It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave - NYTimes.com

It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave - NYTimes.com

Or so says The New York Times.

But is that really an unprecedented trend, or a return to the historical norm?

We're used to the idea that children grow up, "move out of the nest", and go on to lives of their own.  And any right thinking parent wants a child to have his or her own life as an adult, to be sure.  And it's always been the case that the young tended to move on to that life. As Genesis tells us regarding marriage; "For this reason, a man shall leave behind his father and mother, and he shall cling to his wife; and the two shall be as one flesh."

But is the phenomenon of  a person being at home into their adult years, if unmarried, really all that odd and distressing.  Not really.

We've addressed it here, but men and women leaving home before their married, while certainly not uncommon, wasn't all that usual if they stayed in one location.  In eras with thinner resources, which is most of human history, young men and young women tended to stay at home with their parents until they were married, unless they moved away for work or for some other reason.  That was pretty much the norm.

There were a variety of reasons for that, a lot which had to do with resources or ready resources.  Prior to the post World War Two era, it just wasn't that easy to live independently on your own.  Cooking meals, washing clothes, etc. took a lot more effort in prior eras, and attempting it on your own often wasn't easily possible.  The same technological revolutions that made it possible for women to have jobs outside the home, made it possible for men and women to live singly on their own easily.

Up until now, that is, apparently.

What we're seeing is probably due to a contraction of resources, even though we live in the richest era in human history.  Just as with our story on homesteading of the other day, the cost of living on your own has increased for the young.  It's increasingly difficult for them to find work, and housing costs continue to be prohibitively high for many, maybe most.

And, of course, there's an aspect of this story that has to do with family, and perhaps that's a good thing.  At some point in the 1950s or 1960s people became accustomed to "youth rebellion", but that isn't the historical norm either.  We're seeing, it would seem, a return to an era when children strongly identified, even as adults, with their families.  Social commentators who can recall only back to 1960 or so might lament that, but I don't know that they really should.