We've all heard the numbers: our nests are not emptying out as quickly as they did a generation ago. What with the major blips in the economy, the difficulty in landing career jobs and the burden of student debt, lots of grown kids who've completed their college days are living at home–saving for the future or just riding out a low-income job till something better comes along.
That's been true of both sexes. But now a new Pew Research study finds our daughters are heading home at a faster pace–and for longer stays–than our sons. According to Pew, you’d have to go back 74 years–to the 1940s– to observe similar living arrangements among young women. Young men are also living in the same situation, but their share hasn’t climbed to 1940's levels, the highest year on record. Back then, 36.2% of young women lived with their parents or relatives. That percent dropped over the next couple of decades (as low as 20 percent in 1960) as marriage rates increased and women began joining the workforce in larger numbers, becoming financially able to live on their own. In the 1940s, even if a woman was single and able to support herself, it was culturally unseemly for her to live on her own.
A study out of Australia finds almost one in four young adults– between the ages of 20 and 34–are living with their parents, but the split between percent of men and women sticking to the home front is wider. About 18 per cent of women were still living at home compared to 24 per cent of males.
A researcher at Melbourne University, Associate Professor Cassandra Szoeke, sees the worldwide trend of grown children living at home as having a huge impact on the parents of those still-at-home grown children. She looked at research involving 20 million people across the world and found children living at home were causing parents financial stress and personal anxiety and that there was deterioration in the relationship between parent and partner and between parent and child.
She also looked at which children tend to hang around ye olde nest the longest. Those with happily married parents are more likely to live at home than those who have a stepmother or father. Wealthier parents are also more likely to have their kids stick around.
Some charts from Pew that detail changes in women's lives:
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