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

Re-Formed Nests: Grown kids are moving back home--a trend with a Covid accelerant.

Ever since the pandemic descended on us in March, there's been a noticeable uptick in an ongoing trend: Our adult kids are moving in with us. For some the reason is financial: the economy crashed and with it, their jobs. For others, it's emotional: the loneliness of living alone in a small apartment under quarantine conditions. For some it's technical: they still have their jobs but they need more robust Internet connections.  And for others it's familial: Their kids are going to school by zoom and there's a need for loving caretakers.

There are a thousand permutations of reasons. One couple hosted their daughter, her husband and their toddler grandchild for a year while the young family sold their city apartment and bought a house in the suburbs.

By September, Pew Research was reporting that the share of 18- to 29-year-olds living with their parents had become a majority, surpassing the previous peak during the Great Depression era.

Here are Pew's numbers:

In July, 52% of young adults resided with one or both of their parents, up from 47% in February. The number living with parents grew to 26.6 million, an increase of 2.6 million from February. The number and share of young adults living with their parents grew across the board for all major racial and ethnic groups, men and women, and metropolitan and rural residents, as well as in all four main census regions. Growth was sharpest for the youngest adults (ages 18 to 24) and for White young adults.

The move back to the comforts of the parental nest was a factor during the Great Recession of a decade ago. At that time, family became an economic refuge for many. Pew says it ran its recent survey because it wanted to see whether young adults again resorted to that “private safety net” amid the pandemic's widespread shutdowns and rough economic conditions.

Here's what they found:

Young adults have been particularly hard hit by this year’s pandemic and economic downturn, and have been more likely to move than other age groups....About one-in-ten young adults (9%) say they relocated temporarily or permanently due to the coronavirus outbreak, and about the same share (10%) had somebody move into their household. Among all adults who moved due to the pandemic, 23% said the most important reason was because their college campus had closed, and 18% said it was due to job loss or other financial reasons.

The vast majority of young adults who live with their parents – 88% – live in their parents’ home, and this group accounts for the growth in the population of adult children living with their parents. Nearly all of the remainder live in their own homes along with their parents, or in homes headed by other family members. These shares have been relatively stable for the past decade.

Not all of us are happy to have our "guest room" reoccupied by adult children who have needs, opinions and lifestyles that may not fit with ours. Then there's the wider world concerns. The effect on the economy could be devastating. Even before the outbreak, the growth in new households trailed population growth and slower household growth could mean less demand for housing and household goods. There also may be a decline in the number of renters and homeowners, and in overall housing activity. Between February and July 2020, the number of households headed by an 18- to 29-year-old declined by 1.9 million, or 12%.

If you'd like to see the trend data in chart form, here's how Pew lays it out:

 

 

Empty Nests: When you don't really want them to move back home

This is the emptying nest season. A lot of our kids have left for college and parents are wistful and lump-in-throat sad to see their empty place at the kitchen table. We wish they were still youngsters living under our roof. Or so we think. But four years hence, we may not be so thrilled if the young adults return and set up headquarters in their former bedrooms (now our guest rooms or dens).

We were devoted parents while they lived with us but we may not be so happy to see them come back. That's the gist of a column by Charles Blow, an oped columnist for the NYTimes who usually writes about such weighty matters as racism and immigration. But Blow, a single dad since his son was six years old and his twins were three, has taken time to fill his column space with an essay on parenting. He acknowledges that when the twins went off to college a few years ago he felt "free, that I was entering a new life of my own, and I felt absolutely no guilt about that."

When the twins graduated from college, they moved back into his house and settled in as they searched for jobs and looked for their first apartments. Blow admits to, well, being less than happy about their return. 

I will say the thing that we as parents are not supposed to say: What happened to my empty nest? The very definition of home has changed. Mine will always be their family home, their spiritual home, but it cannot be their primary home. This is now my primary home, alone.

I know that this arrangement is temporary, and I want to help my children out in every way possible, but it would be dishonest to say that their reappearance in “their rooms,” which I now call guest rooms, has not been jarring.

Then he addresses the conflict many of us feel when our kids refill the nest and our culpability in making it oh-so-comfortable for them.

No matter how much I try to resist the urge, I’m reverting to my last-phase parenting mode — worrying about whether they’re eating enough and eating healthfully, washing their clothes and taking them to their rooms.

These are young adults and not children. I have to remember that. I also have to remember that this phase is temporary. But, I also have to prevent them from dragging their feet leaving home and starting their own lives.

When your children return to your empty nest, it is a good thing to firmly nudge them out. That, too, is what love looks like.

