Esther Rantzen, the former television presenter and would-be MP, describes her
mood this weekend as one of “unalloyed joy”. Her 30-year-old daughter Emily,
who used to live in her own flat, has decided to move back home. As you read
this, Emily may well be unpacking suitcases while her mother makes Sunday
breakfast.
“She brought a few things round with a friend a few days ago. I heard them
roaring with laughter in the kitchen and my heart lifted,” said Rantzen. “I
loathe a quiet home. I have never, ever lived alone and I wouldn’t want to.”
Her son Joshua, a medical student, also spends extended periods at the family
home in north London “eating everything but the metal bar to the fridge”.
Does she mind her grown-up children reinvading? Far from it.
“It’s wonderful. I cook him huge casseroles and he polishes off the lot,” said
Rantzen. “Where is it that people all live together in longhouses - Borneo?
Well, I am a Borneo’d-again mother. As far as I’m concerned my house is a
longhouse, it’s just vertical rather than horizontal.”
Rantzen is one of millions of parents who find themselves playing host to
their adult offspring – although many are not nearly as delighted as she is
to see the chicks they thought had flown the coop come fluttering back home.
Job insecurity, house prices and failed relationships are frequent excuses for
what has become a growing trend. As of the end of 2008 some 1.8m – or 29% –
of men aged 20-34 were living with their parents, as were 1.1m – 18% – of
women – a significant increase. Add the impact of the credit crunch and it
is not hard to imagine that trend accelerating.
“My boyfriend and I are looking to buy and living at home is the only way to
save for a deposit,” said Gemma Collins, 23, who works in marketing in
Brighton and lives with her parents in Ripley, Surrey.
“I started a degree in London but moved back when I was 20 and have been here
ever since. Things are great, we get on better than we ever did before,
although I am sure my mother would like to get rid of me eventually.”
Research by the Higher Education Careers Service, published last week,
predicted that up to 22,000 graduates will join the ranks of the unemployed
this summer, while nearly 18,000 of last year’s graduates were still looking
for a job six months after they left university. Many of both groups have
joined or will join the trudge back to mum and dad when their student days
are over.
Britain has a greater proportion of so-called “boomerang” children – who leave
home to go to work or university only to return in their twenties – than
France, Ireland, Greece and Portugal, as ranked earlier this year in a study
by the Institute for Social & Economic Research at Essex University.
The impact this is having on family life is one that sociologists are watching
with interest: “It’s about people’s understanding of what it means to become
an adult and independent,” said Gill Jones, emeritus professor of sociology
at Keele University and author of Youth, a study of young people’s lives.
“If you are stuck at home with your parents until you are 30, you have to
rethink what you mean by the term ‘adult’. People living at home find ways
of defining themselves, maybe by paying for their board or making their own
decisions – eating out whenever they want to, for instance.
“But others find it quite difficult, especially if they have lived away and
have to go back home for some reason. Many – especially women – feel they
have gone backwards and their parents have control over them again.”
Studies dating back to Victorian times show that, historically, working-class
men have been the last to leave home. Middle-class men – and more recently
women, too – left for university while working-class men lived at home until
they had saved up enough money for a deposit on their own home or found
someone who would look after them the same way that their mother had.
Working-class women, who tended to marry early, were the youngest to leave
their families.
All that changed radically after the second world war. The expansion in higher
education meant that far more people of both sexes and classes headed for
university. With rents and property prices far more affordable than they are
today, teenagers began to disappear from home aged 18, never to return.
Now the pendulum is swinging back and with tough times ahead it may be that it
is the baby boom generation, rather than the “credit crunchers”, which turns
out to be the historical blip. Certainly, some baby boom parents are finding
it difficult to come to terms with their children’s apparent inability to
leave home, even if they have started their careers.
The mother of one stay-at-home twentysomething, who asked not to be named,
said: “I bumped into a friend in the supermarket and asked how her
26-year-old boy was. She rolled her eyes and said, ‘Still at home’. He’s a
solicitor.”
