Father and son working on team.
From a Pew survey:
For First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds: For the first time since 1880, Americans ages 18 to 34 are more likely to be living with their parent(s) than in a household shared with a spouse or partner.
I saw this first in a Singletary column in the Washington Post, and she viewed this as a good trend. Here college age daughter, about to enter grad school, lives at home with her parents. As noted, in some ways, it's actually a return to the age old norm. So, in terms of a long term analysis, maybe we just exited a 100 year, or even more like a 40 year, period of abnormality. We seemingly aren't looking at it that way, but maybe we ought to at least ponder it.
Of course, pondering things like that are the line of country of this blog. Indeed, so much so that this post was really more developed than the other two in this series at first and wasn't intended to be part of a series at all.
Some comments on the Pew study. Let's start with this one:
This turn of events is fueled primarily by the dramatic drop in the share of young Americans who are choosing to settle down romantically before age 35. Dating back to 1880, the most common living arrangement among young adults has been living with a romantic partner, whether a spouse or a significant other. This type of arrangement peaked around 1960, when 62% of the nation’s 18- to 34-year-olds were living with a spouse or partner in their own household, and only one-in-five were living with their parents.
This is bull.
Okay, not "bull", but a bit misleading in its use of politically correct, probably by necessity, terminology.
Not the statistics, but the way its phrased, that is. "Romantic partner" is a term that has no meaning, or at least doesn't hold this meaning, in the context of what's stated. Rather, for much of the period looked at, let's say from 1880 to approximately 1980, the most common living arrangement was to live with a spouse, not a "romantic partner". The fact that we have to use the term "romantic partner" is part of the big story here. And that a "romantic partner" has evolved in the past two decades or so from a type of illicit relationship into a second type of common law marriage is significant, but seemingly missed.
Indeed, the whole use of the term "partner" is both absurd, really, and rather Orwellian. In practical terms, it's come to really mean common law spouse, whether or not the couples are married, as marriage is a natural institution and the societal acceptance of a a type of marriage without a ceremony has in fact altered what was for a while a counter cultural act into simply the same old institution but without the legal benefits, or many of them, that the institutional structure for marriage confers.
Even the terms husband and wife, an spouse, demonstrate that. "Wife", as a word, derives from an old Germanic word meaning "woman". Originally a term that translates as the modern Housewife was the more common for what we now refer to as a wife, as a House Woman for a spouse meant more sense that just Woman. Likewise, Husband derives from an Old Norse word meaning Householder. Spouse comes to us from a circuitous route that takes us back to a Latin word for Betrothed, which derives from a Latin word for Promise. So, Spouses are "promised", a way of referring to the relationship to the betrothed that still exists today.
Anyhow, "partners" are those engaged in a business relationship from which they each drive a benefit and bear a burden. How romantic. The reduction of these relationships from illicit ones to quasi legal ones borrows from teh concept of business partners, and not too surprisingly these quasi marriages suffer conceptually from that reduction. And I hate it when the PC, as is so common now, chooses to address married couples as partners, or when some phrase sensitive person simply uses the term to refer to all relationships. This is how the term will eventually evolve to have the same meaning as spouse, thereby making it meaningless anyhow, however.
But let's not fool ourselves, the use of the term is a bit silly, and while the statistic tells us something, it has to be analyzed for content to really derive a meaning.
Carrying on, the analysis notes:
It’s worth noting that the overall share of young adults living with their parents was not at a record high in 2014. This arrangement peaked around 1940, when about 35% of the nation’s 18- to 34-year-olds lived with mom and/or dad (compared with 32% in 2014). What has changed, instead, is the relative share adopting different ways of living in early adulthood, with the decline of romantic coupling pushing living at home to the top of a much less uniform list of living arrangements.
Ah, now this is interesting. Contrary to the way that this news tends to be presented, it doesn't quite mean that everyone is now living at home at the same rate as the past. Nor does that mean it was as high in 1880 as it was later. We learn here that the last true year of the Great Depression in the United States, 1940, saw the peak of adult children living at home. Now that's interesting. And we also learn that this recently peaked again in 2014, and has declined slightly since then. Rather, what we also learn is that a decline in marriage, or whatever Pew must call it given the societal etymology problem earlier noted, has mean living at home has been pushed back up to a really high statistical significance, higher than any other living arrangement.
