There's always an explanation: A 22-year-old college grad wants to hold out for the right job rather than jump into an underpaid makeshift position. Rents are so inflated, a 25-year-old moving out of her boyfriend's apartment couldn't possibly afford a place of her own. With two bedrooms to spare, parents can rehouse the kids and everyone will benefit.
Whatever the reason, young adults are returning home in increasing numbers—following graduation, the dissolution of a relationship or the loss of a job. They often live rent-free and subsidized, with no scheduled date for departure. But while much attention has been paid to live-at-home "adultescents," little has been said about their parents, many of whom are Baby Boomers who greet their boomerang kids with open arms. For a variety of emotional and demographic reasons—their desire to be close with their kids, a yearning for youth—many of today's parents (the original Peter Pan generation) just don't want their adult children to grow up.
"Parents used to let go when their children reached age 18," says David Anderegg, professor of psychology at Bennington College in Vermont and author of Worried All the Time: Overparenting in the Age of Anxiety. "The idea was, if you can go to jail, I'm no longer responsible for you." But that changed during the 1990s, when Baby Boomers' children turned 18 and devoted parents realized that they had poured their emotional and financial resources into their children from the get-go. "Hyper-investment," says Anderegg, "is hard to turn off."
Some argue that permaparenting stems from the indulgence of an immature and spoiled generation. Others blame the phenomenon on the heavy hand of social and economic forces. And our very definition of adulthood is in flux—with a homestead no longer a key component of adult identity.
But a rising chorus of psychologists and sociologists says parents simply aren't letting go when they ought to—not only impeding their children's adult independence but also hampering their own post-parenting lives. In the absence of an acute crisis or devastating financial setback, the consensus is that parents should look twice at the reasons they continue to shelter their grown offspring. "If parents can get over the idea that they're not being 'parent enough' or that their kids still 'need' them, then they can get on with their new lives," says Roberta Maisel, author of All Grown Up: Living Happily Ever After with Your Adult Children.
The combination of high rents and an unstable job market, increased college attendance and delayed marriage and parenting conspire to inch the age of perceived adulthood upward. Bianca Mlotok, an unemployed college graduate who lives with her parents in New Jersey, admits that even years after graduating, she doesn't feel like a grown-up. "I'm a mature person, but I think I'm probably not capable of being on my own," she says. "I feel like an adult sometimes, but in other ways I still feel like a child. I guess I see being an adult as more about a certain level of maturity than about some kind of outward sign. Though probably when I start my own family, I'll finally have my own adult identity."
Bianca isn't the only twentysomething grappling with delayed adulthood. According to a study by the National Opinion Research Center, most Americans don't consider a person an adult until age 26, or until she or he has finished school, landed a full-time job, and begun to raise a family. Living independently from one's parents is expected by an average age of 21, yet living on one's own is considered less of a determining factor in reaching adulthood (only 29 percent say it's an "extremely important" step) than completing an education (73 percent) and supporting a family (60 percent).
Shifting parental attitudes toward boomerang kids have much to do with generational differences, the result of each generation correcting and overcorrecting the excesses of the previous one. The wave that preceded the Boomers, the Swing, or Silent, generation (born during the Depression and World War II, 1930-1945) and their children, Generation X (born 1965-1978), were brought up during eras of economic recession, reduced birthrates and familial instability, when raising kids was not a societal focal point. Parents of Boomers "were eager for their kids to grow up and leave the household so that they could be free to pursue their own lives," says generational historian William Strauss. "Boomeranging home was a mark of failure for both children and parents."
In contrast, the Baby Boomers themselves (born between 1946 and 1964) and their Echo Boomer offspring (1979 and 1994) have had the happy fortune to be born during periods of prosperity and family growth that place an emphasis on parenthood. From the 1980s hit The Cosby Show to kidcentric TV like Nickelodeon, Boomers were awash in media celebrating the rewards of child-rearing and the joys of childhood. Five times more parenting books are published today than in 1970. Ann Hulbert, author of Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children, says the resultant professionalization of parenting marked a shift from "what was once considered an intuitive, instinctive endeavor into a systematic, intellectualized enterprise."
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