Keeping Your Kids Afloat

AARP Magazine
By Anne Cassidy, November & December 2006

As the cost of living soars, more young adults are turning to their parents for financial help. Sometimes the best help of all is saying no

Six months after Sue and Jim Pearson of Washington, Indiana, were married, Sue's daughter, Kimberly, 22, called and said, "I have nowhere else to go. I'm coming home." Kimberly had been living with her fiancé and his parents. Then the engagement ended, and her daycare-center job didn't pay enough to support her.

When Russ Phillips was 19, "he heard there were jobs in Utah, so he just took off," says his mother, April Phillips, of Reston, Virginia. Armed with a high-school-equivalency diploma, Russ found a series of menial jobs—waiting tables, sorting cans, working as a ranch hand. Sometimes he had to ask his mother to help out with money for food, rent, or a car payment. "I never sent him enough to come home, only enough to solve the problem," says April, an elementary-school teacher.

Families like the Pearsons and the Phillipses are popping up everywhere these days as young adults confront higher hurdles on the path to independence. Since 1970 the number of adults ages 25 to 34 living in a parent's home has ballooned by more than 50 percent, to 39 million—and parents, on average, are spending an inflation-adjusted 13 percent more on their grown offspring, reports a University of Michigan study based on Census Bureau data. For many parents the financial strain of this longer haul means postponing retirement, raiding savings, or taking on debt in an effort to help their kids. For all, it means added worry.

"This is a cultural sea change," says Linda Perlman Gordon, a psychotherapist and coauthor (with Susan Morris Shaffer) of Mom, Can I Move Back In With You? (Tarcher/Penguin, 2004), of the phenomenon of parental involvement in grown children's lives. She and Shaffer use the term adultescence to describe the prolonged period today's young people spend as%2