More Parents Are Moving In With Adult Children—at Younger Ages
Housing costs, child care and shifting ideas about family are driving a new rise in multigenerational living
4 min
More parents are moving in with their young adult children, and they are doing it while they are younger, healthier and often still working.
One in four Americans aged 25 to 34 lived with parents or older relatives as of 2021, the fastest-growing segment in multigenerational households, according to data from Pew Research Center. Most of this group is adult children moving back in with their parents, but a significant number of older adults are moving in with millennials, said Richard Fry, a senior researcher at Pew. In 2021, 9% of multigenerational households were headed by a 25- to 34-year-old, up from 6% in 2001.
Some parents aren’t waiting for retirement or urgent healthcare needs to move in with adult children, the Pew data suggests. Known as the reverse-boomerang effect, the move is often driven by changing attitudes about family life, high housing costs and challenges in finding affordable child care, the researchers said.
Nearly one in five Americans lived in multigenerational homes in 2021, which are defined as two or more adult generations living under the same roof. Such arrangements were more the norm in the first half of the 20th century. But they fell out of favor as housing centered on the nuclear family and older Americans stayed healthier longer and had more money.
After bottoming out at 12% of Americans in 1980, multigenerational living has made a comeback in recent years, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis and during the pandemic, according to Pew.
The challenges of the housing market are also a factor. In 2022, 14% of all home buyers set up multigenerational homes, up from 11% in 2021, according to the National Association of Realtors. The pandemic drove an increase in demand for homes designed for multigenerational living, with separate living areas for older parents.
Pooling resources
Having more generations in one household allows first-time millennial buyers to pool financial resources with older relatives, says Jessica Lautz, the NAR’s deputy chief economist and vice president of research.
Though the hallmark of independence was once living on your own, adults who asked older relatives to move in say it has advantages.
Last year, Darin Freeman, a 30-year-old who makes a living promoting home appliances, clothes and makeup on social media, bought a 3,300-square-foot home in Tampa, Fla., with her husband. The couple spent a year trying to convince her dad, Daniel Kane, and his wife and stepdaughter to move in with them and their two children.
Mrs. Freeman wanted to be closer to Mr. Kane, who lived in Safford, Ariz. She offered him a job managing her and her husband’s Amazon reselling business. They would pay him about $5,000 a month to communicate with manufacturers, keep track of inventory and test new products.
Mr. Kane, 48, says he was hesitant. His job in radio communications for a mining company paid $120,000 a year, but meant 12-hour shifts, a two-hour commute and crawling through narrow spaces.
“I’m turning 49. I’m tired of beating myself up to make someone else money. I’d rather beat myself up making my daughter money,” he said.
He also wanted more time with his daughter and his grandchildren beyond yearly trips, he said. He wanted to cook them breakfast and watch their soccer games and gymnastics practices. Mr. Kane and his wife have their own bedroom and separate bathroom, which he calls “his own little apartment.”
Sharing bills and space
The Freemans pay the mortgage. Mr. Kane shops for groceries, his wife cleans the house, and they watch the Freemans’ 7-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son. Groceries and utilities go on one shared credit card, which they split down the middle.
“For the first time we have endless amounts of help,” Mrs. Freeman said. “We have more time to do things that we enjoy.”
But with most of the adults working from home, it can be hard to find a quiet place to work, says Mrs. Freeman. She works from her bedroom, where she shoots videos and social media content.
As a child, Mrs. Freeman, who is half Filipino and half white, lived with her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. She says that made her more comfortable with the idea of living with her father as an adult.
Mrs. Freeman’s husband also grew up in a four-generation household. She says he understood her desire to have her family closer, since many of his family members also live in Florida.
Pros and cons
The majority of adults in multigenerational households say living with adult family members has been at least somewhat positive, according to Pew, although nearly a quarter said it was often stressful.
Since 2018, Simon DoQuang, 31, and his wife, Alexis DoQuang, 28, have lived with his father in a four-bedroom house in Ellicott City, Md. Mr. DoQuang’s father, Louis DoQuang, made the down payment and the younger DoQuangs pay the $2,425-a-month mortgage. Louis, 62, has Parkinson’s disease and often needs help. And Simon and Alexis, who are working parents with two children, found themselves looking for child care.
In the summer of 2020, they convinced Simon’s mother, Anna DoQuang, to move in, too. She had been living in Las Vegas, apart from her husband. The younger DoQuangs’ oldest son is 4 and goes to daycare, but they needed someone to watch their youngest. Simon offered to pay his mother every month to move in and care for their 2-year-old.
“It’s a blessing to see my grandson grow up,” Anna said.
Simon said his multigenerational living experience is bittersweet. His parents cook, clean and babysit on date nights. But what they are saving in child care and time is costing them in privacy.
“Sometimes I feel like we can’t really be ourselves as a family of four,” Simon said.
His mother says she also misses the privacy of living by herself but that it is too expensive. She says because Alexis’s work schedule changes every week, they need someone to look after their toddler and Louis.
Simon says he and his wife feel they have to keep public displays of affection around the household to a minimum.
“There’s a lot of pros and cons to it,” Simon said. “We’re thinking about possibly selling this house sometime next year so we can separate from my parents.”
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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