As more young adults live with their parents than in years past, more than one-third of Americans say the trend is bad for society – and only 16 percent say it’s a good thing, according to a new poll from Pew Research Center.
Overall, 36 percent told Pew the trend was negative. Only 12 percent of men said it was a good thing, and while women were more forgiving, 31 percent still said it was negative.
At 41 percent, white adults were most likely to say it’s bad for society by a healthy margin, with Hispanic adults the next most likely at 28 percent. Negative attitudes toward the trend increased with age as well as income.
There was also a partisan divide: 48 percent of Republicans think it’s bad for society, while 29 percent of Democrats think the same.
However, almost across the board, about half of all demographics in the poll think the trend doesn’t make a difference. The people who told Pew it’s either good or bad for society are only about half of respondents collectively.
Amid the lockdowns and stay-at-home orders of the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority – 52 percent – of 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. were living with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression, Pew previously found.
Since then, that figure has come down to about half of young adults, according to Pew, but that’s still well above the 44 percent reported in 2010 or 38 percent in 2000.
Sixty-two percent of adult children living at home don’t help with household expenses at all, according to a Savings.com survey, and 10 percent of them even receive an allowance, according to a Nerdwallet survey.
“Living at home, saving money, paying back college debt, that sounds okay to me,” Jim Kinney, a certified financial planner in New Jersey, told The Hill. “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.”
