Lena Dunham, 26, has a successful sitcom on HBO, “Girls,” but until recently still lived at her mom’s house. (Getty Images)
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When Jason Siegel, 23, graduated from Lafayette College two years ago, he was in a better position than most people his age: He had a job lined up in Manhattan (he works as an energy engineer), a decent starting salary of $50,000 a year and a stable relationship with his long-term girlfriend.
Siegel is still at the job and still with his girlfriend, and — as he was two years ago, upon graduating college — still living at home in Westchester with his mom and dad.
To which the average functioning adult would say: Why?
“I didn’t want to start a new job and move at the same time,” Siegel says. “It was too much transition, two huge changes at once.”
So, as he has since 2010, Siegel commutes 45 minutes each way on Metro-North, averages about nine hours a day at the office, then heads home to the suburbs, where he goes to the gym, has some dinner and hangs around the living room with his folks.
It’s not quite the romantic, bohemian ideal of being young in New York that’s prevailed for decades, but Siegel and his peers don’t care. They’re not interested in sharing in a tiny walk-up in Long Island City with two other people or sacrificing premium pay-cable packages or dinner at Babbo to pay the cellphone bill.
“Living at home contributes to a much higher quality of life for me,” says another gainfully employed 23-year-old. He’s not ashamed of his situation, he insists, though he asked to remain anonymous. “I can travel without worrying about money. I go out to not the cheapest dinners, often. It’s especially good. I don’t have to think, ‘Is this dinner next week’s rent?’ ”
“I don’t have to cook my own meals or shop for clothes — my mom picks up stuff for me,” says personal trainer Amanda Shugar, 23. She works in Rye and has a 12-minute commute. “I’ve been mentally preparing myself for moving out. It’s a scary thing.”
“I have a very good home environment,” Siegel adds. “My parents let me come and go as I please.”
Lest you think Siegel is an outlier, he reports that the majority of his friends — all college-educated, all from wealthy backgrounds, all gainfully employed right out of school — moved back in with their parents upon graduating.
Siegel’s older sister, now 29, also spent her first year post-college living at home. Their father owns a small business, and their mother, a former ballerina, is a dance instructor. Again, not unusually, Siegel wasn’t asked to contribute to the household — no rent, no chores, no running of errands.
“I don’t think any of my friends were asked to contribute,” he says. “I would’ve been fine either way. I think a lot of it depends on a family’s financial situation. Westchester’s relatively wealthy.”
At no time since the 1940s have more 25-34-year-olds lived with their parents. According to a 2010 Pew poll, 21.6% of people in this age group are living in a multi-generational home, compared with 11% in 1980 — and since then, those numbers have been rising steadily. Among 18-39 year-olds, 57% get some form of financial help from their parents.
Most mainstream coverage of this so-called “Boomerang” generation — and the coverage has been copious over the past few years — draws a direct causal link to the recession. This isn’t wrong. But what has been largely ignored is another aspect that’s wholly new: the utter reluctance of people in their early-to-mid-20s to separate from their parents, emotionally and psychologically, and their parents’ refusal to subject them to the real world, so rough with its vicissitudes and general indifference.
What’s more, according to experts who have studied the phenomenon, these young adults don’t see themselves as forfeiting autonomy by moving back home, nor do they equate financial self-sufficiency with self-esteem. In fact, Boomerang kids who spoke with The Post are quite certain that they, too, are doing their parents a favor — so loved and liked are they, their parents can’t get enough of having them around. It’s an emotional double-helix that, to most anyone over 35, sounds sad and ridiculous.
But is it?
“The pattern of leaving and returning to home has changed surprisingly little since the 1990s, even though the economy has gone up and down,” says Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, psychologist and author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens to the Twenties.” “What has happened is the emergence of a new life stage. It’s not just tied to the recession.”
