A week ago, we celebrated Thanksgiving. This is in fact the time of the year that we celebrate our families, often traveling long distances to be with one another. But for many young adults, the voyage back to the family home isn’t very far – they’re already there.
According to a report from the Commerce Department, the share of eighteen to thirty-four year olds living with their parents was in excess of thirty one percent as of this past March, up slightly from the same month one year prior. In two thousand and five, just twenty seven percent of young adults lived with their parents.
As indicated by the Wall Street Journal, the fact that the share of young adults living with their parents remains so high comes as a surprise to many economists. Many economists had expected a higher fraction of young adults to strike out on their own once the economy began to improve.
And the trend of young people continuing to live at home is unlikely to meaningfully reverse course any time soon according to Jed Kolko of the University of California, Berkeley. That’s because the rise in young adults living with their parents is largely related to the fact that people are marrying and having children later, not to the weak economy and the housing market.
