Parenting Grown Children: What Dr. Spock Forgot to Tell Us

Refilled Nests: Our adult kids are coming home to live with us again. What's up?

Our Gen Z kids are nestling into their old bedrooms, sleeping in our basements or otherwise making themselves at home in our homes. The post-college life is unfolding under the parental roof. It isn't just our kids here in the U.S. Parents in other first-world countries are finding their 20-somethings--and even  30s--reversing trends and coming back to live at home.

Many of us find it shocking. It's so unlike what we did when we were their age: We couldn't wait to break free and live independently. At least that's how I remember those heady days--I got a job, I rented a walkup apartment with my best friend, we furnished it with her aunt's cast-off sofa. We felt like we were living large.

Today our kids are migrating back to their parental homes in significant numbers. Here are the numbers:

87 percent more adults between the ages of 25 and 34 were living at home with their parents compared to 20 years ago, according to 2024 census data.

Nearly half of young adults live with their parents, a rate that hasn’t been seen since the 1940s; that’s about 23 million adults between the ages of 18 to 29.

American kids aren't the only ones traipsing home. Macclean's, the Canadian magazine reported, in a cover story entitled, "Why Gen Z Will Never Leave Home," similar findings. Here are the numbers from StatsCan.

46 percent of all twentysomethings lived with a parent in 2021, ; 30 years ago only a third of twentysomethings did.

Nearly a third of people aged 25 to 29 are still living at home compared to 11 per cent in 1981.

Why the push to be homeward bound? After all, many Gen Z kids have jobs that pay more than minimum wage; they could, in theory, eke it out on their own with a roommate or two or three. But other factors are pushing them home.

Bloomberg reports three top reasons young adults are choosing to live with mom and dad again:

To save money.

To take care of older family members.

Because they can’t afford to live outside of the home anymore.

 Axios expands on the first point:

Rent, especially in desirable big cities, is very expensive and not improving. So  staying home helps young people save money for a future down payment or future rent.

Bloomberg interviewed several young adults and found there was concern that the job market was deteriorating.

By remaining under our roofs, kids are, in effect, pushing off home ownership, marriage and parenthood.

Macclean's looked to  Jeffrey Arnett, an American psychologist who studies the transition from adolescence to adulthood, for some wisdom on what young adults are thinking.

In 2000, [Arnett] proposed that people in this life stage weren’t even full adults. Instead, they were “emerging adults,” finding their place in a world that no longer held just one or two possible paths. When he first coined the term, he set the age range at 18 to 25; he now considers this life stage to last until about age 29. “People are taking longer to find a stable place in the adult world,” he says. He’s experienced this firsthand: one of his 25-year-old twins moved home last year. 

The Gen Zers themselves seem to be less judgmental about living at home than we were. But the effect on us today is profound. Here's Macclean's take:

For parents, it means those heart-tugging memes of “only having 18 summers with your kids” are a load of crap. They’re emotionally and financially supporting their kids for much longer than expected, forcing them to reimagine their retirement years. Instead of an empty nest, they now have a roommate who keeps forgetting to empty the dishwasher.

painting: Edward Hopper

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sharing the Wealth: What do we owe our adult kids?

Do we have to share our wealth--be it a dollop from our savings, income or investments--with struggling grown kids? If we don't have to, should we anyway?

Many of us have answered the latter question with a "yes." That is, we want to if we can afford it. (Never mind the Boomer, Gen X or Millenial nomenclature: We are the Wealth Transfer generation.) Some of us have said yes even if we can't quite afford it.  But a woman writing to Slate's Kirstin Wong can afford it. A widow, she writes that her husband left her financially comfortable. She owns two homes, takes one or two cruise vacations a year and cares for two beloved French bulldogs that, in her words, cost more to maintain than a small child, which her only child has as well as a wife, a small apartment in a dicey neighborhood and health-related debts.

The grandmother/mother is in a quandry: Should she help them out if they have not welcomed her into their lives? Should she just write them off.

