Layla Ahmed is, by any measure, a responsible adult. She works at a nonprofit in Nashville helping refugees. Makes 50k a year. Saves money. Pays her bills on time.
But there’s another measure of adulthood that has so far eluded her. Ahmed, 23, moved back in with her parents after graduating college in 2022.
“There is a perception that those who live with their parents into their 20s are either bums or people who are not hard-working,” she told the Today, Explained podcast.
Being neither of those things, Ahmed and her situation actually point to a growing trend in America right now: More adults, especially younger adults, are either moving back in with family or never leaving at all.
According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of all adults ages 25 to 34 now live in a multigenerational living situation (which it defines as a household with two or more adult generations).
It’s a number that’s been creeping upward since the early ‘70s but has swung up precipitously in the last 15 years. The decennial US Census measures multigenerational living slightly differently (three or more generations living together), but the trend still checks out. From 2010 to 2020, there was a nearly 18 percent increase in the number of multigenerational households.
This is totally selfish of me, but I will be happy for my daughter to live with us as an adult, because empty nest syndrome is going to hit me super hard. I also want her to be independent and strike out on her own, so I would never tell her this. She knows she’s welcome to live with us whenever and for as long as she likes and I’ve left it at that.
On the other hand, I’ve spent a week (so far) in an AirBnB with my 82-year-old mother after being stuck with her during the 8 1/2 hour drive to get here and it has not been fun, so I hope we never have to move in with her, even though she has a ridiculously huge house she doesn’t need.
The real question is, would you be happy to live with your daughter in her house instead of yours? 'Cause that’s the economically-healthy way to do multigenerational housing.
Why? If you own your own home, then why shouldn’t your kids live with you?
Because the issue is the younger generation coming into it in a position of economic, not weakness. The elderly in-laws are done building wealth; it’s the working-age generation that need the equity.
To be clear, I’m not saying it’s wrong for the older people to also have the means to own their own home; it’s just that it shouldn’t be about them.
I disagree that it’s more economically health for adults to be their children’s dependents than it is for adult children to be dependent on their parents. Those are both equally unhealthy situations.