Let's look at it a bit closer:
Among young adults, living arrangements differ significantly by gender. For men ages 18 to 34, living at home with mom and/or dad has been the dominant living arrangement since 2009. In 2014, 28% of young men were living with a spouse or partner in their own home, while 35% were living in the home of their parent(s). For their part, young women are on the cusp of crossing over this threshold: They are still more likely to be living with a spouse or romantic partner (35%) than they are to be living with their parent(s) (29%).
Now that is, I suspect, a real change from the past. At one time, this would have been more common for women than men. That truly reflects a change in society over the past century, which we've addressed here before.
Pew attributes all of this to an increase in postponement of marriage and economic factors, which is no doubt correct. But how much of that, from what we look at on this blog, is actually a return to the historical norm, and what does that mean?
Earlier in this thread we looked at the Boomers, and frankly we were a bit hostile to them when we probably ought not to have been. But what should stand out regarding them is that there is indeed a lot of Boomer Exceptionalism, if you will. Leaving home, which the Boomers, in casual conversations, regard as a norm, or a right of passage, may instead simply be a statistical glitch applying mostly to them, and mostly reflecting American post war affluence. If that's correct, what we're seeing now is the norm, not the exception, and that may mean we're returning to an economic regime that's more the historical norm than the current one, or rather the recent one.
If we step back what we would find, and indeed as we have discussed in other contexts before, is that prior to the introduction of domestic machinery, the living arrangements of the young were much different than they came to be in the 1945 to 2000 period. As was noted in that thread:
Now, that may be the condition we're observing, but why?
In order to answer that, we probably have to look at the conditions that reflected the prior arrangement. We basically have done that above. But looked at another way, what we find is that conditions and resources made this the most practical, and in some circumstances the only practical, living arrangement. And maybe, in looking at this, we out to step out of location and take a look at Europe of the same period.
Now, that may seem odd, but the reason that may be illustrative is that we see the same thing in Europe, but it persisted. Indeed, in some situation the prevalence of adult children living at home is so pronounced that it continues on after those children have married. Indeed, that's the norm with farm families.
Now, that is also the norm in American agricultural families as well, but in Europe the norm is and was for everyone to live n hte same house. Indeed, it's typical to have three generations all living in the same house, with their relative position in the family determined by their location withing the house. Simply put, in a densely packed region, the resources for individual living simply do not exist.
The US, of course, is a big country, but something that's been missed over the last several decades is that the American tendency to simply assume that the American geography is ever expandable so as to keep the conditions in the country ever the same are simply wrong, and that has expressed itself in housing values. Americans, unlike many Europeans, tend to aim towards owning their own houses (in some European countries that's not the norm, nor even the general desire) but they are becoming increasingly un-affordable. This tends to cause housing "bubbles" of course, as much of hte current pricing really isn't very realistic, but it also reflects a situation in which moving up into a house is no longer as easy as once was, although there has always been a sector of the economy for which this hasn't been easy at all.
And that carries on to rent. What used to be fairly easy for a lot of people is to move on and into a rental unit. But now, apartments are blisteringly expensive in many regions. Indeed, Denver Colorado prides itself on its ever expanding population while continually noting that its rental rates are sky high and going higher. No wonder.
In such a situation living outside the home is simply impossible for many young people. It might be once they marry, as two incomes is now the American married rule, but it might not be at that. A good friend of mine, for example, recently related to me that his married son and his daughter in law are living with him while they save money for a house. Here we see a return to a very, very old norm, and the re-establishment of the European norm in the US. This isn't uncommon.
Also worth noting is that the average age of marriages is rising, sort of. Frankly, this figure is complicated by much of what I've noted above. If the reality of common law marriages, no matter what htey are termed, are considered, this may actually not be nearly as true, but because of the transitory nature of quite a few such arrangements, which effectively has introduced something akin to common law divorce into the picture, that's a risky assumption. Anyhow, what is often noted is that Americans are "postponing" marriage until their "careers are established".
Or maybe they are not.
