While some are all too familiar with Mom’s joking threat that “you’re never leaving,” for some, this is more of a reality.
According to a report by Zillow, 22.5 percent — roughly 12 million young Americans — are still living at home with their parents as of 2016. This is a large spike from 2005, where only 13 percent of Americans ages 24 to 36 were still living at home.
At 22, just out of college and living with her parents while job hunting, Liz Kussman was discovering one surprise about moving home: “I would come in at 2 a.m., and the house would be totally dark. I’d enter as quietly as I could,” she says. “And then all of a sudden my dad would pop out of the shadows. ‘Where were you?’ He literally couldn’t sleep until I was home.” Like Kussman, boomerang kids all over the country are learning what it’s like to be accustomed to their freedoms but have to adjust to new rules. More 20-somethings are living at home than are married or cohabiting, per a 2016 Pew Research Center analysis. Blame the $30,000 student loan for the classics degree, the astronomical cost of renting in certain cities, or the long preparation (grad school, internships) now required to start a career in an ever-more competitive world. Also—props to Mom and Dad here—young adults seem to feel closer to their parents than previous generations did and consider them good company. “It’s so common, there is no longer much of a stigma,” says Katherine Newman, PhD, a sociologist at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of The Accordion Family. There’s even an official name for this life stage: emerging adulthood. “It’s what we call the period between 18 and 29,” says Elizabeth Fishel, co-author of Getting to 30: A Parent’s Guide to the 20-Something Years. “It’s a state of flux and possibility,” especially as the traditional markers of adulthood—marriage, house buying, babies—are happening later.