Stuck in first gear

Why are so many millennials living with parents?

Interesting news last week from Pew Research Center: “In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household.”

One part of the picture: Young adults aren’t getting married as early or as often as they used to. Are youngsters avoiding responsibility? Or do they lack opportunity? Joel Mathis and Ben Boychuk consider the issue.

JOEL MATHIS

Pity poor millennials: They grew up expecting that young adulthood might look something like “Sex and the City.” Instead, they’re living out their own version of “The Waltons.”

There’s some good news and some bad news involved. First, the bad news: Generations are huddling under a single roof because that’s what makes economic sense.

There are more unemployed young men today than there were in the 1960s. The ones with jobs have wages that, by and large, are stagnating or even declining. The economy has been going south for the middle class for decades — though the rich have kept getting richer — and so the survivors aredoing the sensible thing: They’re grouping up. It’s what Pew calls “the private safety net.”

Here’s the better news: This new grouping isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Or even new.

The last time so many 18- and 34-year-olds lived with their parents was the tail end of the Great Depression, in 1940. That group of Americans went off to fight in World War II the next year, came back and attended college — thanks to the GI Bill — then entered the work force when the American economy had no peer. The result? A burgeoning middle class and explosive homeownership numbers. We thought it was normal. We were wrong. “Normal” may look, in fact, closer to the social arrangements we had in the 1940s.

The conservative writer Alan Jacobs recently wrote about his own experience growing up with multiple generations of family: “Through living as an extended family my parents got free child care, my grandparents got free rent, and I grew up surrounded by family members who loved me,” he wrote. “How did living this way become an image of ‘a life gone wrong?’”

The “private safety net” shouldn’t be our only safety net. But as the economy changes, it might even be a source of joy and strength.

BEN BOYCHUK

Millennials are the least self-reliant and most-coddled generation yet to come of age in the United States. It’s really no wonder that a cohort raised by “helicopter parents” would effectively ground itself.