Why Are There More and More Young People Living with Their Parents?

Recently, the number of young people between the ages of 18 and 35 living at home with their parents has surpassed that of people of the same age group living with their partner in the United States. By the middle of the 20th century, the latter were twice as numerous as the former.

In Spain, this trend has also occurred: more than 78% of people between 16 and 29 years old live with their parents, something that has never been recorded in recent decades, according to the Emancipation Observatory. The time to become independent occurs later and later

What is this trend due to? The causes that explain this phenomenon are material and economic, but also psychological.

A choice or a necessity?

Part of this tendency to stay at their parents’ home is not the result of a decision, but of necessity. In Spain, for example, the youth unemployment rate is so high that the difficulty of finding a well-paid job prevents many young people from the possibility of emancipation Furthermore, instability prevails among young people who work: in Catalonia, approximately 85% of new contracts are temporary.

Given the responsibility required to start building a life together, the lack of money means that people under 30 have less freedom to become independent.

There are more and more singles

Another cause that explains the low number of people living with their partner and not with their parents is that, simply, people stay single longer

Decades ago, the idea of ​​starting a family was practically an imperative, but today many people decide not to commit. One of the reasons is that among women, economic dependence on the figure of men is increasingly less, and on the other hand, new lifestyles prioritize individualism over the importance of the nuclear family.

The idea of ​​enjoying life with greater freedom means that young people have fewer reasons to find a partner and start a life together sharing everything. Increasingly, singleness is seen as the “default marital status”, while previously people who did not live with a partner were seen as a future family project. Already It is not necessary to look for an excuse to justify why you have not formed a family and this makes us more likely to see the possibility of living with parents again as something more attractive and with some advantages.

At the same time, new paradigms of affection, such as polyamory, have caused cohabitation and love life to become a little more dissociated. It is no longer so strange to be in open relationships in which the most unusual thing is to all live in the same house or apartment.

A deeper bond with parents

Another psychological factor that explains the growing tendency to emancipate later is, simply, that the relationships between parents and children seem to have become closer and more satisfactory over the generations.

The frequency with which parents and children share moments in which emotional bonds are strengthened has grown since the mid-20th century, and it is not only a consequence of the need to live at home: this is a trend that was recorded long before of the 2008 financial crisis.

The same has happened with the subjective feeling of well-being that fathers, mothers and their sons and daughters say they experience in the company of the other family generation. The way in which personal relationships have evolved within the family have led to a closer and more empathetic treatment than what occurred decades ago. The abandonment of very rigid rules and the emphasis placed on the authority of the father, who came to adopt an authoritarian and cold role, has contributed to this.

Now, emotions are expressed more directly, and family members are not as reluctant to show their feelings and seek emotional support from others. This makes cohabitation, in many ways, more bearable, and living under the same roof as parents seems, in fact, an attractive (and in many ways, comfortable) option.

A free professional career

Previously, it was normal for only one family member to work outside the home, while the rest depended on him. Currently this is not possible: the adults in the house must go out to earn money to support the family.

This has led to a new work mentality, according to which everyone must be, first of all, its own economic engine The consequence of this is that living with parents is a possibility that is seen as another resource to progress towards self-sufficiency, while previously this option did not make as much sense.