David Nunez, 24, lives with his parents in Tampa, Florida. He pays for his own phone bill, Netflix subscription, and groceries, but thanks to his parents’ generosity, he doesn’t pay rent. Contrary to what some might think, Nunez is not an unemployed freeloader; he works full-time in marketing. But his $33,000 annual salary barely dents the local rent market; a studio downtown can cost more than $2,000 a month. He just can’t afford the rent.
“I’m lucky to have a family that understands that these are difficult times,” he told me.
Despite the strong job market, many Gen Zers still rely on their parents for help to make ends meet. A Pew Research Center survey last fall found that only 16% of 18- to 24-year-olds said they were completely financially independent, compared with 32% of 22-year-olds who said the same in 1980. Over the past decade, the share of parents who say they support adult children has doubled, from about 30% in 2013 to about 60% by 2023, according to Pew. Some parents report spending an average of $1,400 a month to help their adult children with groceries, tuition and other expenses.
“All our lives we’re told that when we turn 18 or 19, we’re supposed to leave home and have our own life,” Nunez said, “but in my friend group, I only know one person who doesn’t live with their parents anymore.”
This new normal has parents overwhelmed. Aside from paying for college, many aren’t sure how to handle the prospect of their children remaining comfortably in the nest and relying on them for food, rent and other expenses after college. Nunez’s mother lived with an aunt before immigrating to the U.S., and is happy to have her son live with her. “I want you to know that you’re here and that you’re OK,” she told her son. But for other parents, the help comes with questions: At what point should parents cut the financial cord?
Gen Z faces significant economic hurdles despite being better educated than previous generations and more likely to work full-time.
First, wage growth has been modest, but student loan debt looms large. Over the past two decades, average student loan debt has more than doubled to just over $37,000 per borrower. “More young people are pursuing higher education,” says Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson, a professor of sociology at Washington State University. “They’re staying in school longer, and their earnings potential is slowing down.”
Rising home prices are also a barrier: Zillow estimated this year that people need to earn 80% more than they did four years ago to comfortably buy a home. And rent is taking up an increasingly large portion of people’s budgets: Zillow found that the average rent in the US has risen 60% since 2015.
Meanwhile, wages are not keeping up with inflation and people are becoming increasingly cash strapped. Overall, Kirkpatrick Johnson said, many young people are “in jobs that don’t support them.”
Each generation strives to improve and do better than the last.
In these dire times, many are choosing to seek refuge in their childhood homes: In the United States, the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds living with their parents has increased by 87% over the past 20 years. Other milestones, like getting married and starting a family, are also being delayed longer and longer.
In his book, The Oxford Handbook of Adulthood, Clark University psychology professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett defined adulthood as being responsible, making independent decisions, and becoming financially independent, but an increasing number of people don’t meet that definition until they’re nearly 30. Arnett decided that the period between the ages of 18 and 29, when young people are still on the path to independence in our modern economy and culture, needed its own name: adulthood.
Not everyone agrees: A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 64% of Americans said they believe young people should be financially independent by age 22. “Our system hasn’t quite caught up yet,” Kirkpatrick Johnson said, adding that without the social security benefits of subsidized student loans and publicly funded health care that other countries have, American parents often have to cover them.
Some parents are happy to help. Jo Clark, 50, always knew she’d be supporting her two daughters after they finished university. “I always wanted to support them as best I could,” she told me. Clark’s eldest daughter, 26, lived at home for a while, but her youngest, 24, now lives in an extension Clark added to their Surrey, England, home for the purpose. She hadn’t wanted her daughters to contribute to the household bills, but they insisted, and now she chips in £150 a month. “I wanted to give them the opportunity to save for their future,” Clark told me. “My goal is to be able to save for a down payment on their own house.”
Clark says that if her daughter does move out in the future, the door is always open for her to return: “I’m not in a great position financially myself, so this is my way of giving my children a foothold to be able to buy their own home,” she says.
Theresa Bailey, a senior wealth strategist at Waddell & Associates, argued that Gen X parents were one of the earliest generations to demonstrate such a willingness to provide financial support. “This generation of parents experienced 2008, 2009, 2010 as relatively young adults and really experienced financial hardship,” Bailey said. “They’re in a lot of ways a product of that mindset and they want their kids to be different.”
Parents have little time to recover financially, and young people have a life ahead of them – something that isn’t always taken into consideration.
