Failure to launch
With sky-high rents forcing millennials to stay at home with mum and dad, is it even possible to play happy families, asks Kathy Donaghy
It’s a rite of passage for most twentysomethings. Leaving the parental nest and finding a place of your own to call home. But soaring house prices and crippling rents mean the wings of millennials have been clipped — often leaving them feeling trapped.
Known as the boomerang generation because they bounce back to their parents’ houses after leaving home for a few short months — not to mind the youngsters who’ve never left home at all — the statistics show that as many as a quarter of couples have an adult child living with them.
The latest Census figures showed the number of couples living with children who were over the age of 20 had gone up. The figures show that 132,500 married couples now live with an adult over the age of 20.
Of course, it’s not always financial necessity at play — some adult children choose to stay living at home. Even when their movies had made millions at the box office, Hollywood A-listers Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper remained under their parents’ roof.
And as recently as 2015, tennis ace Rafael Nadal’s entire family including his father, stepmother, siblings and grandfather all lived together.
But in this country, a generation caught up in a dysfunctional property market are at home mainly due to economic circumstances. So how do you negotiate your way through this uncharted territory and keep relations harmonious?
Claire*, a mum of two daughters in their mid and late twenties, put her girls through college and thought they would have been living independently after the age of 18, like she was herself. The reality is they are in jobs that would not sustain the shuddering cost of renting somewhere on their own and they both still live at home with Claire and her husband.
“My eldest daughter was looking for something on her own but the rent was coming in at ¤1,400 a month. If she was to share with others it was more like ¤900 a month. That’s still too high — she doesn’t earn anything like that and because she needs a car for her work, it’s not an option,” says Claire.
A study in the UK by the specialist bank Aldermore showed that the cost to parents of an adult child living at home is close to £5,000 (¤5.6k) a year as their offspring save for the deposit on a place of their own.
While there are no comparative figures for this country, rents rising at a rate of 15pc a year mean it is too expensive to move into rented accommodation. And even with first the Government’s Help-to-Buy scheme — there are simply not even new homes being built to meet the demand.
Claire says she and her husband pay the household bills but their daughters pay their way and contribute to buying food and other things for the house. She says the real negotiations are not over the financial aspects of sharing a home but around things like cooking in the kitchen, watching TV and privacy. “Negotiating kitchen space is hard. We’re at a stage where we all come in at different times and we all cook our own dinner. If somebody doesn’t tidy up, that has a knock-on effect. If someone wants to have a guest for dinner, that can be nice but sometimes if they want privacy you just clear out,” she says.
“Then there are issues like sex. We understand we’re the parents of grown-up children. They would say to me ‘I’m having my boyfriend over this weekend, can you give us some space?’ We are all very conscious of one another. We raised them to be individuals and they have
their own rights. For us it’s about leaning back and to try not to control them. At one stage you’re in charge and then you’re not — you have to let go. It’s a growing experience for us all,” says Claire.
“You can’t always rely on things being the way you expected them to be. The kind of house they’d be looking for — they’d need a deposit of ¤58,000 in cash. I don’t see things changing soon unless there’s a massive input into the property market. It’s a case of us keeping the head down for now,” she says.
Financial adviser Frank Conway of Money Whizz says young adults can feel a sense of betrayal when finding a place of their own is financially beyond their reach. In his work with families he sees tensions building up especially when parents try to impose strict boundaries on adult children who are still living at home.
“Kids feel they are being crowded out while parents feel they’ve done the work and they’re still responsible not just for their own kids but sometimes for their grandkids too. Sometimes there’s rivalry between siblings if one has moved out and one is at home and sometimes it can be vitriolic,” he says. “Parents ask me all the time how they should negotiate these kinds of issues. I think people have to establish some ground rules — there has to be contribution to rent for example. That way if a sibling who is out of home asks about it, the parents can say the one at home is contributing.
“There should be some long-term objective. Is the young person building towards something? If the child is earning a decent salary but they’re saving for a deposit, the parents might be happy with a few hundred euro a month. There have to be rules around who does what around the house because things can fester,” says Frank.
Bernadette Ryan, a psychotherapist and relationship therapist based in Dublin’s Ranelagh, says there isn’t even a vocabulary around what to call young adults at home because they are no longer children. While professionally she sees families trying to negotiate the new reality of adult children moving back home, she knows from first-hand experience the challenges that come with the situation. Her son and daughter, both in their early twenties are still living at home.
“It definitely calls for a sitting down and negotiating the terms. I’ve done it myself a number of times. As I tell my clients you can’t change the other person, you can only change yourself. I learned not to get on their case about everything because I was only upsetting myself. I found that worked best for me,” says Bernadette.
“I think parents should assess the situation and think ‘what is it I need?’ Is it really
important that they keep their room tidy or can you just shut the door? As in all relationships you need to ask what you can let go of. The question is do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? I understand that struggle,” she says.
“Often what makes parents angry or emotional is that the child will not do what they want them to do. I understand that but we are just giving ourselves grief. If adult children continue to act like teenagers, that needs to be addressed but letting go is important too. People tend to wring their hands about this but take a step back and ask ‘how can this work for us all now that we are in this situation?’ We have to deal with the changes in these relationships and realise children are still finding their way. Parents also need to ask themselves what kind of relationship they want with their child,” says Bernadette.
“The flip side is parents being able to get to know their child as an adult. Maybe we need to reassess what family is all about. It’s changing all the time. Sometimes we try to impose impossible standards on our children. We need to watch the words we use like ‘you should be doing this’ or ‘you should be doing that’. What is the perfect family anyway? I don’t know what that is.”