The other evening I was having dinner with a colleague and his five children. Most of his children, like me, are in their 20s, living at home, or trying to achieve or launch varying degrees of success. As my five children compared notes between the ages of 21 and 31, we realized how different this period of our lives was from our own experiences at the time. While we can expect to buy a home worth four times our annual income, our children can expect to take on a mortgage seven times as much. Where we once recognized a career choice, our children are now scrambling for entry-level jobs that provide a path to a pension. We were pretty sure humanity could and would not nuke the Earth, but our children realized that Earth was a lost cause and that it was possible to provide a home for our children. I’m pretty sure the sex is low (even if I had a house). All of this, and the identity crisis of having so many choices in a world of social media where every choice becomes political, is causing emerging adults (as they are referred to in the literature) to epidemic levels of anxiety, depression, and depression. , explains why people report feeling lonely.
Parents are confused about how to help.
What is clear is that expectations about normal developmental stages are becoming confused. Children are spending more time at home. For some families, this is a cultural preference. But for many others, it is a symptom of a population of young people with lower economic prospects and greater emotional insecurity. These days, 42.3% of young people live with at least one parent, an astonishing increase from 26.9% in 1981 and 32.1% in 1991. Men are more likely to stay at home than women, and one reason for this is that women tend to stay home for longer periods of time. They form relationships faster than men. Still, the proportion of young people in committed relationships and living as couples has steadily declined, from more than 68% three decades ago to just 45% today.
All of this means that our young people are stuck in their bedrooms, acting like lodgers, yet struggling to know how much they should claim each month as a contribution to their families. When they finally consider moving, we struggle to know how much of our income to share with them because we’re always worried about our retirement income.
From our conversations with many parents, we’ve established some things to expect when caring for children in their 20s.
Our home will continue to be an extension of our children’s home for much longer than we expected. Our garage becomes their storage locker (free of charge), our bank account becomes their savings account, our signature becomes their security and credit guarantee, and our home equity becomes their down payment, perhaps. And our cars will become their means of transportation. (If we’re lucky, they’ll come back with the same amount of gas in the tank.) Adult children will likely be more emotionally vulnerable than we are. They do not accept confrontation or criticism. They will say that the world is a difficult place to live in and that we “don’t understand.” Even if we give them a good start, they will claim that their life is harder than ours. They say they care deeply about the planet and human rights and animals and are trying to make the world a better place, implying that our generation has messed it up badly. They will also be deeply upset by how futile their efforts are and resist our advice that they can still improve the situation. Some people (but not all) want a quality of life that far exceeds the effort they put in.
I don’t mean to sound cynical, but between a world where children are being robbed of a secure future and their own personal stories of vulnerability, there is a gap between them trying to launch and establish their own lives. challenges await. As their parents, I don’t think we begrudge our adult children the love and support they deserve. I don’t think we expected them to depend on us for this long before we turned the tables and started relying on them a little more.