“Emerging adulthood” — an appellation credited to Arnett — is, he maintains, a new stage of human development, one born of social and scientific advances of the last 60 years. We live longer, marry and have babies later, are more educated and less likely to work at the same company — let alone have the same career — over a lifetime. (According to a Pew study, twentysomethings average seven job changes over the course of that decade.)
“I think it’s a thoroughly modern thing,” Arnett says. “This is the first time that people in their late teens to mid-20s are living a very unsettled life, and it’s normative.”
This existential limbo may, in fact, have a biological basis: A longitudinal study by the National Institute of Mental Health, which began in 1991, found that the brain doesn’t fully develop until at least age 25, with the maturation of the cerebellum and the prefrontal cortex — the area that regulates emotion — coming towards the end of neurological development.
“This,” Arnett says, “is the new reality.”
Yet there’s resistance to Arnett’s theory, both within and without the psychological community. Unlike adolescence, “emerging adulthood” isn’t a stage of human development that affects everyone and therefore can’t be classified as such. It’s more likely more situational and environmental: If you have parents who are highly involved and protective, it makes sense that a young adult might, in turn, be overly reliant on their parents.
Technology, too, has helped collapse traditional boundaries: Parents friend their kids on Facebook, can stay in constant conversation via Twitter or text, have access to areas of a young adult’s life that were once considered not for parental consumption.
All of this leaves older generations a bit queasy. America, after all, is a country founded on the dire necessity of independence, the place where the axiom “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” originated. And this makes the kids who choose to work in New York City, yet live plumply and plushly at home, even more curious: What is the point of attempting to make it in New York — the most difficult, competitive, expensive, filthy and gloriously aggravating city in the world — if your game’s rigged, if there’s no real consequence to failing?
‘This is a strange country,” says Carl Pickhardt, psychologist and author of “Boomerang Kids.” “We pride ourselves on independence, and yet we’ve protracted dependence. It’s a two-sided deal. It would be different if we had parents who said, ‘Hey — you hit 18 and you’re out the door.’” He laughs. “But that’s not what we’ve got.”
He’s right: Boomerang kids are the product of what’s been called “cockpit parents,” so named because they’re co-piloting, step-by-step, the trajectory of their child’s life, cheating them of the opportunity to develop resourcefulness, self-reliance, the ability to balance a checkbook.
Pickhardt traces this all back to the publication of Dr. Spock’s “Baby and Child Care” in 1946, which he says introduced the concept of “professionalized parenting,” the notion that there was an algorithm to raising a brilliant, successful child that would be an adequate reflection of the parents themselves.
“As we increasingly put parenting front and center,” he says, “we ended up protracting dependence in a way we didn’t anticipate.”
Pickhardt doesn’t subscribe to Arnett’s theory of “emerging adulthood,” but he does believe that adolescence lasts longer than we think, and that the last stage occurs from ages 18-23. And because it takes longer for young people to mature than previously thought, “it creates complications for parents about how much to hold on, and how much to let go.”
Lena Dunham, the 26-year-old creator and star of the HBO show “Girls” — which features four twentysomethings in varying states of parental dependence — recently told Rolling Stone that she had just bought her first apartment, even though she had been very happy living with her parents in their TriBeCa loft.
“I understand now that I can always come to my parents,” Dunham said, “or spend the night if I have an emergency.”
As childish as that might sound, Dunham is also a highly successful and accomplished showrunner who made her first feature film, the critically acclaimed “Tiny Furniture,” when she was just 23. Records show she purchased her Brooklyn Heights apartment for $500,000. Clearly, for her, living at home for a good chunk of her 20s contributed to self-sufficiency in other areas.
In pop culture, adults who live at home are still largely depicted as losers, and their ages are creeping ever upward (fear of contagion?). The syndicated comic strip “Dustin,” about an unmotivated, 23-year-old college grad who lives with his parents, runs in hundreds of papers nationwide, and it’s telling that Dustin is among the youngest of such current characters. Consider the older-than-twentysomething protagonists of recent films such as “Jeff, Who Lives At Home,” “Stepbrothers,” “Dark Horse,” and HBO’s series “Enlightened,” which stars Laura Dern as a New Age devotee who believes she has all the answers to life, yet lives with her mother and sees no real disconnect there.
