Boomerang children: bad news for parents?

The bedrooms have been redecorated in grown-up colours, the toys have been chucked out and the washing machine is “blissfully underused”, said Yvonne Roberts in The Observer. And then, just when you’re starting to enjoy a child-free house, the nest fills again. According to a new study by the London School of Economics, adult children who return to the family home after a period away – often at university – cause a significant decline in their parents’ well-being. While the study acknowledged that these “boomerang” children can be a source of emotional and practical support for parents, it found that the quality of life of the parents studied fell by an average of 0.8 points on the researchers’ scale when their kids moved back in – an effect similar to developing an age-related disability.

The idea that the end of hands-on parenthood might be liberating “still feels faintly taboo”, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. But it’s natural that people have mixed feelings about boomerang children. It’s not just about parents wanting a spare bedroom again, or more time for new hobbies. Putting up a grown child also “feels at some deep level like a failure for all concerned”, even if the reasons for it – mainly insecure employment and the cost of housing – are beyond our control. “A quarter of young British adults now live with their parents, more than at any time since records began in 1966.” That’s not a healthy situation. Tell me about it, said James Marriott in The Times. As a 25-year-old living with my grandmother, I’m part of the boomerang generation, and when you’ve worked hard through school and university only to find yourself back where you started, the sense of injustice is “powerful”. Living with grown children may mean that parents “can’t wander around the house naked or listen to The Archers at an antisocial volume”, but it cramps our style, too. We millennials have fewer opportunities to engage in the wild behaviour that the baby boomers did at our age. With so little control over our own lives, “is it any wonder that we sit at home behind our computers worrying about abstract problems such as gender pronouns”?