Ali Lupo, a millennial who lives in upstate New York and has a 10-month-old daughter, agreed that part of the trend toward special support is due to changing parenting styles. “Every generation is trying to improve and be better than the last,” she said. “My grandparents’ generation would kick the kids out of the house in the summer and hand them sandwiches through the door. My parents’ generation was more protective and wanted to help more. We’re even more so now, and I think sometimes it’s taken too far.”
She and her husband plan to cover their daughter’s education, health insurance and wedding expenses, and don’t plan to charge rent. “Once you register as a parent, you’re a parent for life,” Lupo said.
Some parents may be willing to help financially because they want to feel like good parents. A Pew Research Center survey last fall found that 71% of young parents said their children’s successes or failures reflect their own performance as a parent. That belief was especially strong among higher-income parents. But help isn’t always easy to come by. Some parents sacrifice their own financial security, dipping into retirement or emergency savings, to help their adult children. A Bankrate survey last year found that 31% of parents with adult children said they’d made significant financial sacrifices to help them.
“Parents have very little time to recover financially, and young people have their whole lives ahead of them,” Bailey said. “That’s not always taken into consideration.”
Some worry that overly supportive parents are slowing down their children’s developmental milestones: A 2019 report from the Urban Institute found that a study of young people ages 25 to 34 between 1999 and 2005 found that only about 68% of those who lived with their parents at that age were independent 10 years later, whereas nearly all those who rented or owned their homes were independent.
Meanwhile, JP Krahel, chair of the accounting department at Loyola University Maryland, told me that young people would be better off saving and spending less if they could: “Strictly speaking, are people sleeping in their cars on the street financially independent? Maybe, but they’re not on a good trajectory.”
It’s a tough balance to strike, and the Lupos plan to leave some of their money to their daughter, including college tuition, when she reaches the right age. “It’s important to us to set her up for success, to give her love and support, and to empower her to make the best choices, but not to give her free rein,” they said.
Cody and Erica Archie took a different approach. The couple from Texas will start charging their daughter $200 a month in rent, starting the month after she graduates from high school in 2022. “It’s not so high that she can’t afford it, but it’s a little painful when we have to pay it,” Cody Archie said. “If she’s an adult and she lives in our house, she can pay for long showers, pay for food, contribute to the household income.”
If you work 40 hours a week, you’re an adult, and that’s when you need to live off your parents’ bank account.
Archie said that if his daughter had gone to college while living at home, he wouldn’t have charged her rent and would have helped pay for her tuition. But she decided not to go to college and now works as an insurance salesman. “When you’re working 40 hours a week, you’re an adult,” Archie said. “That’s when you need to live off your parents’ bank account.”
Archie and Erica, both in their mid-40s, believe that pampering adult children is damaging to them and a missed opportunity to teach them an important lesson: financial responsibility. “If you’re not going to force them to leave the nest and go out and fend for themselves, then there’s really no need to do it,” Archie says. “They have to fend for themselves, or you have to force them to.”
When India Anderson turned 20 and decided to move in with her boyfriend, her mother cut off most of her financial support. Living as a full-time student in Orlando, Anderson needed to find a way to pay the bills, so she started a hair braiding business on campus. Now 22, she’s graduated and grown her business. She still lives in Orlando with her boyfriend, splitting rent and bills. The only bill her mother still pays is her cell phone bill.
“I wasn’t raised with the financial literacy necessary to jump into the real world,” she says. “At least for me, the transition wasn’t that smooth.” Anderson struggled to save money and dealt with unexpected expenses that she had to pay with credit cards. She also worries that she’ll be dropped from her family’s health insurance when she turns 26. At the same time, she values financial independence. “It’s an expensive sacrifice,” she says.
Anderson’s 20-year-old brother still lives with their mother and nine-year-old sister, which Anderson feels is a burden to her mother. “He has a job, but he spends his money every day on computer games and Uber Eats,” she says. Still, she doesn’t want him to endure the sudden separation she experienced. “Some independence would be good for him, but at what cost?” she says.
Most parents want what’s best for their kids, but figuring out what that actually looks like in a changing economy can be tricky. When Nunez told his parents he wanted to move in with his girlfriend later this year, they were nervous. “They weren’t like, ‘Get out of here,’ but more like, ‘We don’t want you to leave unless you have to come back,'” Nunez says.
Eve Upton Clark is a features writer covering culture and society.
