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.
It’s not just parents though. On a personal note, It was extremely important for my development as a young adult to be out on my own and navigate the world. And I always had that support from parents, but it’s different when you have to manage budgets, do grocery shopping, navigate insurance, and handle loans by yourself.
I imagine it’s the same for many young adults. Independence is really important.
I had the same experience and agree with your conclusions, but this is a very Western version of growing up. Multi-generational households are common and socially acceptable (even expected) in many non-western cultures. That doesn’t mean that young people starting out in those cultures are any less developed. They simply have different ways of obtaining that same development. My guess is that with multi-generational households becoming more commonplace in some Western societies we’ll learn some of those ways too. If we’re smart, we’ll look at the other cultures to see how it works there for some guidance so we don’t have to try to learn from scratch.
This is so true. I’m already in an empty best situation with my older at college and the younger only two years behind. I miss seeing them every day and miss the bustle of a full house. However they’re “required” to live at college, I try to balance my expectations of them toward “find a city that’s best for you to support your life”, and I will never ever say out loud my true feelings of “please come back, and I’ll make you chocolate chip pancakes every Saturday”