To some extent this is undoubtedly true. But at the same time for quite a few American ethnicities, this isn't true. So we have the truly peculiar fact that while it is true that "people married younger" and in some instances very young, there's a strong demographic element to it that ran the other way. This is particular true with some ethnicities such as the American Irish, which did not marry young at all. Men tended as a rule to be in their early 30s and women in their late 20s, both in Ireland and the United States, amongst people with an Irish Catholic background. The simple reason was economic. Men couldn't afford to marry any younger, as a rule. And they nearly always lived at home until they did. Indeed, the fairly legendary devotion of Irish and Irish American men to their mothers is no doubt a partial product of this, with it being the case that they frequently had lived well into their adulthood in their parents homes providing support while they saved to go out on their own. Boomers who find their adult children now staying at home are, in part, experiencing the exact same thing, as the American economy which allowed an 18 year old high school graduate to go out and find good work is dead.
Indeed, I've experienced, in one fashion or another, nearly all of this, and the reaction to it, in one fashion or another. My own parents were in their early 30s when they married and my half Irish, half German father resumed living at home when he returned from university, and then Air Force service, and lived there until he met and married my mother. My mother, on the other hand, had struck out adventurously on her own in her early 20s, but her family bonds were incredibly strong right up until her death. When I first went to school, I stayed here in town and continued to live in my parents home. When I came back from law school, I moved back in for what I thought was going to be a brief stay, but when my father fell very ill, I stayed. I stayed on after he died out of loyalty to my mother, and then left home when I married. So I guess I was a pioneer in the demographic trend. Right now, my 18 year old son is living here at home, but he intends to rent my mother's old house while attending college, a sort of price supported living arrangement which recalls for me the old boarding house arrangement to some degree.
It's interesting to see how Boomers and others react to this. The old Boomers, strongly influenced by a culture which really emphasized that they should move out and move on, tend to not like the idea of anyone staying on locally, if they didn't. Missed in that is the fact that their own parents who left home early often had done so due to war, a unique situation, which made those people adults really quickly. In contrast, the pushing out of the fledglings in the new economy, and culture that was at least somewhat damaged in the wake of Boomer excess, isn't nearly as good. The foundering of Millennials has become legendary, but then no wonder really.
Again, while making resort to movies for examples is something a person has to do with caution, movies here can show us how societal views have changed on this topic, and living conditions have changed, if we consider what they accidentally depict about their own eras in these regards. Its' sort of an interesting exercise.
Take again the film Marty. Released in 1955, the Academy Award winning film presents a "small story" concerning the life of a blue collar, big city, bachelor. Some might define the film in terms of presenting a "romance", but if it does, it's the most unromantic romance every filmed. The interesting thing here, however, is that the aging bachelor, plaid by Ernest Borgnine, who was then in his late 30s, is shown living in an apartment with his mother as an important, but routine, detail of the film. Indeed, during the film his aunt moves from another, married, son's house into the same apartment (while cast in ethnic terms, the same situation is explored, with many of the same movie themes, in the the 1991 film Only The Lonely, one of John Candy's best films). Similar living arrangements are shown in the much loved film Its A Wonderful Life (1946) and the legendary post war film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). The point is that in all of these films unmarried men and women living with their parents is shown as common and expected, requiring no explanation.
Take in contrast a film like Failure To Launch (2006) in which the protagonist, played by Matthew McConaughey, is depicted as "still" living at home. McConaughey was 37 years old, one year old than Borgnine at the time Borgnine filmed Marty, and yet this living relationship is depicted as comedic and abnormal. It probably seems less so in 2006 than it does now in 2016.
So, I suppose, we are left with the question of what all of this means. And what it seems to mean is really two things. The post war period in which everything about the United States seemed exceptional really was, and for various reason the conditions that prevailed prior to it, in a lot of ways, are back. And if that's true, perhaps what Pew is calling the "Modern Era", isn't.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Why is the text above blue? No idea whatsoever. It just turned blue, and Blogger won't accept the change back in color.
I like Blogger, but it can be extremely frustrating from time to time.
