Destigmatizing the Mom’s Basement Trope:

A Return to Communal and Multigenerational Households

Over the past six months or so, I’ve noticed a marked uptick in moms of young adults posting to local Facebook groups expressing their embarrassment and/or discomfort with the fact that their adult children are still living at home despite their obvious desire to let their children stay for as long as they’d like. Often, the post isn’t a question but simply a request for reassurance that they’re not alone — one that is answered resoundingly. 

The comments will invariably be full of replies from moms in the same situation expressing solidarity — they know a lot of folks look down on this, but they also know they don’t want to force their child into a life of perpetual hardship and struggle where their basic needs aren’t being met. 

We all get the point of laughing at jokes about living in a parent’s basement. It’s an effective insult because of what it implies: that the butt of the joke failed to launch into adulthood, instead finding themselves leeching off of their parents like a spoiled man-child. And I say “man-child” intentionally because it almost always refers to a man, emphasizing the idea that men should be independent, men should be competitive earners plowing forward to eventually reap their cut of the American dream with a wife, a suburban home, and the latest iPhone.

That’s by no means to suggest the expectation doesn’t apply to women as well, because there’s plenty of cultural pressure for young women to move out and start contributing to society in some meaningful capitalist way, whether through a traditional role (increasingly less of an option in today’s economic climate) or through some other life roadmap that includes a projection of status and conformism.

But even if you buy into that vision, in a world where one income is no longer enough to support a family and most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, often forced to choose between basic necessities like rent or healthcare, the idea of teens graduating high school or college to jump on an upwardly mobile career track simply isn’t realistic for most young people.  

The High Price of Simply Existing

When I was a young adult in the late 1990s, it was possible to rent a basic apartment for around $600 a month. We didn’t have mobile or internet service yet to pay for back then, and landlines were pretty cheap. Figure in gas and your electric bill, assuming that your water is included in the rent price, and you could barely eke by as a solo renter on a full-time entry-level job with a few part-time hours on the side — that is, as long as you didn’t have a car payment, a car breakdown, or a medical crisis. Going to the dentist wasn’t possible, and good luck getting your employer to let you take time off for basic healthcare. But at the end of the day, it was certainly possible to struggle through. 

Even back then I saw plenty of folks forge ahead with toxic relationships, moving in with a boyfriend or girlfriend because it made sense economically. But just as it helped take the financial pressure off at move-in together, this intertwining of lives could also make it incredibly difficult to unwind the relationship once it went south, forcing many couples to stay together long past their coupling’s expiration date. 

Fast forward to 2026, and the financial pressures on lower-wage-earners are heavier than they’ve ever been. The costs of necessities like rent, utilities, and groceries have steadily increased, far outpacing wage increases for many Americans living in the lower half of the income spectrum. Compared to the 1990s and early 2000s when young drivers could pick up a cheap clunker that would get them to work and back for around $500, even the lowest-priced used cars can cost thousands, and good luck with the maintenance costs as its parts inevitably start to break down. And then there’s the price of the phone and internet service most young workers will need to even look for a job.

Still, some folks from older generations just love to dunk on younger folks for not having their lives together. Of course I mean the same older generations who worked 40-hour weeks, or if they worked side jobs, worked them to afford a higher standard of living rather than scrape by. The older generations who took vacations every year or two, supported a family on one income, had affordable housing options, and could just call up or walk into an employer to apply for a job instead of getting buried in a digital email landfill of AI-slop resumes despite submitting dozens or even hundreds of applications. Those generations.

“Nobody helped me out when I needed it” is a common refrain among these detractors, as if they remotely understand how much the world has changed since they set out into the workforce. They’ll be quick to tell young folks they need to “pay their dues” and work their way up in their chosen career or suggest they should take any job they can get, no matter how low the pay with no realization that the wages are below a livable standard in many careers…with no realization that it’s much easier to get settled in a lucrative career when there’s no constant pressure to pay for the next emergency, keep the lights on, and avoid homelessness. 

It’s awfully easy to sit on a high horse while atop a hefty retirement fund amassed in the pre-internet era when affordable places to live were much easier to come by. 

