NewGeography.com: Millennial Generation Safe at Home
Each emerging American generation of adolescents and young adults tends to have a distinctive relationship with its parents. For the Baby Boomers of the 1960s and 1970s, that relationship was often conflicted, even adversarial. For Generation X in the 1980s and 1990s it was frequently distant and disrespectful. By contrast, the interactions with their parents of most of today’s Millennial Generation (born 1982-2003) are close, loving, and friendly. That’s a very good thing because, to a far greater extent than for the previous two or three generations, Millennials in their twenties live with their parents, and even grandparents, in multigenerational households. To the surprise of many members of older generations, most Millennials—and their parents—believe the experience is beneficial and even enjoyable. It may even help America in the years ahead.
A Pew survey conducted last December indicated that nearly two-thirds (63%) of young adults 25-34 knew someone who had recently moved back in with their parents. Almost three in ten (29%) said that they were currently living with their parents. That is nearly three times the percentage of those of that age who lived with their parents in 1980 (11%). Multigenerational households, once seen as a lagging trend, have been growing as a share of households since 1980, rising from 12 to 16 percent over the past three decades.
More recently, the powerful and disproportionately large impact of the Great Recession on young Americans appears to have further accelerated this trend toward multigenerational households. According to Pew, in 2011, the unemployment rate for 18-24 year olds (16.3%) and 25-29 year olds (10.3%) was well above that of those 35-64 (7%). ...
... Like Millennials, the GI Generation (born 1901-1924) was of a type labeled “civic” by those who study generational change. Like the Millennial Generation, the GI Generation was raised in a protected manner by its parents and even tended to stay with their parents well into adulthood; multi-generational households according to Pew, after all, were far more common—nearly one in four in 1940—than today. This led to complaints about the generation that later became known as the Greatest Generation which sound strikingly like what is said about Millennials today. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe, the creators of generational theory, early in World War II, Army psychiatrists even fretted about “how badly Army recruits had been over-mothered in the years before the war.”
Perhaps as a result of this protected upbringing, the GI Generation also was a “stay-at-home” cohort when its members were young adults. A Pew analysis of US Census data from 1940 indicates that when this generation were all 25-34 year olds about 28% of them lived in multigenerational households, a number almost identical to that of Millennials today. As a result, members of the GI Generation married and had children later than previous or subsequent generations, just as Millennials are doing today. However, once the pressures of depression and war were behind them, the GI Generation more than caught up. It parented the Baby Boom Generation, the largest in American history before Millennials came along. Aided by favorable governmental policies such as the GI Bill and the Federal Housing Administration, it grew the American economy to unprecedented heights, and expanded the American middle class, homeownership, and enjoyed en masse the chance to escape crowded cities for more bucolic suburbs. ...
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