Little did they know that ‘boomeranging’ back home would change the way they saw their parents, forever
When David and Linda Ellis sent their daughter Juliette, the youngest of their three children, off to college in 2019, they figured they had become empty-nesters for good. In short order, the couple downsized from their family home in Raleigh, North Carolina, to a much more manageable three-bedroom apartment rental nearby. Little did the Ellises know that, in under a year’s time, two of their three adult children would once again join them under the same roof.
After their school and work went remote in March 2020, Juliette Ellis and middle brother Gregory flew in from their respective posts in Vancouver and Brooklyn to wait out the uncertainty of Covid-19 with Mom and Dad. The eldest Ellis son, Justin, remained a short drive away in nearby Chapel Hill.
“It was a joy to have this time with our adult children,” says David, who looks back on the experience as one of the “silver linings” of an otherwise difficult time.
Aberystwyth Wales UK, Friday September 19 2014 At the start of the 2014-15 academic year, a happy smiling first year ‘fresher’ woman student arrives with her father at her University halls of residence.
Throughout the pandemic, scores of young adults have boomeranged back to their parental homes. That trend was especially pronounced in the first half of last year, when the Ellises were among the nearly 3.5 million young adults to move in with their parents. By July 2020, a Pew survey estimated that 52% of Americans between age 18 and 29 were living with one or both parents – the largest group to do so since the Great Depression.
Some, like Gregory and Juliette, saw the family home as a more stable environment in which to ride out the storm of the unknown. Others used the opportunity of work-from-home mandates to leave their small (and expensive) urban apartments. Yet others were casualties of the early pandemic’s economic downturn, which cost many young workers their jobs.
At the time, speculation grew that the trend might have a generational ripple effect – that, just maybe, Americans were redefining the ideas of “family” and “home” to embrace a gentler and more fluid timeline of when young adults should strike out on their own. “Perhaps the pandemic is an occasion – an unwelcome one, sure – to reappraise a living arrangement that is often maligned,” wrote Joe Pinsker in the Atlantic last July.
But as the world reopened and young adults became able, once again, to cobble together some semblance of a normal social existence, many moved out of ther childhood homes for the second time. Others have imminent plans to do so, citing a desire to return to the “normal” life that has been ingrained in so many young Americans.
And some found it annoying to live and work in close quarters with multiple other adults – even if those adults happened to be their parents.