The Neurodiversity Factor

As my family stands on the precipice of change with both of my sons turning 18 and graduating high school this year, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about transitioning to adulthood, especially since all three of my kids are neurodivergent. A study published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information found that around 61% of autistic adults were employed, with many ASD individuals struggling to find work. Among those who are, 16% are employed part-time (per Forbes). Low wages and other challenges also contribute to high rates of poverty and homelessness among autistic adults, something I’ve watched autistic friends suffer in my own adult life.  

Many adults with ADHD, which both my sons have, also experience a widening income gap throughout their adult lives. 

But even if your kids were 100% neurotypical, the challenges young adults face moving out on their own today make getting any kind of a head start in life almost unattainable for many, thus perpetuating the poverty cycle and in many cases, pulling children of middle-class families down into poverty or poverty-adjacent levels of struggle where they’re doomed to a lifetime of food insecurity and inadequate health coverage.

And the kicker? The idea that kids should just move out when they turn 18 is largely a 20th-century construct — one that is, in our current economic climate, contributing to our collective income disparity problem in the United States. 

The Construct of the 18-Year Move-out Date

The idea of kids suddenly leaping from childhood to adulthood at 18, at which time they need to move out and start earning like good little Americans, is a societal construct that doesn’t exist in most of the world and really didn’t exist here until recently.

To calibrate the conversation, the U.S. census shows that nearly 60 percent of adults between 18 and 24 live with their parents today, with that number dropping dramatically as they enter the next age bracket. But around the globe in nations from Italy to China, most cultures consider multi-generational living the norm, according to one ABC piece. And that’s exactly how things were in the United States until the 20th century. 

According to one census analysis, generational living was common prior to the late 1800s, which saw somewhat of a shift in that pattern, possibly due in part to high U.S. immigration rates for young folks traveling alone. Not for nothing, it wouldn’t be long before we started shipping older folks off to homes for the elderly, a trend that increased with the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act. As should not come as a surprise to most readers, prejudices toward immigrants, who would find their extended families crammed into tenements, also began contributing to the stigma surrounding multi-generational households.  

Those patterns shifted again during the war and post-war periods of the 20th century with the G.I. bill and post-war marriage booms, with nuclear families reaching their highest levels during the post-World War II period, particularly among white Americans. But from the late 20th-century onward, the age of young adults leaving home has once more begun to rise. By the 1980s, one of every five U.S. adults lived in a multi-generational household, with the shift continuing its gradual return from nuclear living as Gen-Xers and Millennials now find themselves sandwiched between raising kids and caring for aging parents amid a difficult economic climate. 

All of that data isn’t meant to dazzle you with my awesome research skills or dizzy you with numbers and data, but rather to underline one simple point: that the whole nuclear family wasn’t even a thing until the 20th century, and even then who knows how many Don Drapers hawking cars and three-bedroom suburban homes had a vested interest in promoting the whole concept to pressure generations of little birdies to fly from the nest as early as possible. 

It’s also meant to emphasize that for most of human history on just about every corner of the planet, multi-generational households have been the standard. We literally evolved for it, and under the light of this revelation, it’s easy to see that the shift to nuclear or solo living isn’t helping our serious societal loneliness epidemic and socialization issues in the post-internet era.

When Teenagers Aren’t Teenagers Anymore

It’s not just the economics crushing young adults as they make their way out into the world. There’s also a reality that for some reason we aren’t really addressing yet as a society: that of the fact that the teenage years are no longer the interim period between childhood and adulthood that they once were under the cultural norms that we’re living with today. 

The teenage years used to be a period of experimenting with independence and developing relationships outside of the home. From driving cars to getting jobs to going out with friends, many teens are doing a lot less of this these days due to a convergence of factors like economic pressures, parental safety concerns, educational workloads, and an increased reliance on online communications. And beyond the screentime piece, factors like parental burnout from an overburdened workload or on the other side of the coin, parental overinvolvement, are only adding to teens’ lack of preparedness for adult living.  

