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The accordion family: When kids move home
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The accordion family: When kids move home
An extremely tough job market for young people has seen kids returning home to live with their parents in droves. As these households expand like the bellows of an accordion, stress often follows.
ALAIN JOCARD/AFP/Getty Images
About a fifth of men aged 25 to 34 are living at home again. With few jobs available to recent college grads, and young people generally, the post-recession economy has created a wave of “boomerang kids.” If you’re 30 and living at home, are you an adult or a child?
That’s something author Katherine Newman wonders. Her new book, “The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition” takes a look at this phenomenon. She talks with Tess Vigeland about how families are affected when grown-up kids move back in.
“There’s a worry that the next generation is simply not going to see the kind of prosperity and independence we typically thought of as characteristic in the Baby Boom generation,” Newman tells Tess. “That what is happening in the world economy is reverberating in the private sphere of the family.”
Click on the player above to listen to the interview.
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