PenPenWrites

A little historical perspective: We may all hear about–and some of us experience–a return of our adult children to the nest–but their leaving before marriage is a relatively new phenomenon. And one some of us may view from a biased perspective.

 Michael Rosenfeld, a social demographer at Stanford University says almost 41% of singles ages 20-29 in 2005 were living apart from their parents, compared with 11% in 1950 and about 19% in 1880. His analysis  shows almost 39% of single women and
almost 46% of single men ages 20-29 lived with a parent in 2005, up
from 36% of women and almost 42% of men in 2000.

It may only be a blip. “The boomerang idea,” he noted in a USA Today story, “flatters our parental sense that our adult children need us more than they think. They think they’re going to be independent, but we know they’ll come back to the front doorstep and need us again.”

Many of us hope that's not so.