Before we rush to judgment, let's get more of the details she shared in her letter. 

--She and her son have been "extremely distant ever since he graduated college," she writes, "and especially since he got married. He didn’t even have a wedding to invite me to, and I’ve never met my 7-year-old granddaughter in person." 

--The granddaughter needed surgery shortly after birth and the parents have been paying that off as well as college debt. They would like to send their daughter to a more challenging school in a safer neighborhood but can't afford to do so.

--When she asked him recently why there was such a coolness between them, "I was shocked when he told me he and his wife have always felt that I don’t care about them because I’ve never helped them financially."

--Her daughter-in-law comes from a poor immigrant family, "yet they have a very close relationship with her parents, who watch my granddaughter every day after school. Apparently, if you can’t afford to give them anything, they won’t expect it!"

--She is thinking of leaving her worldly goods to her church instead of to her "greedy and materialistic" son.

The French bulldog reference pushed some hostile buttons for me, but Slate's Wong wisely moved away from the judgmental. Her advice revolved instead around the symbolic meaning of money and the importance of communication. Here are some relevant excerpts:

Money issues are rarely just about dollars and cents. Money holds symbolic value for all of us, and to your son and his wife, financial support could be tied to emotional support, care, or even love. It’s easy to characterize them as greedy and resentful, but consider another explanation: Maybe, given all their struggles and your relative ease, he feels unimportant and neglected.

Money is a resource, and it seems to be one that’s readily available to you, so I can see why your son is interpreting your lack of financial help as a lack of care. He and his wife might not expect the same from her family because they support them in other ways, using other resources, like time and child care—both of which are immensely valuable.

Talk to your son without holding judgment or making assumptions. Figure out what care means to him and what he needs from you to feel it. Chances are, it’s about not just money.

painting: "Bacchus and Ariadne" by Frank Auerbach

Good Manners: Who's to blame when grandkids don't say Thank You? What if they're step-grands?

When we don't get a thank you for gifts sent--holiday presents, birthday gifts, Confirmation, Bar Mitzvah, whatever--resentment becomes an unpleasant visitor in our lives. Why should it be an effort for our adult kids or grandkids to text, email or phone in a "Thanks"--never mind penning a note on thick vellum paper. (That's a wish too far.)

We can also be quick to enter the blame game. If it's the grandkids who haven't responded, we often point a finger at the mom, especially if she's our daughter-in-law. When there are step-daughters involved, it can get even trickier. Here's the complaint of one woman who is grandmother to three families. She writes to Sahaj Kahur that two of the families not only say thank you but are interactive with her, often bringing her their artwork which is hung all over her home. It's the third family that's the problem. Her stepdaughter--her husband's child--is not, in her eyes, bringing up her children to have good manners. There are no thank you's for gifts or other treats from the grandparents and no offers of the children's drawings to hang in the grandparent's house. The stepdaughter complains that the grandmother is not treating her children equally with the others. The grandmother writes that her husband promised to talk to his daughter about the problem but hasn't. What is the grandmother to do to stop her resentment from growing worse?

Here are three of the suggestions (edited for space and clarity) Kahur makes, some of which may highlight issues many of us have in our relationships with the parents of our grandchildren.

ONE: If there are two parents in the picture, it’s not just on your stepdaughter to raise the kids with manners.  Try to avoid zooming in on your stepdaughter being the problem.

TWO: Strengthen the relationship you have with her. Focus on the positives in the relationship you do have with her and her kids. If that doesn’t feel like enough, be honest with her. Just remember that you want to approach the conversation with care, not with the intention to “prove” that you treat all your grandkids similarly.

THREE: Kindly tell your husband that something needs to change and you would appreciate working together to create a realistic, yet more specific and time-bound, plan on approaching his daughter.

REMINDER: You’ve been stuck in limbo and the only way for something to change is for something to change. So take some time now to consider how you can approach your stepdaughter and her kids differently, or how to have a more structured plan in place with your husband.

painting: "The White Cat," Pierre Bonnard