On a late summer Sunday, Daniel Clifford sat for dinner at his parents’ home in South Shields, a town that slopes down to the River Tyne in the northeast. His father had made lamb, served with mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes, carrots, peas and gravy. Daniel could not remember the last time they had a family meal together; it must have been years ago, judging from the expired gravy mix on the kitchen’s shelves.
At 34, he had just moved back to the parental home, a small semi-detached council house he first left nearly a decade ago after finding a “proper job” as a project manager at an arts organisation in Birmingham. For the past two years, he had been a programme coordinator at a charity in Manchester, but he decided to quit in March, not suspecting that a pandemic would make it incredibly difficult to find work again. After lockdown, he broke up with his partner and found himself with nowhere to go but his childhood home.
Hitting historic heights
Like Daniel, thousands of young adults have gone back to their parents’ in recent months. In the US, 52 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds now live with their parents—the highest share ever recorded. Comparable data for the UK is not yet available, but according to Professor Ann Berrington from the Centre for Population Change at the University of Southampton, the wave of job losses at the end of the furlough scheme would compromise young people’s pursuit of independence.
Research by personal finance website Finder.com found that as many as 10.5m Britons had moved home due to the pandemic, with over two-thirds saying they expect the move to be more permanent and have no move out date in sight. Meanwhile, columnists are gleefully weighing in, deeming the move “cool” and “financially astute”; “an act of resistance” that rejects “the establishment’s prescription of success,” or decrying the average £2,700 that returning adult children added to household bills during lockdown. Others advise parents on what to do to help their kids “maintain true independence” without them “lapsing into comfort” (the short answer: “invite them to clean [the house] themselves and check regularly.”) Most tellingly, reports have shed light on the gap between young people’s desire to move out and their real options to do so.
It's nothing new
Long before the pandemic pushed millennials and Gen Z-ers to seek shelter with their parents, the trend of young adults living at home was widespread and gaining currency in the press as the “boomerang” generation. In the UK, the number of adults aged 20 to 34 living with their parents has increased 46 per cent in the last two decades, from 2.6 million to 3.5 million.
Rising unemployment is a key driver of returning home. But it’s not the only factor: young adults are increasingly likely to live at home even if they do have jobs. Last year, Dewi Hargreaves, 24, moved to his parents’ home in South Staffordshire in what he imagined to be a “stop-off point between returning and moving on again.” He had previously rented a place in Portsmouth after graduating from university in 2017 but later moved in with his family to save up while working as a freelance writer and artist. “I enjoy the flexibility and freedom” he said, noting it meant that he didn’t have to take on a low-paid job he didn’t like. “I was going to be spending many more hours doing something I hated, and for not much more money.”
Though it is a financially-savvy move—a quality rarely ascribed to young people—Hargreaves sometimes feels a twinge of disappointment: “There’s a sense of whiplash you get after you’ve started your life journey, living away from home and setting your own schedule, only to find yourself back in the same house you were in as a child.”
Relying on financial assistance well into their thirties
Historically, the UK’s average age for leaving home was one of the earliest in Europe thanks to a strong welfare state that allowed young people to flee the family nest to form their own.
“In my generation, believe it or not, students could get housing benefits; we were very much supported by the government, and social housing was much more available,” said Berrington. Her research shows that government austerity measures, student debt and the lack of affordable housing have meant that today’s young adults are now reliant upon financial assistance and state support well into their twenties and thirties. And yet despite today’s situation, the belief that one should live independently to qualify as a full-grown adult persists, as film tropes and media headlines perpetuate the idea that those who “fail to launch” are immature or lazy.
In reality, the age at which people leave home has been increasing for decades. The average age for Britons in 2019 was 24.7, making the UK less like Sweden, where young adults tend to leave at 18 and never return, and more like Spain or Italy, where children can stick around for decades.
In this sense, one’s ties with their parents and the financial stability they can provide become all-important in determining one’s experience of returning home. Some people might have a great relationship with their family and find comfort in their emotional support. Others might be afforded more space than they otherwise would have in a rented flat. Gender, ethnicity, class, and geographical location all influence these experiences. For people from higher income households, living with parents might offer a chance to pursue unpaid or low-paid work opportunities that will provide experience, exposure and networking. “But if you’re from a lower income family and need to bring money in to help your parents pay their mortgage and rent," Berrington said, "you might have to take whatever job is in the local labour market."
“There’s not much else to do in this situation”
These structural barriers are still often missed in write-ups about millennials and their life choices, which have an unfortunate habit of framing them as quirky personal preferences—consider the many “millennials love tiny homes” reports. It may be the case that young adults finding themselves back home can now evaluate what they want in their lives, or benefit from strengthened connections with their families. But the very economic conditions and policies that have made it necessary cannot be forgotten.
In the meantime, those who return home increasingly question the relevance of typical markers of adulthood. Clifford, who is job-hunting, said he felt lucky to be able to prioritise looking for work that he enjoyed. For Hargreaves, media portrayals of “boomeranging” millennials as slackers are unfair and uninformed, but he ignores them and carries on. “There are a few ways I counter it: I do my own washing and cooking, help keep the house clean, look after the dog, and pay board. There’s not much else to do in the situation.”
