Why are more and more young people living with their parents?

Recently, the number of young people between the ages of 18 and 35 living at home with their parents has exceeded that of people in the same age group living with a partner in the United States. In the middle of the 20th century, the latter doubled the number of the former.

This trend has also occurred in Spain: more than 78% of people between the ages of 16 and 29 live with their parents, something that had never been recorded in recent decades, according to the Observatory of the Emancipation. The time to become independent occurs later and later.

What is this trend due to? The causes that explain this phenomenon are material and economic, but also psychological.

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A choice or a necessity?

Part of this tendency to stay at home with parents is not the result of a decision, but of necessity. In Spain, for example, the youth unemployment rate is so high that it is difficult to find a well-paid job prevents many young people from the possibility of becoming emancipated

. In addition, instability prevails among young people who work: in Catalonia, approximately 85% of new contracts are temporary.

Given the responsibility required to start building a life together, the lack of money means that people under 30 years of age have less freedom to become independent.

There are more and more singles

Another reason that explains the low number of people living with their partner and not with their parents is that, simply, people stay single longer.

Decades ago, the idea of ​​starting a family was practically an imperative, but today there are many people who decide not to commit. One of the reasons is that among women the economic dependence on the figure of the man is less and less, and On the other hand, the new lifestyles give priority to individualism over the importance of the family. nuclear.

The idea of ​​enjoying life with greater freedom means that young people have less reason to find a partner and start a life together sharing everything. Increasingly, singleness is seen as the "default marital status", whereas previously people who did not live with a partner were seen as a future family project. Already it is not necessary to look for an excuse to justify why a family has not been formed, and this makes us more likely to see the possibility of returning to live with our parents as something more attractive and with some advantages.

At the same time, the new paradigms of affectivity, such as polyamory, have made coexistence and love life a little more dissociated. It is no longer so strange to be in open relationships in which the most infrequent thing is to all live in the same house or flat.

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A deeper bond with parents

Another of the psychological factors that explain the growing tendency to become emancipated later is, simply, that the Parent-child relationships appear to have become closer and more satisfying through the passage of time. generations.

The frequency with which parents and children share moments in which affective bonds are strengthened has grown since the middle of the 20th century, and it is not just a consequence of the need to live at home: this is a trend that was already registered long before the financial crisis of 2008.

The same has happened with the subjective feeling of well-being that fathers, mothers and their sons and daughters say they experience in the company of the other family generation. The way in which personal relationships have evolved within the family have led to a closer and more empathetic treatment than what happened decades ago. This has contributed to the abandonment of very rigid rules and the emphasis placed on the authority of the father, who came to adopt an authoritarian and cold role.

Now, emotions are expressed more directly, and family members are not as reluctant to show their feelings and seek emotional support from others. This makes cohabitation in many ways more bearable, and living under the same roof as your parents actually seems like an attractive (and in many ways comfortable) option.

A professional career for free

Previously, it was normal for only one of the family members to work outside the home, while the rest depended on him. Currently this is not possible: the adults in the house must go out to earn money to support the family.

This has led to a new work mentality, according to which each one has to be, in the first place, its own economic engine. The consequence of this is that living with parents is a possibility that is seen as a more to progress towards self-sufficiency, while previously this option did not have as much sense.