Are your adult children “yuckies”?
Another new acronym has been coined to describe adult children living at home: yuckies. It stands for Young Unwitting Costly Kid.
The interesting thing is that so many of the adult children who still rely on their parents for financial support really are unwitting about the amount of financial pressure it can put on parents to support their children well beyond childhood. If your adult children are thinking about moving home — or are already there — make sure you talk to them honestly about any concerns you have about your own financial well-being, whether it’s major, like concerns about being able to pay the larger grocery or heating bills, or whether it’s a simple thing — like you’d been planning a vacation that you can no longer afford to take. A family budget can be a good way to get a clear picture of your boomerang kid’s impact on your household finances.
Stay focused on the goal
If you’re like me, you’re probably pretty much glued to your TV set this past week, watching the Winter Olympics. I’m especially lucky, as they’re happening right here in Vancouver.
I was thinking about the sacrifices these athletes–and their parents–make to get where they are now, when I came across a great quote I wanted to share with you.
James Southam, who is competing on the U.S. Olympic cross country ski team, told his home-town newspaper about the experience of moving back home to live with his parents when he began pursuing his Olympic dream:
“Fortunately my parents saw this [training] as a job,” he said of dad Dean, a teacher, and mom Mary Anne, who ran a doctor’s office. “It wasn’t always fun for them having their 21-year-old son living at home, but we made it work.”
It’s a great reminder on the importance of staying focused on the reason your adult child has returned home, and helping them reach that goal.
It doesn’t have to be as ambitious a goal as becoming an Olympic athlete, but for everyone’s sanity there needs to be a stated goal, preferably with a target date.
If you and your adult child can view that goal as a job–whether it’s so they can save for a down payment, work to land a new job, go back to school, or get their life in order–it can help everyone get over some of the inevitable hurdles.
Boomeranging: A wise financial decision?
I’m interested to see what readers of this blog think of a recent editorial written by the editor in chief of the college paper at Ferris State University in Michigan. The editor says that moving back in with one’s parents is a “rather adult decision.” Her logic?
Recognizing the likely poor living conditions they would be able to afford individually and deciding that rather than settling for a job just to pay the bills, this demographic has opted to stay in school, continuing their education to better weather the economic storms in the future.
With the headline “Boomerang Kids Aren’t Bad,” this piece may stir up some negative feelings from parents struggling with adult kids who are close to overstaying their welcome. You can read the full piece here.
Why should they ever grow up?
A recent opinion piece by Mark Steyn on Macleans.ca talked about the impacts of adult children living at home, pegged to the story of Giancarlo Casagrande, a 60-year-old Italian father who has been ordered by the Italian court to pay support to his 32-year-old daughter until she finishes her thesis — which she’s been working on for eight years.
This might sound utterly bizarre, but it’s simply an extreme example of the cultural shifts that have allowed adult children living at home to become such a problem all over the world (and it is a problem — statistics show that there are numerous financial and emotional consequences for both the parents and the adult child).
As Steyn says in his piece:
If you’re a 30-year-old Japanese gal or 38-year-old Italian guy, why move out of the house? You’ve got all the benefits of adulthood (shagging, boozing, your own TV) with none of the responsibilities (cooking, laundry, property tax bills). We’ve created a world in which a 37-year-old Italian male can stroll into a singles bar, tell the chicks he lives at his mum and dad’s place in the same bedroom he’s slept in since he was in grade school—and he can still walk out with a hot-looking babe. This guy would have been a laughingstock at any other point in human history.
To read the rest of Steyn’s piece, click here.
New study: Adult children get more help in “a more complicated world”
This cheeky graphic comes from a recent article in the Globe and Mail. And in case you’re wondering what the secret is — it’s you.
The article talks about a study published last month in the Journal of Marriage and Family that looked at the relationships of 633 Philadelphia-area parents, aged 40 to 60, and their 1,384 children, aged 18 to 33.
The findings? Of those 18- to 33-year-old adult children, 76% got domestic help monthly, and 79% got money most months. That’s more than three quarters of 18- to 33-year-olds still getting regular financial support from mom and dad!
The article also introduces us to a couple of families where the moms seem happy to continue baking and doing laundry for their adult children. If this describes you, keep in mind that your adult children will need to learn to do their own laundry some day — and you’re really not helping them to become independent by continuing to care for them as if they are small children.
You can read the whole Globe article here.