‘It’s become a lot more like a share house’: When adult children stay in the parental home

More young people are staying at home longer and moving back with parents as adults. What’s it like in the homes where the kids never left?

Pic: iStock

Multicoloured climbing holds dot the ceiling of Ben’s workshop in the garage adjoining his home. Tools are stacked in plastic boxes in floor-to-ceiling cupboards and his mountaineering and ice climbing gear fills every spare space. The workshop and its ample storage are among the reasons the 23-year-old architecture student remains in his parent’s home well past the age that previous generations may have moved out. There is, he says, “no real reason” to leave.

“I know with the rent situation that I wouldn’t be able to afford a place that has a garage I could put a workshop in. It’s just not possible.” If he moved out, he’d be coming home all the time anyway, he says, “in which case it becomes kind of pointless”.