Young adults are still financially reliant on parents

More than half of adults 18 to 34 years old rely on some sort of allowance from their parents, according to a study released by the Pew Research Center. (in the United States)

Gen Zers 18 to 24 are most likely to depend on their parents for financial support. In fact, more than half of this cohort survive thanks to their parents helping to pay for basic household expenses.

Almost 1 in 5 adults aged 30 to 34 have their parents chip in for their household bills.

Overall, only about 45% of 18- to 34-year-olds are completely financially independent from their parents, the Pew survey found.

Most Americans agree that young adults today face more challenges than their parents' generation, particularly when it comes to saving for the future, paying for college, buying a home, and finding a spouse, a 2022 Pew Research Center study found.

"We're likely to see young adults continue to put off important financial and personal milestones because they just can't afford them," Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, told The Post in 2022.

Most Gen Z and millennials are financially dependent on their parents: Pew report , Adriana Diaz, New York Post, January 25, 2024

Well Into Adulthood and Still Getting Money From Their Parents - Nearly 60% of parents provide financial help to their adult kids, a new study finds , Julia Carpenter, January 25, 2024, Wall Street Journal

A portrait of America's young adults: More debt burdened and financially dependent on their parents , Aimee Picchi, Alain Sherter, CBS News - Moneywatch, January 25, 2024


"Young Americans Struggle to Hit Adult Milestones"

Here's a link to an article about how certain "milestones", such as driving a car, moving out of one's parents house and renting an apartment, starting a family, or buying a home, are getting delayed among the newest generation of young people, compared with young people in previous generations (born between around 1935 to 1985).

Young Americans Struggle to Hit 'Adult' Milestones Story, Bloomburg, Natasha Solo-Lyons, May 2023

 

Isn't it etiquette to provide some sort of comment with an article to state your purpose?

 

My comment is this is an unattractive state to attract a mate, particularly for males. This may lead to resentment and incel like behaviour.

 

In my personal opinion, that is not always required. Sometimes facts have obvious implications. (Or have so many implications that it would be better to bring those up somewhere else in other different discussions)
The point of this thread is to present an issue and to inform people. And to debate in case anyone disagrees.

I will comment that I believe the root cause of this is almost entirely economic, rather than cultural.

We can be left to wonder what's eventually going to happen to the society once all the older generation dies off.
Young adults not being financially independent until later and later in life is certainly a worrying phenomena.

That type of situation mirrors other parts of the world with less economic opportunities, such as Italy or Iran.

 

On a positive note it means that you need to be polite to your parents, even once you leave home

Joking aside, perhaps the world doesn't need too many more people. It's worth noting that there is often cheap, sometimes free accommodation available in villages and towns. But it seems that young people want to live in cities - which you can't really blame them for.

 

What's interesting to point out is that the young adult suicide rates are often higher in those cheaper places than in the cities where it is unaffordable to live.

(But this is not always the case. For example, the young adult suicide rate is very high in Hawaii, a state where housing affordability is very difficult for young people and there is no easy escape except to move 2,400 miles away to the mainland)

Recently in the U.S. there has been an opioid drug epidemic ravishing young adults (especially male young adults) in economically depressed rural areas. The cause, of course, is believed to largely have to do with economics.

 

Yes country towns often have a higher suicide rate in particular in Australia. There's a kind of desolate hopelessness to them. Engaging in tourism can sometimes save the day.

Poverty of the Pocket or poverty of the Mind? An existential crisis?

I bet if cash was doled out it wouldn't make much of a difference.

 

I'd be somewhat curious exactly why that is. Whether it's lack of better economic opportunities, or maybe just shear boredom.
But that is a discussion for another thread.

Well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that. It's hard to dole out enough to free cash to make up for lost economic opportunities.

 

That's a good point. They need things to do to make money, not just money. The pity the Chinese do it so much cheaper, huh?

By the way, isn't the unemployment rate rather good in the US? That's why I was pointing to housing affordability.

 

For the year's end of 2023, the labor force participation rate is about 3.5% percentage points lower than it was in 2008, so that may be part of the issue.
(The percentage of people in the population trying to get a job going down will of course make the official "unemployment rate" go down)

And the economy is more complicated than just the unemployment rate (even if the labor force participation rate never changed). The unemployment rate doesn't necessarily tell us what quality of jobs the population has. They might be worse jobs, which pay less.

More of the younger generation has been going to college, but at the same time good paying jobs have been harder to get, and more people who have graduated from college are having trouble getting the better paying jobs that traditionally required college. This is a phenomena that has been going on since at least 2004.
So now many of those in the younger generation are just left with big student loan debts, and 4 to 6 years less time spent in the labor force.

If there is a problem with housing affordability, it could be because there is a problem with housing prices being too high, or it could because a larger share of the population is not in better paying jobs.

Unfortunately, I think monetary inflation kind of obscures change that happens over time. If there never was any inflation, then it would be easy to look at incomes and see if people in a certain type of job were earning more or less money in 2023 than they were in 1993. But with inflation, it appears that everyone is earning is always earning more money than in the past, which is an illusion, of course.

 

(This post will be very watered down to please the moderators.)

There is no better subject than this toi prove the decline of the USA. Not that long ago, folks 18 to 34 (unless they were in college) that were so dependent on their parents were would be social social pariahs, viewed as weak and helpless. They would also have a hard time finding a spouse. Embarrassment would drive them out into the world.

Such folks undermine the very fiber of the American spirit that made this country great.

Folks I grew up with with firmly established by their early thirties... married... kids... established career and more.

One guy I know had Commanded troops in the US and Germany by thirty-for. He had an engineering degree, an MBA and held a patent for a high tech system. He had a son who was destined to graduate Cornell and Fordham Law. He wasn't exceptional. He was very common and typical among his peers. He was the norm.