Moving in with mom and dad
Young adults struggling to find jobs, parents adjust to life back under one roof
Ben Hicks looks online for a job at his parent's house in Sonoma. Hicks graduated with a masters degree in engineering from Cal Poly this spring and has moved back in with his parents until he can find work.
BETH SCHLANKER/The Press DemocratPublished: Sunday, September 5, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, September 5, 2010 at 9:12 p.m.
On the eve of graduation and with a bright career ahead of him, Kathy Weber Hicks' son, Ben, called her last year from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with ominous news.
Mom, he confessed, there's one class I need but didn't take.
Hicks' heart sank, knowing that when it comes to putting a kid through school, even one more semester means thousands of dollars.
Just what was it her smart, high-achieving son — a civil engineering major — still needed?
Experience, was his ironic reply.
In years past, engineering majors at Poly graduated not only with options but firm job offers. But now promising grads are competing against experienced engineers for far fewer jobs. With no job prospects in sight, Ben Hicks, like many young college grads, ended up taking cover from the bad economy by heading to graduate school.
Now armed with a master's degree, he's back in his old boyhood bedroom in Sonoma — command central for a job search that has so far turned up only one serious job prospect.
Meanwhile Hicks, a nurse, struggles with how and where to draw the line with Ben, who is still her child but who also happens to be a highly educated 24-year-old man.
“I can't tell him he can't play computer games until 2 o'clock in the morning,” she said.
In the worst job economy since the 1930s, more and more young adults — largely kids of the baby boomers — are stuck living at home or, like boomerangs, landing back in the nest, unable to find career jobs or sometimes even any job that will pay enough to allow them to live independently. Sonoma County's jobless rate is 10.8 percent. But among young adults nationally, it's hovering around 15 to 16 percent, experts say, prolonging dependence and testing family dynamics with multiple generations once again living under the same roof in greater numbers than they have in decades.
“They're the last hired and the first fired. Even with a degree, it's taking them a lot longer to get on that escalator of career steps,” said Barbara Ray, a spokeswoman for the Network on Transition to Adulthood, a multi-discipline consortium in Philadelphia of researchers dedicated to studying coming-of-age issues.
Demographers say the depressed economy has hastened a trend that has been playing out for the past 30 years, with young adults taking longer to achieve those traditional markers of autonomy — whether it's getting married, getting a full-time job, renting an apartment or buying a house.
In 1980, just 11 percent of young adults age 25 to 34 lived in multi-generational homes. By 2008, the rate had leaped to 20 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And when those figures are updated, the percentage of young adults still living “at home” will undoubtedly prove even greater, said Frank Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Transition to Adulthood network.
“These young adults are now coming to terms with a set of economic constraints that their older siblings might not have felt or even their parents might not have felt at their age,” Furstenberg said.
According to a recent Pew Research Center analysis, in 2009, some 37 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds were either unemployed or out of the work force, the highest rate in that age group in 40 years. One in eight 20-somethings surveyed by Pew report having boomeranged back home after being on their own. The job connection website Monster.com's 2009 Annual Entry-Level Job Outlook found that 40 percent of 2008 grads were still living with their parents and that 42 percent of the 2006 graduates surveyed were also still in the nest.
“I was told when I arrived at Cal Poly that I would never have to look for a job. Jobs would come to me,” said Ben Hicks. Of the many jobs he's applied for, only one potential employer has even called him back. He's feeling optimistic, with interviews in two weeks and the candidate pool now down to just one rival. Still, the wait has been frustrating. His mother redid his room after he left home and it really doesn't feel like his space anymore.
“This phase of my life ended a long time ago and now it just feels like a blast from the past,” he said. “It feels like I'm not moving on, like it's a step back right now. My parents have been very understanding and very nice and very generous in letting me stay here, but I've spent enough time in this house. I need to start the next phase of my life.”
Camille Sapp, a 2005 El Molino graduate, had her own apartment until last fall, when she moved back in with her parents while finishing up at Santa Rosa Junior College. But even if she wanted to continue balancing on the edge of survival on her own, she said she probably couldn't. She has two part-time jobs — one at a store in the Petaluma outlet mall and one at a framery. But the hours still amount to only 20 to 25 a week. And at $9 to $11 an hour, it's hard to make enough to pay $500 a month for a shared rental, along with transportation, books, clothes and entertainment.
