Layla Ahmed is, by any measure, a responsible adult. She works at a nonprofit in Nashville helping refugees. Makes 50k a year. Saves money. Pays her bills on time.
But there’s another measure of adulthood that has so far eluded her. Ahmed, 23, moved back in with her parents after graduating college in 2022.
“There is a perception that those who live with their parents into their 20s are either bums or people who are not hard-working,” she told the Today, Explained podcast.
Being neither of those things, Ahmed and her situation actually point to a growing trend in America right now: More adults, especially younger adults, are either moving back in with family or never leaving at all.
According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of all adults ages 25 to 34 now live in a multigenerational living situation (which it defines as a household with two or more adult generations).
It’s a number that’s been creeping upward since the early ‘70s but has swung up precipitously in the last 15 years. The decennial US Census measures multigenerational living slightly differently (three or more generations living together), but the trend still checks out. From 2010 to 2020, there was a nearly 18 percent increase in the number of multigenerational households.
And those of us with poor parents, or who are estranged from our parents, or who otherwise have some barrier between us and our parents either have to bootstrap our ways to survival or die.
I wish I had married someone rich instead of the daughter of two school teachers. But I’m lucky she had generous rich extended family that gave us enough to buy the house I now own before we divorced.
Now I’m unemployed after being laid off 3 months ago with no safety net and no strong prospects for work that will keep me in the house, even with a roommate paying rent. I have nowhere to go and no one to support me if I lose the house.