Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/03/26-year-old-americans-are-now.html
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Don’t know if there’s an explanation for this in the article because it’s inaccessible, but I’m pretty sure there was a non-zero number of people living with unmarried partners in 1968.
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They probably would have used the word “roommate” for their own safety.
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One suspects those would still count as roommates. Certainly back in 89 when I was still 26 I lived with roommates.
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Spouses are that deadly for 26-year-olds?
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Given the current social safety net, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of those 26 year olds were living with their 'rents to help take care of them since they can’t afford a nursing home because insurance and whatnot.
I wouldn’t mind living with both my spouse and my 'rents, as long as the 'rents give me POA.
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Here’s another way to characterize the data: 26-year-old Americans are much more likely to live alone than in 1968.
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Not just 26-year-olds. My sister had to go back and live with my mom and step-dad, and my wife’s brother had to move in with his mom after his divorce. And they are in their 40s.
It’s annoying for all involved.
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Sometimes this can go the other way, too. A child will move back in with their parents to help the parents with bills.
But of course, single family homes are relatively historically unique anyway. Before the modern era (and in many places around the world) the norm is multi-family living. That being said, we are very used to our individuality and privacy, and not having that can be annoying and feel very weird or like a personal failure…
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Right, however not in either of these cases. I’m just hoping I can continue my streak of self reliance until it’s my time to fall over dead. 20-ish years, maybe. Fingers crossed.
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But if you merge the “spouse” and “partner” groups, they are still larger than the “parents” group. The gap has decreased, but it hasn’t inverted.
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Absolutely. There are definitely benefits to multi-generational family living, but I couldn’t hack it myself after becoming accustomed to living on my own. Having to move back in with my mother, even as a caregiver (which I would do if circumstances demanded it), would drive me nuts.
Also, this phenomenon in contemporary America is driven more by economic necessity than it is by some cultural shift that values family bonding more than it has in the past half century or so. Economic necessity basically drives it in other cultures, too – they’ve just been doing it long enough that it’s morphed into virtue and never really experienced the postwar economic anomaly that the developed world enjoyed from 1947 until 2007 or so.
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Oh yeah… it would drive me crazy living with my parent at this point…
True, but I think it’s important to remember that single family homes are very much an aberration to longer historical realities.
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Seriously,
1968: “Mom, Dad, this is Peter, he’s my… uh, roommate”
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Including in the U.S. Look at pre-war media and you see even wealthy households filled with parents, grown children, grandparents, and the occasional elderly “maiden aunt” or “bachelor uncle” all living under one roof (a lot less charming in real life if the household wasn’t wealthy, of course).
Single-family households are in large part a Silent, Boomer, and Gen X phenomenon, but becoming part of one is now (and for decades has) assumed to be a marker of adulthood. It will be interesting to see how that’s rolled back, culturally speaking.
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In this case, it’s already happening, so if it continues as a trend and becomes entrenched again, it will be a case of the culture catching up to describe reality… which is par for the course under capitalism, I’d argue.
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This is mostly driven by economic forces, but homes are a lot larger now too.
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this is that Moloch stuff I’ve been reading about
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It’d be great to live in a house on my own. But I don’t have half a million (starting. It goes up plenty higher around where I live and work) dollars to pay for one.
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