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Should Parents of Adult Children Let Them Move Back Home After Graduation?
On Rush’s show yesterday he mentioned this recent survey that came out and was posted on Yahoo! News.
About half of students expect to be supported financially by their parents for up to two years after graduation, according to a new survey of 500 students and 500 parents released Tuesday by Upromise, the savings division of Sallie Mae, the student lender.
And almost half of students surveyed said they would be willing to pay their parents rent if they moved back home post-graduation, the survey found. Only 5% of parents say they would not let their child move back in with them after graduation.
When I graduated college in 2000 I assume the numbers were similar, but perhaps more like 30% to 40% expected to move back home. However, the job market was better then and college was slightly cheaper. My parents were in the 5% who didn’t want me moving back. So I moved out after college while most of my friends moved back home. I had some crappy apartments and a crappy car. When my friends living rent free at mom and dad’s would ask me if I wanted to go someplace, many times I had to decline because the rent was due.
This experience forced me to grow up in a way that many of my friends didn’t, or at least it took longer for them. Also, you’d think they would have saved money while not paying for living expenses, but many didn’t. They spent their money on a nicer car, clothes, or vacations than they should’ve had. Many of my friends now admit that they didn’t start saving until they moved out on their own.
My friends’ experience is not unique. More and more often, kids expect to graduate only to come back home for a few years and depend on their parents again for support. No wonder so many of those college kids went nuts when Obama announced that they could stay on their parents’ health insurance plan until they were 26. I was married and bought a house at 26.
I know many of you have college-aged kids or even adult kids living at home, and I understand the economic conditions, the job market, etc. But here is another quote from the article:
Some 36% of parents say they expected to support their children financially for more than two years, up from just 18% last year, and only 2.8% of parents expect their kids to have a full-time job after college and only one-quarter see them having any kind of job in their chosen field when they graduate. And if they moved in with their parents after graduation, 20% of students expect it would be at no cost to themselves.
If these kids expect their parents to support them financially, doesn’t that incentivize them not to find work or to reject jobs that are not “up to their standards?” When I was on my own I got laid off and was unable to collect unemployment. I had to find a job fast and was able to do that. Was it the best job in the world? No, but I had a job and was able to work while looking for something better.
I get that it’s not an easy decision and every kid is different. But are we doing these young people favors by keeping them dependent on their parents for that long? They are calling this the “new normal” but do we want this to be the new normal, that the typical young American adolescence goes on into their 30s?
Published in Culture, Education
Wow. I know I’m old and from another universe, but when I graduated from high school, I was dying to leave home because then I didn’t have to go out and milk those 40 cows every night and every morning. And, I got married after a couple of years of college, and even when I went back to stay with my parents for a few months one winter when my dad was sick, and they needed the help, I still went out and milked those cows. It was a strong incentive to move out and stay out!
None of my children have ever expressed a desire to come back home and live with us parents. We’ve never had cows. But they just wanted to be free!! No seriously, it would have seemed like a horrible defeat to them. We would totally welcome them if there was an emergency or illness or whatever. But they just want to fly away from the nest and not come back, except for a brief visit.
I hitchhiked from Southeast Missouri to Estes Park, Colorado at the tender age of 18 and got a job washing dishes. Then moved down to Boulder at the end of the summer and worked for Eco-Cycle as a recycling engineer. Fun times but I survived.
All kids should be out of the house at 18. Fly away little bird, fly away.
That’s nothing. I have a friend who managed to get out of the stigma of living with his parents by having them move away.
My older daughter lived with us about two years after college. She was employed during that time and was able to repay all her college debts, buy a late model car, and save enough to buy her own house. It was a joy having her around after having her attend an out of state college for 4 years.
My oldest son just graduated and moved home and I expect his experience will be similar. Neither of them are “spoiled brats.” They are pleasant to have around (usually!) and have pulled their weight with household chores, errands, etc.
However, I will echo a previous writer who stated that having adult children in the home can be a strain on marriage. (I also have 3 teenage kids at home.) I get along very well with my son and daughter, in fact, I consider my daughter to be one of my best friends. I don’t work so have plenty of opportunity for quality time with the kids. But having another adult in the house can drive a wedge between spouses. My daughter would typically get home from work about an hour before my husband. We’d have an hour to talk together about our days and then when the husband came home it was as if there was nothing left to say.
Our son did ROTC scholarship for college (graduated 2010), so getting out on his own was not an issue we had to think about. The Air Force told him where he would go. But, we had been telling him since he was about 4 years old that we expected him to be fully independent when he became an adult (we left fuzzy whether that meant when he graduated from high school if he chose not to pursue college, or after college). I occasionally would point out to him that I wanted his bedroom as my study after he was gone. I can’t say we would have “refused” to let him live with us after school, but he knew that if he did, he would be paying rent, or doing chores, or something to avoid being a freeloading slug. To me the important thing is the expectation that the kid is moving on a trajectory toward independence.
[Working around the 250 word limit]
Our daughter graduated from college in 2007. She moved with her best friend to a different city where she thought the job opportunities would be better. We gave her a fixed sum of money for living expenses for six months while she hunted for a job. She did genuinely look for work, but that was the early stages of the Great Recession, and so finding a job was harder than we expected. As she got closer to using up the allocation we had given her, she got more desperate on the job front, until she finally took a temporary job just so she wouldn’t run out of money. She considered this to be a real set-back, but she had absorbed our 22 years of expectations that she was going to be independent. She decided to throw herself into that temporary job, even if it was “beneath” her. The company was so impressed with her work that they created a “permanent” job so they could hire her!