Earlier in this thread we looked at the Boomers, and frankly we were a bit hostile to them when we probably ought not to have been. But what should stand out regarding them is that there is indeed a lot of Boomer Exceptionalism, if you will. Leaving home, which the Boomers, in casual conversations, regard as a norm, or a right of passage, may instead simply be a statistical glitch applying mostly to them, and mostly reflecting American post war affluence. If that's correct, what we're seeing now is the norm, not the exception, and that may mean we're returning to an economic regime that's more the historical norm than the current one, or rather the recent one.
If we step back what we would find, and indeed as we have discussed in other contexts before, is that prior to the introduction of domestic machinery, the living arrangements of the young were much different than they came to be in the 1945 to 2000 period. As was noted in that thread:
Of course, some men took apartments in towns and simply ate out every day, or resorted to less than desirable means of cooking. Even now, quite a few men engaged in heavy labor hit a working man's restaurant early in the day, and pack a lunch of some sort with them for lunch. The point is, however, that for most working men, the conditions of the day didn't give a great number of options in terms of getting food cooked, clothing washed, etc., and still allow them to work.That work, that is the domestic work, fell to women, but not because of some societal conspiracy thought up by men so much as by necessity. The were some female out of the house occupations, as noted, but they were generally few, and the women who occupied them tended to be just as oppressed by the needs of every day life as men. When you look at old advertisements that seem quaint or even a bit odd now, in which some poor young woman is depicted as being in desperate straits as she's in her late 20s and not married, it should be kept in mind that for most women getting married did indeed improve their lot in life as they'd be taking care of their own household, rather than be auxiliary to somebody else s.This discussed living at home and other living arrangements in a different context. It's still illustrative of something, even in our much different domestic machinery and economic (maybe) regime today. Boiled down to its essence, prior to World War Two, and for some time after it, young men and women generally lived at home until they married for reasons that had, in essence, something to do with resources, until they married. And now, in 2016, this is becoming the norm again for the young. They're living at home until they marry or enter into what is effectively a species of common law marriage.
Now, that may be the condition we're observing, but why?
In order to answer that, we probably have to look at the conditions that reflected the prior arrangement. We basically have done that above. But looked at another way, what we find is that conditions and resources made this the most practical, and in some circumstances the only practical, living arrangement. And maybe, in looking at this, we out to step out of location and take a look at Europe of the same period.
Now, that may seem odd, but the reason that may be illustrative is that we see the same thing in Europe, but it persisted. Indeed, in some situation the prevalence of adult children living at home is so pronounced that it continues on after those children have married. Indeed, that's the norm with farm families.
Now, that is also the norm in American agricultural families as well, but in Europe the norm is and was for everyone to live n hte same house. Indeed, it's typical to have three generations all living in the same house, with their relative position in the family determined by their location withing the house. Simply put, in a densely packed region, the resources for individual living simply do not exist.
The US, of course, is a big country, but something that's been missed over the last several decades is that the American tendency to simply assume that the American geography is ever expandable so as to keep the conditions in the country ever the same are simply wrong, and that has expressed itself in housing values. Americans, unlike many Europeans, tend to aim towards owning their own houses (in some European countries that's not the norm, nor even the general desire) but they are becoming increasingly un-affordable. This tends to cause housing "bubbles" of course, as much of hte current pricing really isn't very realistic, but it also reflects a situation in which moving up into a house is no longer as easy as once was, although there has always been a sector of the economy for which this hasn't been easy at all.
And that carries on to rent. What used to be fairly easy for a lot of people is to move on and into a rental unit. But now, apartments are blisteringly expensive in many regions. Indeed, Denver Colorado prides itself on its ever expanding population while continually noting that its rental rates are sky high and going higher. No wonder.
In such a situation living outside the home is simply impossible for many young people. It might be once they marry, as two incomes is now the American married rule, but it might not be at that. A good friend of mine, for example, recently related to me that his married son and his daughter in law are living with him while they save money for a house. Here we see a return to a very, very old norm, and the re-establishment of the European norm in the US. This isn't uncommon.
Also worth noting is that the average age of marriages is rising, sort of. Frankly, this figure is complicated by much of what I've noted above. If the reality of common law marriages, no matter what htey are termed, are considered, this may actually not be nearly as true, but because of the transitory nature of quite a few such arrangements, which effectively has introduced something akin to common law divorce into the picture, that's a risky assumption. Anyhow, what is often noted is that Americans are "postponing" marriage until their "careers are established".