Empty Nest, Refilled: The cost of housing is a universal concern for young buyers and their parents

The pressure on Chinese parents to help their Millennial-aged children buy a home is a jaw-dropper.  The Chinese one-family policy plus the urbanization of the economy  is creating a generation of Little Emperors  that have high expectations for how much their parents will do for them in terms of housing.  With housing tight in urban areas and unaffordable at the salaries the Little Emperors are earning, Chinese millennials are looking to their parents to help with the down payment on a house as well as a hefty assist with the mortgage payments.

It's a familiar story--at least the housing part of it.

In Australia, where there's a housing crunch too, a study of 2017 home purchases found that more than half--55 percent--of first-home buyers got a financial boost from their parents. It's quite a leap for the land down under. In 2010, only 3.3 percent of first-time buyers got help from mom and dad.

Here in the U.S., the pressure also starts at home. According to a recent analysis of census data by Zillow, in 2005 roughly 14 percent of millennials (ages 24 to 36) lived at home with mom and dad; today, it's nearly 23 percent. They're there for a variety of reasons but chief among them is the cost of housing in urban areas, which is outpacing wages.

Both millennials and their parents would like to see the youngsters move out and into a home of their own, and parents are helping make that happen.  A 2018 survey by the  National Association of Realtors found that, among homebuyers who made a down payment, 23 percent of those 37 and younger had the wherewithal of a gift and 6 percent a loan from family or friends — the highest proportion for either type of assistance among all age groups.

Feels like help with a down payment is becoming a universal language of love--or for parents who can afford it, a loving necessity.

 

Refilled Nests: When Boomerangers come back, we don't like it.

 

No less an authority than the London School of Economics tells us that we suffer when our adult kids return home to live with us. There is, the newest research finds, a decline in parental quality of life and well being when our adult children return to live with us.

This is based on research and surveys in Europe--not here. That said, roughly a quarter of young adults in the UK and throughout Europe are living with their parents -- the highest number since records began in 1996. The move home is driven by the unaffordably high cost of housing and job insecurity on the part of our adult kids.

When these adults return home to an empty nest--that is, no other children are still at living at home--our brothers and sisters over there experience loss of ‘feelings of control, autonomy and pleasure in everyday life’--regardless of the reason the children returned home.

How deep do those feelings run? Pretty far down. The scale for quality of life measures ranges from 12 to 48. When a child returns home to a previously empty nest (and it's not for the purposes of parental support), researchers found that the parental score went down by an average of 0.8 points. That's a big enough drop, researchers said, to be similar to developing an age-related disability, such as difficulties with walking or getting dressed. Oooph.

Here's the bottom line from Dr. Marco Tosi, one of the authors of the study. :

"When children leave the parental home, marital relationships improve and parents find a new equilibrium. They enjoy this stage in life, finding new hobbies and activities. When adult children move back, it is a violation of that equilibrium."

And then there's this from British therapist and author Andrew Marshall:

‘Living with adult children can be destructive for trapped nesters’ relationships. Lack of privacy means the biggest casualty is the parents’ sex lives – just when they were beginning to recover from years concentrating on the family – and the children can also take a lot of the emotional focus a couple should be giving to each other again.’

To say nothing of single parents with an eye on dating and putting a little more zip into their social life.

                             

 

 

 

 

Emptying Nests: A tip for moving boomerang kids out of your house

 

Let's call it the Canadian solution. The problem: Our adult kids living in our homes.

If you've followed the U.S. Census news, you know the phenomenon is more widespread today than forty years ago.  Back then, one in five adults ages 18 to 34 were living at home. Today, it's one out of three.

For some of us, having the grown kids putting down roots in their childhood bedrooms is pure pleasure. If they're saving money to get married, buy a house, start a business--or they're keeping vosts down low until the right career job comes along--we feel good about making the future more financially sound for them. Some adult kids are at home because it suits both parents and child. A couple we met on our recent group tour of Morocco admitted, in somewhat embarrassed tones that they enjoy having their 30-something son and his girlfriend live with them. When the parents travel, the younger couple water the plants, feed the cat and walk the dog; when the parents are in town, they are included whenever the younger couple's friends drop by. She's an artist, he's a poet and having the next generation around keeps them in touch with the changing culture.

For many of us, though, the pleasure is mixed with pain. We may be embarrassed that our kids are still at home. Or we may be concerned that our 20-or 30-something kids have failed to launch, or their habits may be out of sync with our life style. Or we feel it's time for our kids to live independently: we don't want to deny them the space to learn the life-management skills of paying the rent and balancing their budget.

Pleasure or pain, if we want to encourage our grown children to find a new place to call home, Canadian parents have a sure-fire method. Pay them to move on.

