If You Still Live With Your Parents, You’re Not the Only One
After a fun four years spent away at college, you undoubtedly began to imagine what your post-collegiate life would be like. We’re betting things like a cool studio apartment, a trendy tech job in SF or NY and evenings spent grabbing drinks with friends at that new bar that just opened up all came to mind. But sadly we can’t all be Carrie Bradshaw. If your post-grad reality is more in line with Annie’s life in Bridesmaids (a minimum wage job and living at home), take some comfort in knowing you’re not alone. In fact, a recent study by the Pew Research Center just reported that more millennial women are living at home than during the 1940s.
Pew Research Center analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data and discovered that 36.4% of women aged 18 to 34 lived with their family (mostly mom, dad or both) last year. This percentage hasn’t been that high since the 1940s, when 36.2% of young women lived at home. The number of young men staying home is also increasingly high, but unlike women, their share hasn’t climbed to its level from 1940, the highest year on record.
While the percentage is the same, the reasons women are moving back or staying at home today are much different from 75 years ago. Back then, women stayed home until they were married, but today it seems to be connected to a wider range of reasons. Richard Fry, a senior researcher at PRC, told the New York Times,“Some of what’s happening is probably economics because the great recession really hit young adults hard. But I’m still struggling with the economic explanation, since the labor market for young adults has improved in the last five years, and yet the percentage living with their family is still going up. It seems to be somewhat decoupled from economics.”
Blame it on the gigantic student loans or the sky-high rent in cities where all the jobs are (ahem, San Francisco), but it looks like those empty nests aren’t quite so empty anymore.
Do you currently live at home? Tell us why in the comments below.
(Photos via Getty)
