Independent Perspective News - You can go home again

By Johnny Diaz.

The first time Margo Anderson moved back home to the parental nest was a rough draft for the second.

After she graduated from Hamilton College in upstate New York in 2000, she moved back to Dorchester's Lower Mills neighborhood because "I didn't have any money."

She eventually saved some, landed a job as a bank analyst and found an apartment and a roommate in Newton. Now, as she prepares for law school this month, Anderson decided to return to her old Lower Mills home to save some dough.

"I didn't want to be in debt any more than I needed to be," said Anderson, who is 24.

Like Anderson, many young adults are learning another lesson in their post-college years: Getting on in life can mean taking a U-turn -- and flocking back home.

A stingy job market, high housing costs, and college debt have forced many 20-somethings to discover that returning home, at least temporarily, is a necessity when their ideal straightforward plans take a sudden turn.

Some of their independence is curtailed. Home-cooked meals replace all-night parties. I-won't-be-home-tonight notes dot the refrigerator. No overnight guests allowed.

As their college counterparts prepare to head back to school in a few weeks, some of these out-of-work or debt-burdened graduates are finding that returning home might actually be good for them. They avoid latching onto public assistance during jobless stretches. They gain maturity. They hold out for jobs that are more meaningful to them. They save money.

"The second time around is definitely better," Anderson says of life with parents, "because they aren't trying to keep track of me as much. Now they go to bed."

But it's a lifestyle change for empty-nesters as their homes fill up again with their adult offspring. That can mean a change in family dynamics, household expenses, and dashed plans for that spare room. In Anderson's case, her parents had already converted her bedroom, and she found herself in the spare basement room once used by her grandmother.

Sociologists have referred to Anderson and other returning adult children as "boomerang children."

"For the better part of human history, children stayed closer to their parents or to their parents' house. They didn't move out until they were financially stable," said Daniel Monti, a Boston University sociologist. "Children living at home into their young adulthood used to be more commonplace than it is today. So part of what we see going on is simply a reversion to the way life used to be."

It has been happening in the past 20 years, as the number of adult children living at home has increased steadily, according to the US Census Bureau.

In 1980, 10.5 percent of all 25- to 34-year-old men lived at home. Three years ago, 12.9 percent did.

Women of the same demographic showed a parallel rise: from 7.0 percent living at home in 1980 to 8.3 percent in 2000. For men between ages 18 to 24, 54.3 percent lived with parents in 1980 while 57.1 percent did in 2000.

Just last month, Maynard-based MonsterTrak.com's "Living at Home" informal online survey reported 64 percent of college graduates who answered say they plan to live at home with their parents. Another recent MonsterTrak check found that 53 percent of college seniors who responded didn't expect to find job offers when they graduated last May, compared with just 23 percent when the same question was asked two years earlier.

Taking a page from the you-can-go-home-again theme, a NBC show debuting this fall, called "Happy Family," will feature adult children moving back in with their would-be empty-nester parents.

Despite what had increasingly become a social taboo in American culture, moving back home or staying there after college has been common among some immigrant groups, including many Latinos and Haitians.

"The son or daughter helps the parents by contributing with their individual incomes. More recent arrivals will stay longer at home because of the financial pressures and stresses of keeping a household together," said Monti, of Boston University, adding that being on your own can be an expensive endeavor regardless of ethnicity or race.

"You have kids who are making it but for whom living independently is prohibitively expensive. The kid comes back and lives at home and replenishes their financial reserves and moves out more successfully and more efficiently as a solitary person. In a particular place like Boston, which is so expensive, you will see this happening a lot."

`I felt like a teenager'

Just ask Sarah Northrup, who has put on a good face each time she has used her going-back-home card since she graduated from Boston College three years ago.

After moving home from school for a year, she then rented an apartment in Waltham for about $900 and later shared a Brighton three-bedroom with two roommates for $733 each earlier this year. She was hoping to move in with her boyfriend when his lease was up, but he lost his job and moved back to his parents' house in Milton.

Stuck with heavy credit card debt, Northrup, 24, did the same four months ago, returning to her parents' house in Newton.

"Every once in a while, it's sort of embarrassing to say `Yeah, I live at home with my parents.' But overall, it's OK. Hopefully, it goes better this time around," said Northrup, who works as an environmental compliance coordinator for a telecommunications company. "It's one of those things where I say, `I am going to grow up and get my own home.' The goal is for me to get completely out of debt [so] that I might pay everything off and move out again."

Northrup says her parents have been supportive. She doesn't have to call her parents (although she does if she stays out late), keep a curfew, or pay rent.

But there are some rules she has to abide by.

One of them: Her boyfriend can't sleep over unless he stays in the guest room.

For Northrup, it's the kind of adolescent flashback she hadn't expected.

"At the end of the night, it's like goodnight and you go home," said Northrup. "It's reverting back to high school dating again, a very sad thing to be stuck with at 24."

Anderson, who moved back home in May after living on her own in Newton for more than a year, finds herself adjusting as well.

When she moved back to Lower Mills the first time post-college, she remembers being pelted with questions: "Where are you going now? What are you going to do? What are your friends' phone numbers? Are you going to a party?"

Anderson said she "felt like a teenager."

This time around, Anderson said, she and her parents made some rules upfront. Among them: She would not be required to wash her dishes of oatmeal right away nor pick up her backpack and handbag that she drops off in the dining room when she gets home.

"It's not so bad," Anderson said of living back home. "Because it's not the first time, we've got a better handle on how to deal with it now."

Phone line warfare

Not everyone cherishes extended cohabitation with their not-so-little-anymore offspring. At the Hoffman household in Randolph, sometimes Ian and Susan Hoffman can't make calls.

"We only have one phone line and he likes to use the computer," said Ian Hoffman, who said he enjoys having his oldest son, Shaun, home. "At times it's nice and at times it's, `Aghhhh!' For the most part, it's us trying to get a hold of our phone line."

Shaun Hoffman acknowledges hogging the phone line to go online. But hey, he reasons, he sometimes cooks meals for his parents.

"I'm used to being on my own, washing dishes on my own time, being on the Internet whenever I need to be, doing things my way. But it's different at home," he said.

One issue, he says: "nagging" to mow the lawn.

When Hoffman's job prospects fell through, the 2002 college grad knew what he had to do: Return to the parental nest. Reclaim the old bunk bed he left after graduating high school in 1996.

Then weeks at home turned into months. The job search became an epic tale. Now a year later, Hoffman says it's OK back in Randolph but "kind of tough. I have to find a job, but there really isn't much out there. It's frustrating."

When he graduated in 2002 from Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, N.H., Hoffman was optimistic he would land a job as basketball coach or as a resident director in a school.

"I had a few jobs lined up but they all fell through, most of them were resident director positions at colleges, which includes housing," he said. "So I applied to 43 positions last summer. With those 43 resumes, I had one interview. I did not get the job."

He recalls last summer, when he told the parents he wouldn't stay long. "Hey, it's for the summer, what the heck," recalled Susan Hoffman, whose two other children do not live at home. "The summer turned into a year. It was longer than any of us had anticipated."

Shaun Hoffman began substitute teaching in Canton, where he grew up, and became a volunteer assistant basketball coach at Franklin Pierce College. He hopes to land a permanent well-paying job -- or at least a part-time job, so he can still coach basketball at his alma matter.

His goal: to break out of the nest by fall.

If he doesn't make it, his mom, despite yearning to make over his bedroom as a gym, says she can handle it.

"He knows," she says, "he has a place to come home to."