It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave

[Harpa Timsah 13,258]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/magazine/its-official-the-boomerang-kids-wont-leave.html?_r=0

Annie Kasinecz has two different ways of explaining why, at age 27, she still lives with her mom. In the first version — the optimistic one — she says that she is doing the sensible thing by living rent-free as she plans her next career move. After graduating from Loyola University Chicago, Kasinecz struggled to support herself in the midst of the recession, working a series of unsatisfying jobs — selling ads at the soon-to-be bankrupt Sun-Times, bagging groceries at Whole Foods, bartending — in order to pay down her student loans. But she inevitably grew frustrated with each job and found herself stuck in one financial mess after another. Now that she’s back in her high-school bedroom, perhaps she can finally focus on her long-term goals.

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But in the second version — the bleaker one — Kasinecz admits that she fears that her mom’s house in Downers Grove, Ill., half an hour west of the city, has become a crutch. She has been living in that old bedroom for four years and is nowhere closer to figuring out what she’s going to do with her career. “Everyone tells me to just pick something,” she says, “but I don’t know what to pick.”

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One in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents. And 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from them. That’s a significant increase from a generation ago, when only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support. The common explanation for the shift is that people born in the late 1980s and early 1990s came of age amid several unfortunate and overlapping economic trends. Those who graduated college as the housing market and financial system were imploding faced the highest debt burden of any graduating class in history. Nearly 45 percent of 25-year-olds, for instance, have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000. (Kasinecz still has about $60,000 to go.) And more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, meaning they make substandard wages in jobs that don’t require a college degree. According to Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at Yale University, the negative impact of graduating into a recession never fully disappears. Even 20 years later, the people who graduated into the recession of the early ’80s were making substantially less money than people lucky enough to have graduated a few years afterward, when the economy was booming.

Some may hope that the boomerang generation represents an unfortunate but temporary blip — that the class of 2015 will be able to land great jobs out of college, and that they’ll reach financial independence soon after reaching the drinking age. But the latest recession was only part of the boomerang generation’s problem. In reality, it simply amplified a trend that had been growing stealthily for more than 30 years. Since 1980, the U.S. economy has been destabilized by a series of systemic changes — the growth of foreign trade, rapid advances in technology, changes to the tax code, among others — that have affected all workers but particularly those just embarking on their careers. In 1968, for instance, a vast majority of 20-somethings were living independent lives; more than half were married. But over the past 30 years, the onset of sustainable economic independence has been steadily receding. By 2007, before the recession even began, fewer than one in four young adults were married, and 34 percent relied on their parents for rent.

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These boomerang kids are not a temporary phenomenon. They appear to be part of a new and permanent life stage. More than that, they represent a much larger anxiety-provoking but also potentially thrilling economic evolution that is affecting all of us. It’s so new, in fact, that most boomerang kids and their parents are still struggling to make sense of it. Is living with your parents a sign, as it once was, of failure? Or is it a practical, long-term financial move? This was the question that the photographer Damon Casarez, who is 26, asked when he moved in with his parents after graduating from art school. So he started searching for other boomerang kids, using tools like Craigslist. The result is this photo essay. And the answer to whether boomeranging is a good or a bad thing depends, as Kasinecz noted, on how you look at it.

Childhood is a fairly recent economic innovation. For most of recorded history, a vast majority of people began working by age 4, typically on a farm, and were full time by 10. According to James Marten, a historian at Marquette University and the editor of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, it wasn’t until the 1830s, as the U.S. economy began to shift from subsistence agriculture to industry and markets, that life began to change slowly for little kids. Parents were getting richer, family sizes fell and, by the 1850s, school attendance started to become mandatory. By the end of the Civil War, much of American culture had accepted the notion that children under 13 should be protected from economic life, and child-labor laws started emerging around the turn of the century. As the country grew wealthier over the ensuing decades, childhood expanded along with it. Eventually, teenagers were no longer considered younger, less-competent adults but rather older children who should be nurtured and encouraged to explore.

[Sousuke 1,214]

From what I've seen the job market is alot better for roughly the last 18 months or so (at least in my area). The problem is that alot of these 20 somethings were locked out of the market for 3+ years and they no longer are competitive at least on paper.

They will either become a lost generation, jumping from min wage job to min wage job for the next decade, or if they have the money, restart their career clock by going back to school.

Of course our labour market has taken on some really bad trends of late. Before 2008, unpaid internships were fairly rare....now they are extremely common to the point where I believe the US government needs to step up and crush them (keeping in mind that most unpaid internships are actually illegal).

Edited June 22, 2014 by Sousuke

[Jacque67 7,328]

You can never go back home;)

Interesting topic . Up until recently the extended family was fairly common here in Japan. There are pros and cons to it. Personally I would find it tough and restrictive moving back in with my parents.

[Darnell 8,478]

There's a job center at that university - heck it even services Alums...

What's the dealio ?

[Póg mo 1,749]

You can never go back home;)

Interesting topic . Up until recently the extended family was fairly common here in Japan. There are pros and cons to it. Personally I would find it tough and restrictive moving back in with my parents.

Yeah, it wouldnt be easy, but on the other hand having parents use up large amounts of their savings, or their children's savings, in order to live out the remainder of lives in privately institutions, surrounded by strangers.

[Jacque67 7,328]

Yeah, it wouldnt be easy, but on the other hand having parents use up large amounts of their savings, or their children's savings, in order to live out the remainder of lives in privately institutions, surrounded by strangers.

My mother enjoys her freedom and wouldn't want any of her children moving back in. She couldn't deal with the emotional strain. And as for babysitting any grand children, just no way!!!