How widespread is this approach in Canada? A commercial bank's survey of 1,000+ parents found that three out of four Canadian parents with a child age 18 or over would or have offered their child money to move out of the house. How much? About half put the figure at $24,000. (In U.S. dollars that's a few thousand under $20,000.) Those with household incomes of more than $100,000 said they give $40,000, with as many as 25 per cent offering more than $50,000.

You could sum up the concept as, "Here's the money, I love you, now please move out." The survey did not mention how successful the payoff was.

 

 

Refilled Nests: Is the e-world to blame for the stampede home? Or is it simply demographics?

 

The Census report is in: A higher percentage of young adults have been living with their parents in 2015 than during the recession. Despite widespread expectations, our refilled-nests are not emptying out as quickly and thoroughly as they did a generation ago. (The share of 18-34 year-olds living with parents was 31.5% in 2015, up from 31.4% in 2014.) Major blips in the economy, the difficulty in landing career jobs and the burden of student debt. Those are the usual reasons behind the current trend: a trend that some see as the new normal.

There are additional, counter-intuitive reasons. One is the imbalance in young millennials' lives between offline and online worlds. The youngest millennials are the first generation to grow up as dual citizens or, as Carl Pickhardt,puts it, "Two-worlders." That is they have, since infancy, learned to live in the overlapping and interconnected worlds of offline and online realities. Pickhardt, a psychologist who specializes in dealing with adolescents and young adults, writes that "Since birth they have inhabited the smaller Interpersonal actual world where communication and interaction are directly conducted, and the vast virtual Internet world where communication and interaction are electronically mediated."

He suggests that they are having a hard time balancing one against the other. Their computers are an auxiliary brain--an electronic enabler that serves a multitude of functions --information retrieval, communication, social networking, entertainment, shopping, creative expression, and problem solving.  "It is an integral part of a millennial young person’s functioning, and that isn’t going to change," Pickhardt writes.

In consequence of our children growing up in these two worlds, parenting has become more than doubly complicated. We have to help our kids keep the two worlds adequately separated, adequately integrated, and adequately balanced.

What's that got to do with millennials living at home in greater numbers than usual? It may be that online escape or reliance has come at the experience of offline education and experience. As Pickhardt sees it, "it might be that much of the hard work of growing up (building practical offline skills, problem solving offline experience, assuming offline responsibilities) requires laboring in the fields of relatively unglamorous and comparatively boring offline life. In this way, they may have slowed down the development of functional independence."

Thus some millennials may choose to live a while longer at home where they can continue to be sheltered and defer self-support and direction. They may need more offline time and practice before feeling ready to move out and live independently. 

Perhaps it just takes longer to grow up in two worlds than it used to in one. Maybe learning adequate separation, integration, and balance required by today's dual citizenship just takes more time.

If this is so, the new normal may be here to stay. We might not want to convert their bedrooms to our own private dens quite yet.

There's another reason to keep those rooms available.

Housing economist Jed Kolko addresses the question: Why Millennials Still Live With Their Parents

His concern is with first-time home buyer demand, but here's his take on millennials (who are not flooding the housing market) :

 

"The increase in young adults living with parents over the past twenty years can be explained entirely by demographic changes. The increase since 2005 is not an aberration; once demographics are taken into account, the aberration is the bubble years of the mid-2000s, when an unusually low share of young adults was living with parents."

 

"Unless demographic trends reverse, the share of young adults living with parents is unlikely to fall much. Today’s millennials will leave their parents’ homes as they age — they’re not going to live there forever. But it won’t be the sudden unleashing of pent-up demand we might have expected if the increase of living with parents were only about the housing bust and recession and not about longer-term demographic shifts."

Refilled Nests: Why are so many grown kids heading home? Goldman Sachs has answers

It isn't all logarithms and higher-math analysis at Goldman Sachs. The investment firm's researchers have their soft side. Two economists there looked into the question of, as they framed it, "What's Keeping the Kids at Their Parents' Homes?"

Statistically speaking, they are there in greater numbers than they were post-recession. Between 2010 and this past spring, the share of young adults living in their parents' homes increased from 24 percent to 26, according to a Pew study--even though the economy improved during that time.

So what gives? Here's the Goldman Sachs take:

About one-third of the "excess kids" living with their parents is due to the "current labor force status 'composition effect.' " (According to Goldman:the aggregate share of kids that would be living with their parents if the current distribution of labor market outcomes were the same as in 2007. )

What accounts for the other two-thirds? Partly it's that "the effect of unemployment shocks on the share of young people living with their parents dissipates slowly." (Translation: It takes a while to regain faith in the future.)

But three other factors might also be playing a role:

1--Rising student debt and poor credit scores

2--The median age at first marriage has been increasing at a faster than usual rate since 2007

3--Rent-to-income ratios are at historic highs, especially for young people.

