Kempner: Millennial kids won’t stay gone

Compare that with his own kids. With a year to go in college, one daughter recently announced that she wants to move back in with her parents for a couple of years after she graduates. That mimics the path of another daughter.

I can tell this idea is tough one for Daniels, a senior executive with Atlanta-based wealth manager Ronald Blue & Co. “I still believe that in this culture today this idea that when people graduate from college they are better off leaving the house.”

Yet, incredibly, now the most common living arrangement in the U.S. for people aged 18 to 34 is living with their parents, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis of 2014 data. That's a first in more than 130 years of record keeping.

In Georgia, 33 percent of people in that age group are living with parents, a touch higher than the national average Pew recorded.

I can hear the alarm bells ringing. The millenials won't stay gone!

What happened to the drive to flee dictatorial parents? What about the urge to claim one’s independence, get married or at least shack up and live in sin?

Have we raised a generation of weaklings?

Well, maybe.

Taking in adult children can be the kind of coddling that allows them to become slackers and strains the finances of parents.

Except …

I have to build up courage to write this (and please, don’t tell my own kids who are in college): It might be financially smart. If it’s done wisely.

This isn’t the way I grew up. I lived a few months with my parents after graduating college, then got a place of my own because, well, that’s what you did.

A co-worker and I shared a roach-infested “apartment” above a pawn shop. Air conditioning was accomplished with a 2x4 propping open a window. I had my own borrowed mattress on the floor, a cardboard box for a nightstand and maybe a beanbag chair. I was happy.

But as I’ve gotten older I’ve been struck by the financial inefficiency of this path in general.

Nearly half of U.S. houses built last year had four or more bedrooms. Which means that once the kids leave, huge amounts of space go unused, at least until the parents get around to downsizing.

LINK: Empty nesting ‘opportunities’ await

Living together should be cheaper than setting up another household. Why pay for more than one Internet plan? Why have more than one power bill or property insurance policy? Why have two sofas when there’s enough space on one?

If everyone is working and contributing meaningfully to living expenses, this whole living-with-parents thing could be good for personal finances.

Not everyone wins, though. It’s an unsettling trend for homebuilders, carpet manufacturers and, in fact, any business that relies on young adults to, you know, act like what we thought was normal and spend money getting their own place.

LINK: What we want in our next home — everything and not too much

Andrew Goolsby, 29, now lives with three roommates in Duluth, works full time at a car wash and recently restarted taking college classes after a decade-long hiatus. But having worked a hodgepodge of mostly low-paying jobs, he has sporadically lived with his parents as well as a grandparent since becoming an adult.

He’s not the only one to do that among his circle of friends.

“I saw a lot of people moving back home,” he told me.

Dwuane Brummell didn’t end up in his childhood home. But at 27 and a senior working toward a biology degree, he lives in the downstairs of a split-level in Athens with his older sister and her husband and kids.

It’s an affordable, pressure-free arrangement, he explained to me. “It’s like how a businessman would take advantage of a tax break to save money.”

He, like other young adults I talked to for this column, seemed so … practical.

Getting through college and excelling at work seems to be a bigger, more immediate goal than long-term romance. (Young adults today are significantly less likely to be married or living with a partner than past generations were at the same age.)

Apparently, there’s a certain amount of patience in the love department while they rush to take care of more pressing things. We’ve given our kids our financial anxiety. They’ve seen how hard it is to get a job. They’ve heard the prompts to excel or be left behind. They’ve built up record college debt that has to be paid off.

The changing pressures leave parents struggling for the right balance as they consider having adult kids return home. Among them is Daniels, whose 22-year-old daughter recently disclosed that she wants to move back in next year to save money as she launches her career.

“Raising a child to leave the house and make it on their own in this environment and economy is not as easy as it use to be,” Daniels told me.

For now, he’s planning to put in place the same strategy he used with another daughter who moved in for two years while starting out in a low-paying job for a nonprofit.

He gave the daughter a gradually diminishing monthly payment to cover some expenses. He called it a “glide path.”

“My philosophy is they have to begin making choices by themselves,” he said. “You need to start giving them that responsibility and get them feeling the onus of the responsibility.”