As any parent who was raised in the 1980s or 1990s can see, kids today — especially kids who aren’t involved in sports or extracurricular activities — simply aren’t getting out as much as they used to. Study after study has shown that teens today are among the loneliest people in the world, and although some people will always thrive when they live alone, for many folks, solo living will only add to their sense of isolation. To boot, younger generations are also showing a marked decrease in resilience as they enter the workplace. 

Living With Adult Kids

Just as there’s a common misconception that gentle parenting means parenting without discipline or boundaries, there’s a common misconception that living with adult children means they get to live in perpetual childhood while mom continues to feed them, wash and fold their laundry, and foot the bill for everything. 

Of course, what your family dynamic looks like should be distinct to your family’s needs, and there’s no one perfect way of doing things. But what you don’t want to do is mistake multi-generational living for allowing your adult kids to live without adult responsibilities because, after all, they are adults. And if nothing else, you’re probably not going to be around forever to wash their undies for them — they need to be able to care for themselves and help support your household as contributing adults, and they need to have the skills developed that will one day serve them when they’re the heads of their own households. 

In my family, we’ve already discussed what this looks like. And although my sons are still in high school and don’t yet have jobs (psst…they’re applying if anyone is hiring!), we expect them to contribute to the household maintenance. That means not being asked to participate in chores but doing them independently, preparing meals some of the time, even repairing things that need to be repaired without anyone asking. It also means, generally speaking, earning their extras, like the Steam deck Arthur just purchased with his own money earned from participating in the community project Eastside Rise. It means applying for jobs and/or college scholarships on their own, and it means having a transition to adulthood plan in the works so they don’t end up just bumming around the house for the rest of their lives. 

And again, they’re still in high school. After graduation, they’re expected to contribute to the household expenses the same way their dad and I do, by helping out as they are able. 

I can also understand why it might be easier for some families to stick a dollar amount on their adult kids’ contributions or require them to take on a specific utility bill, for example. On the other hand, it might make sense for some families to continue to pay the bills while their kids say, go to medical school. It’s whatever works best for you — but what it isn’t is just hanging around a parent’s basement leeching up the freebies like a little fungus. 

And truly, if everyone is cool with the arrangement and they never want to leave, I don’t see any reason they should have to. 

As they become more steady on their feet, adult children can move out on their own time or contribute to a roomier space for the household where they can have more independence. The practice of long-term multigenerational living, which has already impacted the real estate market as families seek larger homes equipped to accommodate generations of family members, also helps to mitigate the housing crisis burden.   

Relationships with partners can be handled with the same respect and dignity as their parents’ relationship hopefully is. And as families expand and grow older, generational homes can help reduce the childcare burden while at the same time making life for aging parents easier and household management less stressful for everyone. 

As Frank DeVito wrote in “Multigenerational Living: A Step Back to Healthy Communal Life,” “The love that rebuilds civilization comes when we live together. This is an opportunity to make a serious, radical, countercultural sacrifice of one’s own selfishness, a sacrifice that can change the family culture. It is not an easy decision or an easy life. But it is good.”

Of Course, There Are Exceptions

Multigenerational living isn’t for everyone, and I’m by no means suggesting it should be the norm. Rather, I’m advocating for the destigmatization and renormalization of a community unit that allows families to care for and look out for each other financially, medically, and socially. And it doesn’t even have to be blood relations — heck, I could write a whole ‘nother essay about the benefits of communal living in general. 

Some people can’t wait to get out into the world, and they truly grow from the experience. And frankly, some families don’t have the healthiest dynamics and are better off spreading apart. But for those that enjoy each other’s company and don’t want to see their kids hitched up with the first person who comes along out of economic necessity or living “that van life” because they get evicted, this is your sign to stop feeling bad about the “mom’s basement” trope. 

Personally, I really enjoy spending time with my kids, and sharing a space with them enriches my life. I’m not eager to kick them out of the nest; rather, I want them to leave only if and when they choose to because they’re ready for a change, not because of some ridiculous meme that doesn’t even accurately reflect where society is at today. And if they want to stay and build their own families with us, I would consider that an immeasurable blessing — as DeVito observed, “Multigenerational living is a healthy antidote to a lack of community, through the bonds of relationship.”