her situation actually point to a growing trend in America right now: More adults, especially younger adults, are either moving back in with family or never leaving at all.
According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of all adults ages 25 to 34 now live in a multigenerational living situation (which it defines as a household with two or more adult generations).
It’s a number that’s been creeping upward since the early ‘70s but has swung up precipitously in the last 15 years. The decennial US Census measures multigenerational living slightly differently (three or more generations living together), but the trend still checks out. From 2010 to 2020, there was a nearly 18 percent increase in the number of multigenerational households.
GenX here too. I think the difference for us was that if you were going back to live with parents after becoming an adult (especially if you had a wife and perhaps a new child) was that it was always seen as temporary.
The impression I get now is that young people today don’t have the planned end date because opportunity is slim and costs are high. They can’t know when they’ll be able to leave. There’s no apparent path for them. So instead it becomes “live with parents” with no planned end date because they don’t see anything that can change the situation inside their control. This is just my guess though through observation. I could be radically wrong.
That’s true. Although for many people it was never really temporary. We remember the people who moved away and built their own house by hand, but forget those who never left home. Many people had no real individualistic future because they died young or had to care for their aging relatives.
Those people were all just trying to survive, like us now.