We talk to parents a lot. It’s part of the job. And we hear a variation of the same story over and over again. Junior moved out, went to college, and everything was great…until it wasn’t. Now they’re twenty-four and moving back home. They usually pause waiting for us to say something.
Every situation is different. What might be a smart financial move for one young adult may be the beginning of a collapse for another. So the rest of our conversation usually proceeds like this…
Not by itself, and not historically either. In 1900, roughly a third of white men in their mid-twenties in the United States were living with their parents. That share fell through most of the twentieth century, bottomed out around one in five by 2000, and has been climbing back since, landing closer to one in four by the time researchers Richard Settersten and Barbara Ray published their review of the data in The Future of Children in 2010. We cite that piece a lot around here, because it's one of the few places that puts the "kids these days" narrative next to the actual graph, and the graph looks less like a cliff and more like a wave that crests roughly once a generation.
The twist is where that wave sits right now. A Pew Research analysis published in April 2025 found that about 18 percent of 25 to 34-year-olds lived in a parent's home in 2023, a share that has drifted down slightly since peaking around 2017. The metro-by-metro variation is enormous, from roughly 3 percent in places like Lincoln, Nebraska, up to a third of young adults in parts of coastal California. If you're picturing a single national story of a generation stuck on the couch, the data doesn't support it. What it supports is something messier and more local: this is common, it isn't new, and it isn't evenly distributed.
It also isn't evenly distributed across families. Settersten and Ray's review found that black men live with parents at every age at higher rates than white men do, and that among some second-generation immigrant groups, well over half of 18 to 24-year-olds live at home. Multigenerational households have been the norm, not the exception, for large parts of the country for a long time. The version of this story that treats a twenty-something's childhood bedroom as a symptom is a pretty narrow, pretty recent, and pretty culturally specific idea.
The honest answer is wages, not rent, at least not the way most people assume. Settersten and Ray's review found that young men in their late twenties and early thirties with a high school education or less earned roughly $4,000 less in 2002 than their counterparts did in 1975, after adjusting for inflation. Men with some college lost similar ground. The share of men in their early thirties earning poverty-level wages more than doubled between 1969 and 2004. Women closed part of the earnings gap over the same period, but nearly half were still earning poverty-level wages by their mid-thirties. That is the backdrop every conversation about "why won't they move out" is happening against.
Here's the part that surprised us when we went looking for the rent-driven version of this story: the Pew data found that housing costs weren't strongly associated with how many young adults lived at home across different metro areas. Some of the most expensive places to rent didn't have unusually high shares of young adults living with parents, and some of the cheaper ones did. Rent matters to any individual family's math, but it isn't the variable explaining the national pattern. Wage stagnation stretched out over three decades, combined with the rising cost and uneven payoff of a college degree (only about 40 percent of students who start a four-year degree finish it within six years), does more of that explaining than a single city's rent index does.
None of this is a reason to stop paying attention. It's a reason to stop assuming the explanation is simple, and to stop assuming it says anything bad about your kid.
The boomerang generation isn't defined by the address. It's defined by what's happening at that address. A twenty-six-year-old who moves home after a layoff, takes a job within a few months, pays something toward groceries or utilities, and is visibly working toward the next apartment is regrouping. The living arrangement is a tool, and it's being used the way a tool gets used: temporarily, and in service of a plan.
A young adult who has been home for a year and a half with no job search, no financial contribution, and no version of a plan that survives more than a conversation is in a different place. We want to be careful here, because "no job" and "financially dependent" describe a huge number of people doing exactly the regrouping we just described, especially in expensive metros or during a layoff. The marker we watch for in this field isn't the dependency. It's the direction of travel. Is the gap between where they are and independent functioning getting smaller over months, or is it staying the same width no matter how much time passes? We've sat across from families where the young adult was fully financially dependent and clearly on their way somewhere, and families where the young adult had a part-time job and was no closer to independence than they'd been a year earlier. The job and the dependency told us almost nothing by themselves. The trend line told us most of what we needed to know.
A few signals tend to show up together when a living arrangement has quietly stopped being temporary. The sense of urgency disappears. Structure at home goes with it: no routine, no contribution, no responsibilities that resemble what independent living will eventually require. Social contact narrows. Plans get discussed in the abstract ("I'm going to look into that soon") rather than in anything resembling a next step. And underneath some of this, we sometimes see substance use quietly filling the hours that used to go toward a job search or a degree.
If you're watching that gap stay the same width for longer than feels right, that's worth a conversation, not with your kid first, but with someone who can help you tell the difference between a pause and a pattern. We're here for that conversation whenever you're ready for it.