Life With ‘Boomerang' Kids
Money Magazine Australia|December / January 2021
Adult children who still live at home are a growing challenge for parents
Susan Hely
Life With ‘Boomerang' Kids

When should adult children move out of the home? This is a question that parents often grapple with.

There are many reasons why adult kids are living at home longer today than any other generation did. Even before Covid-19 “boomerang” adult kids were returning to the family home, but now the trend has sharply increased.

Around 57% of men and 54% of women aged 18 to 29 lived with one or both parents in 2017, up from 47% and 36% in 2001, according to the long-running Housing Income and Labour Dynamics (HILDA) survey that tracks 17,500 people in 9500 households over almost 20 years.

“Of course, the cost of housing is a big factor, and it’s been rising faster than inflation and incomes,” says Roger Wilkins, deputy director of research, and Esperanza Vera-Toscano, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, as mentioned on The Conversation.

The other setback for adult kids is that it is getting harder to secure full-time, ongoing secure jobs, and part-time work is more common, say Wilkins and Vera-Toscano. Young people tend to work in sectors where jobs have been wiped out, including travel, retail, and hospitality.

This story is from the December / January 2021 edition of Money Magazine Australia.

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This story is from the December / January 2021 edition of Money Magazine Australia.

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