So, although I do think an expectation of independence is essential, I do feel for the kids who graduate today into an economy that has been so smothered by government that job prospects are so limited.
One of the common threads to truly successful people is delayed gratification. College graduates living at home, living the good life while not paying for food, rent, and other expenses are not being prepared for success in later life. My daughter went to college away and graduated in three years, going straight through summer schools because she liked her independence and disdained living at home under our house rules. After graduation she got a few low paying jobs but needed assistance to get by. We finally issued the ultimatum. Either you get a job that will pay your expenses or move home. If you move home, again you do so under our house rules; in by eleven, clean and cook, pay rent. She quickly got a waitressing job to supplement her day job until a teaching job finally came open. Since then she has acquired a husband, two children and a doctors degree in education. When will we ever learn that making life too easy for people, including our children, does not prepare them to be successful, productive adults? Tough love ain’t easy but it works wonders.
UofC or IIT?
U of C.
If you want to relive those glory days, there’s a Java version of Infocom’s H2G2 game here:
http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html
My son was shocked (to say the least) when I refused to let him move back into the house after he left college, even though I had told him many times that I would only continue to support him while he was working towards his degree.
My reasoning was simple. My job as a father is to raise him to be an independent man. If he could not support himself at 22, then apparently I had not yet completed what was probably the most important task of my life. So at the point it was a question of how to I complete the job. The only answer seemed to be to force him to stand alone. It was hard, for both of us (him the most I am sure). He struggled, fell painfully several times, but eventually stood up and took control. Years later, he told me not letting him move home was the best thing I could have done.
I am very proud of the young man that is my son.
I don’t have as much of an issue with letting grown kids come back home as some others do—although my own Dad booted me after school.
There are plenty of cultures where it’s more normal for kids to live at home until they’re ready to move out on their own.
Unfortunately, for a lot of American kids, they’re not doing it through choice:
Understandably the economy is terrible BUT if these kids made sacrifices, like living with roommates, maybe not getting a car or getting a cheap car, taking a job that may not require a college degree, they could live on their own. I guess my point is that the acceptance and expectation of living with parents and being financially supported by them, after college preventing them from really pushing themselves to be on their own. My own experience was when push came to shove I had to make sacrifices and take jobs that stunk because I couldn’t move back home.
As a current college student I see many of my peers moving back home without jobs even being lined up. To many of them, moving back home is the primary plan. My own parents have made it clear that I am welcome to come home but this might have more to do with all the handy man skills I have developed. But hopefully, by majoring in accounting I will not need to move back in!
I don’t really think it matters that much if they’re doing it by choice or not, as long as they still have a strong work ethic.
When I read old novels, regardless of whether it’s a story about working-class or upper-class folk, it’s almost always about a multi-generational family living under one roof.
Heck, if the story’s involves a wedding, the bride almost always moves in with the groom’s parents. The whole idea is that the son will inherit the family property, so of course that’s where they’re going to live.
My own experience was that, after studying at Imperial in London, I started work at the laboratory near a country town where my Father had worked before his retirement. It made eminent sense to live at my parents house (they now had three empty bedrooms), and for seven years a saved a monthly rent into an investment account. I “left home” with my first expatriation to the Netherlands. After three years I returned to the UK, moving nearly 600 miles to the north, to Aberdeen, where my fiancée and I bought the house she would move to once we got married.
Our eldest wants to be an actor, and, after 6 months living in London while he performed at the “London Dungeon” (Carry On up the Dungeon, it should be called), is back at home. We feel we owe it to him to give him the best chance at trying to break into this impossible profession.
The younger will leave home, I suspect, with his first job out of Cambridge. His elder brother plans to move in with him – hence the younger’s determination to get a single bedroom flat.
A theme I see here is that moving back in with parents can be really good or really bad, depending on the reason. If the adult child is being frugal and working toward independence, it reinforces that tendency. If the adult child is directionless, it reinforces that tendency.
A more worrying trend I see among parents of adult children is their willingness to pay rent on their unemployed children’s apartment. In that case, the child gets all the benefits of independence, without the responsibilities. Unlike living at home, this situation removes all the incentives to become truly independent.
Still, as RD observes, if your child is trying to break into a profession with high entry costs and/or low initial pay, as a parent you want to help him or her succeed.
I understand your sentiment but at what point do you pull the plug even in that situation. I have a friend who is a comedy writer, she works on reality shows and things like that. Her dream is to be like Conan O’Brien, but she’s 36 and still living with her parents, it’s been 15 years. Get out. also doesn’t that take away some of the drive to really “make it”. Sharing a dumpy apartment with some fellow actors or musicians, eating top raman and waiting tables at night so you can audition all day. I don’t know I still say moving out is better, and paying your own way.
Yes, that’s way too long. But would I give some financial support my kids to age 24? 26 even? I guess it would depend on what they were trying to achieve. I’m having a hard time drawing any definitive lines.
Agree.
At various points after graduation each of my three children returned the nest. One (perhaps overlooked) benefit is the opportunity for parents and children to reacquaint themselves as adults.
I’ve never regretted providing a measure of post-graduation housing assistance to each of them, and since my wife and I were well situated, we didn’t ask for rent or other cash payments. Courteous acquiescence to household rules, and cheerful assistance with household projects was payment enough.