According to GS economists, "the future trajectory of these three factors is less clear, suggesting that the share of 18-34 year-olds living at home might not fully return to pre-recession rates."

GS concludes that this is not bad news if you're a home builder. There's a big bulge of adults living at home that will move out and into homes of their own--in a little while. Extending that logic: If you're a parent with a basement full of returnees, the end is in sight--but not right away.

Related articles

Parenting Grown Children: We are at our peril when we give advice they didn't ask for

Boomerang Children: A strategy for emptying the nest

Some of us go with the flow when our grown kids move home with us--especially if they're recent graduates and are trying to gain footing in the work world. A neighbor whose son went to cooking school (to study the glorious culinary arts) loves having his son at home: When the son cooks dinner--and he does so a few times a week--the meals are sensational.

But more of us find the experience frustrating: too up-close with adolescent habits they have yet to shed and with adult ways we're not ready to deal with. For some of us, the experience is financially draining: We're spending money on our adult children that we should be squirreling away for retirement. That is the point Barbara Torris makes in her blog Retire In Style.

She has proposed a solution: downsize. Sell [or rent] the house you brought you kids up in and move into something smaller that doesn't necessarily have room for an extra grown up.

Here's a fuller explanation of the theory from the Retire in Style post:

"Many mid-life and retired people are downsizing so that, when the children need help, coming home to live will not be a choice. They know it would not be a happy situation for them. Interesting huh?

"Could it be people are saving enough money by downsizing so they are able to help children in trouble but not make them dependent on them totally? The family remains on good terms and the children continue to mature and be self reliant. Helping pay part of the grown child's rent is a lot different than them coming home to live rent-free. The child could still be responsible for most of the cost and be forced to live within their means."

Just throwing the idea out there, as was RetireInStyle.

In case you're wondering who--daughters? sons?--is boomeranging back home, there's this recent finding from Pew Research.

Pew Research Center Notes: “Living at home” refers to an adult who is the child or stepchild of the head of the household, regardless of the adult’s marital status. Source: Pew Research Center tabulations of March 2012 Current Population Survey Integrated Public Use Micro Sample.

Related articles

Money Matters:Our grown kids' financial struggles are tougher than ours were at their age.

Catching the Boomerang: Downsizing?

When Parents Throw a Boomerang!

When your adult child moves back home

Baby boomers movin' on down: Downsizing your home means scaling back on stuff

Tips on Downsizing From a House to an Apartment

Emerging Adults: Navigating the financial minefield of earning a paycheck

They're launched. They've finished college and are ready to set out into the world. We've brought them up to be independent, thoughtful individuals, of course. But they still may be babes in the woods when it comes to making the day-today financial decisions they face in their first few post-college years. Sometimes it helps to have words of advice come from a third party--as opposed to the doting parents themselves.

There's a book out there that covers some of the issues: Generation Earn: The Young Professional's Guide to Spending, Investing, and Giving Back by Kimberly Palmer. Here are five paraphrased tips on what young adults should do as their paychecks start flowing in:

1. Build your credit history slowly and steadily by opening up accounts in your own name and paying them off on time.

2. Instead of using the first paycheck to make upgrade the lifestyle--new 60-inch TV, new sofa--spread out purchases over time and start with necessities, like a bed.

3. Start saving at least one-quarterof income for future goals, including retirement. The first priority is to establish an emergency savings accoung with at least three months' worth of expenses . If the employer offers any type of 401k matching program, take advantage of it—passing it up is like saying no to a pay increase. Then open an after-tax savings account for other goals, from traveling to homeownership.

4. Even in this economy, employers expect some haggling over salary and benefits. A simple request after expressing enthusiasm and appreciation for the job offer can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars more in lifetime earnings or better benefits.

5. There's no avoiding the fact that being an adult comes with some secretarial duties. Suddenly, there are pay stubs, health insurance forms, tax documents, and credit card statements to keep organized. Take advantage of modern technology by going paperless whenever possible. Online accounts are easier to manage; websites such as shoeboxed.com keep receipts organized online, which is especially helpful at tax time. Mint.com makes it easy to track spending and establish a budget.

Emerging Adults: They get by with a little help from us

Yet another confirmation of what many of us know: We are the generation that offers our grown children financial help. Pew Research Center's latest poll finds that one in 10 American adults receive money or financial assistance from their parents or other family members. The bulk of those receiving help are emerging adults--men and women in the 18 to 24 year old range. It falls off from there but doesn't stop--some of us are still getting help from our parents. 

I'll let this Pew Research Center chart, courtesy of the New York Times, say it all:

Based on telephone interviews conducted Dec. 6 to 19, 2011, with a nationally representative sample of 2,048 adults ages 18 and older.