What was once unthinkable for most adults has become a go-to mainstream concept populated by characters so entitled and epically lazy that they can’t even muster up proper levels of humiliation. Compare these fictional scenarios to the infamous 1993 “Seinfeld” episode called “The Puffy Shirt,” in which a jobless George Costanza was forced to move in with his parents in Queens. The humor was propelled by George’s utter mortification and self-loathing. “How can I do this?!” he cries. “How can I move back in with those people? Please, tell me! They’re insane!”
In the real world, the common reluctance of parents and kids to discuss finances with friends and family — how much they give and get — indicates, at the very least, discomfort. “It is a non-discussed subject,” says Sally Koslow, author of the new book “Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty Nest. “I think there’s a residual feeling that it’s not OK.”
Indeed, if this trend were primarily driven by the economy, the preponderance of a living arrangement so common in other cultures would provoke less anxiety. But the increasing reluctance of twentysomethings to commit to jobs or partners or apartments of their own, to rely on their parents emotionally and financially well into (at least) their late 20s, generates anxiety for the future: that this new generation — the first unwilling to brook any difficulty without parental buffering — will change the very character of the country, and not for the good.
It’s not just limited to America. In China, for example, where adult children have traditionally lived with their parents until marriage, this current crop of young adults has been dubbed “the strawberry generation” — a pejorative reference to how easily they’re bruised. In Japan, they’re called “parasite singles.” A 2012 study by Australia’s Melbourne Institute found that fewer than two-thirds of middle- and lower-class young adults rely on their parents in any way, while 75% of those from wealthy families are still living with their parents.
Author Koslow says she was happy, perplexed and concerned when her 25-year-old son, Jed, announced that he’d be leaving San Francisco and moving back home.
“And then it got interesting,” Koslow says, “because he didn’t seem particularly psyched to get a new job.”
Koslow found herself grappling with competing impulses: the desire to help her son, which she was financially and emotionally capable of doing, and the fear that she had somehow failed if her 25-year-old was happy to be living rent-free, partying at night and sleeping half the day, not helping with the laundry or the grocery shopping or willing to make the bed, declining job offers that he found unsatisfactory.
All of which happened.
“Let’s admit it,” Koslow writes. “Whether we could afford to or not, we’ve spoiled kids to an unprecedented degree in human history . . . Today’s students enter college on a cloud of narcissism.”
(She forced her son to take the unsatisfactory job and move out.)
Koslow spoke with numerous experts and parents for her book, and she’s still unsure as to whether cockpit parenting is helpful or harmful. Children and young adults raised this way tend to lack “soft skills,” which, not too long ago, were considered rudiments of functional behavior: how to do laundry, balance a checkbook, schedule a flight or call for roadside assistance. One anecdote in Koslow’s book involves a twentysomething young woman who called her father in tears after her car broke down; she did not know to call AAA because she did not know such a thing existed.
“I think our children are younger than we were at their age,” Koslow says. “Today, 25 seems extremely young. It creates a very tricky parent-child dance.”
A little over a week ago, Jason Siegel had an announcement: He’d just come from looking at an apartment on First Avenue and 39th Street with two possible new roommates, both of whom work in finance. It’s a new building with “good finishes,” he reports. Though they’re not sure this is the one, whether he winds up here or somewhere else, Siegel says he is definitely, finally ready to move out.
“I’d like to start engaging with people, have more intellectual conversations,” he says. “My interactions with my parents have been very basic. It’s a lot of small talk, because they’re always there. I think we’ll have a deeper, more meaningful relationship when I move out.”
Surely, a good knocking-about by the real world will also contribute to those deeper, more meaningful conversations.
“Parents have to accept that they can do about 60% of the preparation,” Pickhardt says. “As for the other 40% — they have to turn the kid over to reality and let the school of hard knocks do its job.”