By Carol Church, Writer, Family Album

Reviewed by Suzanna Smith, PhD, Department of Family, Youth, and Community Sciences, University of Florida

If you’re a parent, what do you think about “boomerang kids”— adult children who leave the home they were raised in, only to return to it again? I know that when I was a young adult, moving back home was the last thing I would have ever wanted to do. My parents might not have been too thrilled, either! But over the last few years, and especially since the recent recession, I’ve noticed attitudes changing. It seems that many families today find this option a pretty reasonable one.

An Increasingly Common Choice

Of course, it’s also become a lot more common for young adults to return home, or delay leaving it in the first place. According to the Pew Research Center, a whopping 39% of adults between the ages of 18 and 35 either live with their parents now, or have lived with them in the past few years. So, is living at home today a “failure to launch”—a sign that something may have gone wrong—or has it simply become another life stage?

Why Do Young Adults Return Home?

In order to understand more about this phenomenon, we need to know more about the young people who make this choice. A new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family takes a look at over 8000 young adults, drawn from a nationwide sample, to find out more.

Researchers thought young adults experiencing poor emotional health or those with less education or money might be slower than others to leave their parents’ home, or have more of a tendency to move back. After all, transitioning to adulthood can be challenging. It takes a fairly large amount of money to rent an apartment, buy a car, and get started with everything you need. And for some, emotional independence is tricky.

“Boomerangs” Not Necessarily in Trouble

But many of the researchers’ assumptions were incorrect. Young people in poor mental health were not less likely to stay at home longer. In fact, those with emotional problems tended to leave home sooner, perhaps because these concerns were related to not getting along with parents. (However, these same young people did have a tendency to “boomerang” back, maybe after they struggled with living independently.)

As for financial and educational status, the findings were surprisingly mixed. Young people with the least education actually left their parents’ homes first. Meanwhile, those with the most education (graduate school) left last! And young people considered to be living in poverty were more likely to leave home than those who were financially comfortable. This could be because they didn’t think their parents could do much to support them.

When it came to “boomeranging,” findings were again mixed. Less educated young people moved back home more often than those with higher degrees. But being unemployed or poor didn’t make people more likely to move home.

No Clear Patterns

What can we make of these contradictory and surprising findings? It seems that there may be no clear conclusions to be drawn about the “kind of” young adult who decides to either stay at home longer or move back in. We also shouldn’t assume that place of residence indicates emotional or financial stability—or lack thereof.

Some might also wonder how these families feel about their situations. While this obviously has many answers, too, a 2012 Pew Research poll found that most families with adult children at home were pretty happy about it.

Times continue to change, and family living situations change with them. It will be interesting to see if these multigenerational households continue to become more common, transforming our ideas of what it means to reach adulthood.

(Photo credit: Day 293 – Chillin’ by natalie. CC BY-NC 2.0. Cropped.)

References:

Parker, K. (2012). The Boomerang Generation: Feeling OK about living with mom and dad. Retrieved from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/03/15/the-boomerang-generation/?src=prc-headline

Sandberg-Thoma, S. E., Snyder, A. R., & Jang, B. J. (2015). Exiting and Returning to the Parental Home for Boomerang Kids. Journal of Marriage and Family, 77(3), 806-818. http://dx.doi.org/0.1111/jomf.12183

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