Boomerang Generation

The Boomerang Generation refers to a trend in North America of young adult children, generally between the ages of 18 and 30, returning home to reside with their middle-aged parents in greater numbers than young adults in previous generations. Tied closely to social psychological life course theory, the concept offers a visual metaphor of young adults who “boomerang”—returning to and leaving the family home on several occasions before forming their own households. This pattern violates age-norm expectations that children separate physically from their parents and make their own lives sometime between age 18 and age 24.

If the transition to adulthood is defined by a series of milestones that include completing education or training, achieving economic independence, and forming long-term partnerships or establishing one's own family, the young adult who lives at home can be seen as not fully adult. Delays in home leaving, and returns home after one has left, signify new expectations about adulthood and what it means for the different generations in the household. Research on the family life course examines several questions about this phenomenon: To what extent are young adults today more likely to live at home with their parents? To what extent does this family arrangement represent something new? Who is helping whom with what; that is, what is the familial exchange (parents to child, child to parent, mutual aid)? Finally, what is the impact of such a family arrangement on coresident adults of different generations?

The most recent U.S. Census Bureau figures show that of the youngest young adults, 18 to 24 years old, more than 50 percent of young men and 43 percent of young women lived at home in 2000. Among “older” young adults, 25 to 34 years old, 12 percent of men and only 5 percent of women lived with a parent. This continues a trend first noted in the 1980s when the age of home leaving increased. It is harder to ascertain how many young adults leave home and then return home more than once, but their chances of doing so doubled between the 1920s and the 1980s. One group of researchers estimate that 40 percent return home at least once. The younger the young adult, the greater the likelihood that he or she will return on several occasions, suggesting a more nuanced pattern of establishing independence than in the past.

Why are young adults today more likely to live with their parents? The timing and frequency of standard reasons for leaving home have changed. Generally, adult children still leave home to take a job, to get married, to go to college or university away from home, or to join the military. The typical permanent path to home leaving—getting married—is occurring later, around age 25 or 26, which means more young adults than ever before have never married. Other reasons that may contribute to young adults returning home include economic ones: poorly [Page 91]paid employment, high cost of housing, and the tradeoff between the child's loss of privacy and the ability to save money while living with parents. Leaving home expressly because the adult child wants to be independent, which can include cohabitation with a lover or roommates or living alone, is more likely to lead back to living with parents at a later date. There are also marked cultural differences within some immigrant groups, where children are expected to live at home well into adulthood, and across native-born racial/ethnic groups.

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