More Young Adults Are Poor, Live With Their Parents

By Brad Tuttle
September 14, 2011

It’s not your imagination: It really is more crowded at mom and dad’s place. The Census Bureau made headlines yesterday with news that the nation’s official poverty rate hit 15.1%, the highest since 1993. Tough times have also translated into a rise in adult children moving back into (or never leaving) their parent’s homes. In the spring of 2011, 5.9 million young adults aged 25 to 34 lived with their parents, up from 4.7 million before the recession. And these adult kids still at mom and dad’s make very little money: Over 45% have incomes that’d put them below the poverty threshold.

The U.S. Census Bureau puts these adult children living with their parents in the category of “doubled-up households”—when at least one extra adult resides in the home who is not in school and/or is outside the typical family unit. As of last spring, doubled-up households represented 18.3% of American residences (21.8 million total), up from 17% four years ago, when there were 19.7 doubled-up households.

In addition to adult kids sticking around longer, in recent years there has also been a rise in multi-generational homes where extended families of kids, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and/or cousins live under the same roof. A 2010 survey had it that 16.1% of Americans lived in multi-generational households, compared to 12.1% of the population in 1980. (For that matter, last year also witnessed an increase (8% more) of children living with their grandparents.) the rest