The woman added: “My son’s quite happy to be at home. I do all his washing and
he gets fed. I think it suits him. He gives me £150 a month, which is a lot
less than commercial rent. The average age to move out around here seems to
be 27.”
Negotiating new sets of rules that recognise everyone in the household as
adults can be tricky. One mother, whose three twentysomething children had
all left home, only to return several years later, said she and her husband
felt they had regressed back to a sort of student flatshare: “My husband
keeps going to the fridge and asking, ‘Who drank my beer?’ We’ve almost got
to the stage of keeping our food on different shelves and marking the levels
on the wine bottles.”
Doreen and Brian Jennings, whose 20-year-old son still lives with them in
their four-bedroom semi in West Yorkshire, went camping in Wales last week
to have some time to themselves. Sleeping under canvas was not quite what
she had expected at this stage of their lives. “It was nice to have a bit of
breathing space,” she said.
The sense of dissatisfaction, when it occurs, cuts both ways. One beleaguered
twentysomething wrote on a website that despite seven interviews she had not
been offered a job and she could tell that her mother was fed up with having
her around: “She is obsessed with ‘her things’ and ‘my things’. I cannot
wait to be on my own.”
The ill-feeling that grows up between the stay-at-home twenties and their
parents may well be prompted by guilt on both sides. “Young people often go
home because they can’t cope financially or they’ve lost a job, so there’s a
feeling of having failed to make it in the outside world,” said Jones.
“In theory young people caught up in the credit crunch - there being so many
in the same boat - should not feel guilty about staying at home into their
twenties. But I suspect in practice they do, even though it’s not rational
to feel guilty.
“Some parents are ambivalent about the issue, too. We are supposed to bring up
young people to become independent adults. So if your adult child returns
home, it suggests that you’ve failed as a parent.”
Money worries can exacerbate an already delicate situation. It is not just the
young who have been affected by the credit crunch: parents who had got used
to buying expensive clothes or doling out cash to their children are having
to retrench. For spoilt middle-class twentysomethings it has come as a shock.
“It might be that their parents can’t afford to help them with the deposit for
a flat, or even buy a flat for them as they did for older siblings,” said
Julia Margo, director of research at Demos, the think tank, which is
studying the impact of consumerism on family relationships.
“Suddenly there are spending constraints. It’s common to find resentment
against parents among poor children who live in affluent areas and are very
aware of the designer brands their parents can’t afford to buy them. For the
first time we are beginning to find that same resentment among middle-class
children, too.”
When it works, though, as it clearly does for Rantzen and her family, having
your children around has great benefits for both sides. “My parents have
almost come to terms with my chronic untidiness and I enjoy having my mother
on tap for spontaneous gossiping,” said Wersha Bharadwa,a 30-year-old
writer, who moved back to live with her parents in Solihull five years ago
after working in London.
“I’m here out of choice. I work in a great environment and I spend lots of
time with the people I love most. Where’s the downside to that?”
Chloe Madeley, the 21-year-old daughter of television’s Richard and Judy,
still lives at home and wrote recently of how she chats to her mother and
father “more like friends now”. Like Bharadwa, she particularly enjoys
“girl” time with her mother: “If it’s just me and mum in the house, a
perfect treat would be for me to cook scrambled eggs on toast and for us to
watch The Simpsons.”
Suzi Smith, 23, spent three years studying, followed by two years working in
London, but moved back home to Peters-field, Hampshire, two months ago. “I
was spending so much money on rent and I wanted to save,” she said. “After
five years I also got a little bit sick of living in London.”
Like many twentysomethings she found the transition tricky and wonders whether
the arrangement will last: “Mum was asking ‘What are you doing?’ and ‘What
time will you be home?’ That was hard to begin with. It’s great now - but by
Christmas I will probably be raring to get out again.”
Additional reporting: Zoe Brennan and Roger Waite