Making the squeeze even tighter is the fact that her parents recently downsized dramatically to a house in Cotati that is half the size of the home in Guerneville where she grew up. And her brother, Robin, 21, who makes $10.50 an hour working the night shift at Lowe's, also is living at home.
“It's weird to get that start and feel like you're finally providing for yourself and really making a life, only to wind up back home and being taken care of by your parents,” Sapp said. The room she lives in really doesn't feel like her room. Her parents had converted it to a library.
“Most of my stuff is in boxes in the garage,” she said. “It's pretty much just my bed, my clothes in the closet — and a bookshelf.”
Mom Carey Hobart said she and her husband never anticipated that when they decided to simplify and live “greener” by moving closer to their jobs, both kids would soon be living under their small roof — and that she would lose her own job.
“I worry about my kids delaying adulthood by living with us ... as if time is standing still and the clock has stopped,” she said. She tries to draw boundaries by requiring them to pay their own car insurance, plan and cook a meal once a week and pay a modest rent. She finds that establishing household expectations also is helpful to her, “to remind me that they are adults and not children anymore.”
“I wish I could put up one of those signs you see in work places — ‘Your mother doesn't live here, clean up after yourself.' But I do live here,” she said with a sigh.
Colin Seeley, 28, lives with his wife, Hannah, in a trailer parked behind his parents' house in west Santa Rosa. He gave up a good job in product development in Oregon to go back to school at Cornell University. Now he has a graduate degree from an Ivy League school and $50,000 in educational loans. He's also unemployed. Moving home seemed like a good way to save money and the trailer gives him and Hannah, who just landed a good job at Medtronic, a little feeling of distance. He said he did have to clamp down on his teenage sister's frequent drop-ins, acting as if he were back in his old bedroom.
“I started sending out my resume in October '09 before I had even finished school just to get a head start. I was expecting in three or four months to be able to find a job,” he said. “Then once I got to six months, I started getting a little nervous. I'm frustrated more than anything.”
Mom Marcia Seeley said she feels down about it, but takes comfort knowing it's something a lot of families are struggling with now.
“I'd feel a whole lot worse,” she said, “if everyone else was booming and he wasn't.”
Social observers speculate that the bum economy isn't the only thing keeping kids at home longer. Surveys show millennials seem to get along better with their parents than baby boomers did with theirs, making it a whole lot easier, if not exactly desirable, to move home.
The so-called generation gap that loomed like an uncrossable chasm in the '60s and '70s — when many boomers couldn't leave home fast enough — seems to be closing, said Neil Howe, a demographer who writes about generational changes and who first dubbed the post-Gen X generation “millennials.”
Boomer parents, reacting to their own disaffected youth, may also be more likely to support their adult children as they try to find a career path that fits. At the same time, they may be puzzled and even frustrated by what some perceive as a pickiness when it comes to accepting jobs. This is a generation praised and raised to be confident.
“Because of this idea that young people now have that what you do now has repercussions down the road, they'll likely avoid taking the first available jobs,” Howe said. “A lot will take temporary jobs with no commitment but they don't want to take jobs that will take them off their career path.”
Han Wingate, a Petaluma marriage and family therapist, school counselor and mother of two young adults, believes that “home” can be a safe launching pad. Her son, Schuyler Lindberg, 25, returned home to regroup after he lost his job scouting music for a video game company. He's now returning to graduate school.
“You have to make sure that as a parent you're really clear that the idea is that they're launching,” she said. “They definitely don't want to stay comfortable there. We have to be pretty strategic as parents. If we see our kids sitting around and playing video games and getting isolated or depressed, or even hanging out with their old high school friends, that's not helping them.”
Kathy Weber Hicks said she believes her son is on track. “It's not like he's sitting around watching ‘SpongeBob Squarepants.'” But she wrestles with just how “cushy” to make it. She said it's so different now than when she was young.
“I never would have considered coming back home to live,” she said. “It was never even talked about. It never crossed my mind.”
Travis Lyons graduated from Dominican University in San Rafael in 2009 with a degree in English. He's now waging his job search in publishing and media from his old bedroom in Sonoma. His parents, he said, are very understanding and even help with spending money. But he said it's certainly not his first choice in lifestyle.
“They take care of my needs and I don't have to forage for my own food,” he said of his parents. “But I'm ready to be on my own. I'm an adult and no matter how much autonomy I have at home, it's not as much as I would have living on my own.”
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