Or maybe they are not.
To some extent this is undoubtedly true. But at the same time for quite a few American ethnicities, this isn't true. So we have the truly peculiar fact that while it is true that "people married younger" and in some instances very young, there's a strong demographic element to it that ran the other way. This is particular true with some ethnicities such as the American Irish, which did not marry young at all. Men tended as a rule to be in their early 30s and women in their late 20s, both in Ireland and the United States, amongst people with an Irish Catholic background. The simple reason was economic. Men couldn't afford to marry any younger, as a rule. And they nearly always lived at home until they did. Indeed, the fairly legendary devotion of Irish and Irish American men to their mothers is no doubt a partial product of this, with it being the case that they frequently had lived well into their adulthood in their parents homes providing support while they saved to go out on their own. Boomers who find their adult children now staying at home are, in part, experiencing the exact same thing, as the American economy which allowed an 18 year old high school graduate to go out and find good work is dead.
Indeed, I've experienced, in one fashion or another, nearly all of this, and the reaction to it, in one fashion or another. My own parents were in their early 30s when they married and my half Irish, half German father resumed living at home when he returned from university, and then Air Force service, and lived there until he met and married my mother. My mother, on the other hand, had struck out adventurously on her own in her early 20s, but her family bonds were incredibly strong right up until her death. When I first went to school, I stayed here in town and continued to live in my parents home. When I came back from law school, I moved back in for what I thought was going to be a brief stay, but when my father fell very ill, I stayed. I stayed on after he died out of loyalty to my mother, and then left home when I married. So I guess I was a pioneer in the demographic trend. Right now, my 18 year old son is living here at home, but he intends to rent my mother's old house while attending college, a sort of price supported living arrangement which recalls for me the old boarding house arrangement to some degree.
It's interesting to see how Boomers and others react to this. The old Boomers, strongly influenced by a culture which really emphasized that they should move out and move on, tend to not like the idea of anyone staying on locally, if they didn't. Missed in that is the fact that their own parents who left home early often had done so due to war, a unique situation, which made those people adults really quickly. In contrast, the pushing out of the fledglings in the new economy, and culture that was at least somewhat damaged in the wake of Boomer excess, isn't nearly as good. The foundering of Millennials has become legendary, but then no wonder really.
Again, while making resort to movies for examples is something a person has to do with caution, movies here can show us how societal views have changed on this topic, and living conditions have changed, if we consider what they accidentally depict about their own eras in these regards. Its' sort of an interesting exercise.
Take again the film Marty. Released in 1955, the Academy Award winning film presents a "small story" concerning the life of a blue collar, big city, bachelor. Some might define the film in terms of presenting a "romance", but if it does, it's the most unromantic romance every filmed. The interesting thing here, however, is that the aging bachelor, plaid by Ernest Borgnine, who was then in his late 30s, is shown living in an apartment with his mother as an important, but routine, detail of the film. Indeed, during the film his aunt moves from another, married, son's house into the same apartment (while cast in ethnic terms, the same situation is explored, with many of the same movie themes, in the the 1991 film Only The Lonely, one of John Candy's best films). Similar living arrangements are shown in the much loved film Its A Wonderful Life (1946) and the legendary post war film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). The point is that in all of these films unmarried men and women living with their parents is shown as common and expected, requiring no explanation.
Take in contrast a film like Failure To Launch (2006) in which the protagonist, played by Matthew McConaughey, is depicted as "still" living at home. McConaughey was 37 years old, one year old than Borgnine at the time Borgnine filmed Marty, and yet this living relationship is depicted as comedic and abnormal. It probably seems less so in 2006 than it does now in 2016.
So, I suppose, we are left with the question of what all of this means. And what it seems to mean is really two things. The post war period in which everything about the United States seemed exceptional really was, and for various reason the conditions that prevailed prior to it, in a lot of ways, are back. And if that's true, perhaps what Pew is calling the "Modern Era", isn't.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Why is the text above blue? No idea whatsoever. It just turned blue, and Blogger won't accept the change back in color.
I like Blogger, but it can be extremely frustrating from time to time.
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