Nothing like a New Year to look forward to! You get your hopes up for the future, make big or little plans, and finally start to clean out the kid’s bedroom for an of…never mind. If you were lucky enough that your older GenZ or budding Millennial had moved out, don’t be too quick to pull the Pokémon posters off the wall. It could be a temporary hiatus.

More adult children are living with their parents. Parents are not pleased

The share of adult children who live with their parents has ticked up in recent years. This just in: The parents don’t like it.

…COVID-19 sent adult children back to the nest in unprecedented numbers. A stampede of younger millennials and older Generation Z progeny have fled roommates and cramped urban apartments during the pandemic for spacious homes in thinly settled suburbs with full kitchens and convenient laundry facilities.

The share of adults ages 25 to 34 who lived with their parents reached historic highs in 2020, Census figures show: 22 percent of men and 13.4 percent of women.

The numbers have retreated since then, but not far. In 2022, 19 percent of men and 12 percent of women in the 25-34 demographic cohabit with their parents.

Some of the numbers for adult children living at home – neutrally characterized as “multigenerational families” – in a Pew study were even worse.

…In 2021, 68% of 25- to 34-year-olds in a multigenerational home were living in the home of one or both of their parents. Still, 15% were living in their own home and had a parent or other older relative living with them. Another 14% of young adults in multigenerational households were living in a home headed by a family member other than their parent, such as a grandparent or sibling, or by an unmarried partner or a roommate (3%).

…Regardless of whose home they lived in, most 25- to 34-year-olds living in a multigenerational household (86%) had a parent in the home in 2021. This included 47% who lived with two parents and 39% who lived with only one parent.

There are various reasons kids go in and out of a house, but the overwhelming one in the past two years had been the Pandemic. It’s the extended visit that’s starting to wear on parents.

…Young adults are staying in school longer, coping with rising student debt, marrying later and waiting longer to buy a first home. Many move out of the parental home only to return after losing a job or a roommate. Researchers call them boomerang kids.

COVID-19 sparked a mass relocation, with millions of Americans leaving crowded urban cores and shuttered college campuses. A Pew survey found that young adults were three times as likely to move as any other age group.

…In the years since, much of American life has returned to normal. But many pandemic boomerang kids remain in the parental home: two-thirds, by one estimate.

But these “boomerang kids” aren’t moving back out. Oh, that’s a big NO. There has been a recovery, and, as we’ve shown here at HotAir time and again, jobs are plentiful – the caveat being one has to be looking for employment to know that.

…Over time, some of the societal goodwill has soured. The boomerang child has spawned a cottage industry of coverage about coping, not with the pandemic, but with the young pandemic refugees still colonizing your home.

…“Living at home, saving money, paying back college debt, that sounds okay to me,” said Jim Kinney, a certified financial planner in New Jersey. “But what I’ve been seeing recently is more of this failure-to-launch thing.

The kid’s living at home because he doesn’t want to go out and get a job.”

Aging parents who support adult children risk shortchanging their own retirement plans, Kinney said.

“In the real world, the glory years of when people really pour money into their retirement is the last 10 years” of their working lives, he said. “And if you’re supporting your kid by paying his car insurance and paying for his groceries and maybe even paying for his medical insurance, that takes the opportunity away to pile on the retirement savings in the final years before retirement.”

Even worse if that overgrown child is sitting home waiting on a student loan bailout that never happens and someone indulges a “menial labor is beneath me” attitude. As their folks, in the meanwhile, are dealing with the economic realities of life in Brandon’s America and supporting a few more mouths than they’d planned on.

These numbers are all based on CPI govt data, which is largely fake and massaged lower since they changed the method in the 1980s and again in the 1990s.

Many of these items are up even more than the graphic indicates.#inflation #CPI pic.twitter.com/WvQNcl7pyo

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) January 3, 2023

In many cases, not just food – paying for insurance, picking up car payments, medical insurance, whatever, in addition to the associated increases in utility costs with extra bodies in a house.

It seems as if it’s a worldwide generational phenomenon. Here’s how Australia’s 60 Minutes characterized it in their report.

Once upon a time, kids couldn’t wait to get away from the oldies. But not anymore. Now, more than a third of 20-somethings in Australia are still living with mum and dad. Or to be really tough, still sponging, because most pay little or no rent.

Aussies tend to be a little unfiltered in their presentation, but the gist of it is correct. There needs to be skin in the game and rules.

…Kinney believes most adult children who live with parents should pay at least some rent. “If they’re a little too comfortable at home,” he said, “maybe you need to make it a little uncomfortable.”

For parents who raised their kids in the every-child-gets-a-trophy mold, even the thought of making Junior uncomfortable may be a bridge too far – you might damage his self-esteem, and then he’ll never leave, right?

I don’t know what’s worse, honestly. Parents for not laying markers down or kids who have zero sense of responsibility to help out.

The situation is yet another manifestation of the entitlement mentality being enabled again by the very people who brought us – literally raised – the Woke generation, Words Are Violence and social justice warrior crowd. No one would ever begrudge parents helping kids out – or vice versa for that matter. But it should be that whoever returns contributes in some way to the maintenance of the whole. They’re not 3 or 10 or 15 years old anymore.

“Sponging” was never meant to be a career field.