More adult kids flying back to coop

LONDON: Last week, Jacqui Smith, 32, took the plunge. She moved back in with her parents.

And she’s not alone: it’s becoming increasingly common among young adult Australians to go back to the family home.

A hike in her rent – to $1700 a month – for a room in her inner Melbourne sharehouse combined with escalating power and other living costs made Smith realise that a stint with her parents was the only way she could save for her own place.

Smith, who has a good job in advertising, said moving back in with parents for a while had become common among her peers.

And new data from federal government-funded national survey backs this up. It found almost half of young adults are living with parents and nearly one third of both genders aged 26 to 29 are living at home.

“My housemate’s 33 and moved back home for the exact same reasons,” said Smith, who will still contribute to bills at home.

“Most of my girlfriends, all my mates, if they wanted to buy a place, they’ve moved home for at least a year or a couple of years. Everyone’s moved back home.”

The decision was made easier because social expectations that young people move out and stay out were weakening, she said.

“I’m half Taiwanese, and it’s always seemed quite normal to be in a multi-generational household – but in Western society, it was sort of frowned upon,” she said. “Now that’s changed, and it feels less so, and that’s great.”

The 2023 Household Income and Labour Dynamics survey of 17,000 people revealed the proportion of young-adult Australian men living with their parents had grown to 54.3 per cent for men aged 18 to 29 – up 7.7 percentage points – since 2001. For women, it had lifted 10.8 percentage points to 46.7 per cent.

The Melbourne Institute’s Professor Roger Wilkins, a co-author, said a cluster of factors was pushing more young adults to live with one or both parents. They are also staying for longer, he said, adding that life in many such households was “harmonious”.

Time spent in higher education and amassing a home deposit in a wildly inflated market was often longer for this generation and there was a consequent shift to forming families later, he said.

“There’s a general change in moving towards the things we think of as marking adulthood – getting married and having children, settling into a full-time career – it’s tending to happen later, which could also be partly due to economic forces,” he said.

Parents from the Boomer generation are more likely than their predecessors to be able to help ease the pressure their grown-up children in establishing economic independence – but major hurdles remain for many young people looking for their own housing.

“On the positive side, many parents like remaining close to their adult children and enjoy having that interaction, and having them around for longer; so it’s not an ‘all doom and gloom’ or an ‘everything’s rosy’ perspective – there’s both positive and negative dimensions to this,” Wilkins said.

Myths about why young adults are staying at home longer need to be challenged, said senior research fellow Dr Edgar Liu from the University of New South Wales’ City Futures Research Centre.

The “job for life” is gone and is often replaced by part-time work, short-term contracts or gig work, said Liu, who has written a book about the phenomenon.

Also, “it’s almost impossible to get a job now without a masters” and the time it takes limits earning capacity. “And everything is costing more, so all of this comes together in one perfect storm almost,” Liu said.

Younger people also feel less compelled to find a partner for life early. “Social norms have changed quite a lot … people used to move out to get married and stay married. There’s now more partner break-up after a few years and we move home,” Liu said.

Academic Mark Gibson and his wife have two adult children – aged 22 and 24 – living with them, both of whom are studying for a masters.

Each has spent time out of home – one studying in Canada and one studying and working in Canberra – and the family has transitioned from the notion that the parents do all the domestic work.

“It’s pretty good,” Gibson said. “We have a deal that we’re sticking to that each cooks dinner for all of us once a week.

“Since they’ve returned, there are people around and things happening, and they have interesting insights into what’s going on in the world.”