Last week I was meeting with a new client who wanted to tell me about his cultural background (he’s a Bukharan Jew from Central Asia). He said that in his culture it would be unheard of for children to move away from their parents’ homes before they get married, and married sons tend to stay in the family home and just build a new wing onto the house. He contrasted this with middle-/upper-class American culture, in which children are expected to move away for college and then never come back.
I said that my own family falls somewhere in the middle, where staying together would’ve been preferable but my parents encouraged us to leave because they wanted us to have the opportunities that big cities have. So now my brother’s in Chicago and I’m in New York and nobody really thinks this is IDEAL, because the ideal would have been if my parents had found jobs in a city like Chicago or New York and we had all stayed together.
Anyway, this morning I saw one of those political cartoons about an American middle-class family demanding of their son why he’s still living at home with them (while college debt is a monster sitting next to him at the table), and it occurs to me how bizarre this view of adulthood really is. In other cultures, there’s nothing odd about being an adult, especially an unmarried adult, who lives with their parents. In fact, it’s often the preferred situation.
I don’t know that I’d prefer to live in my parents’ home if it were in New York, but I’m also not sure I see the inherent good in living alone. It’s a waste of money, it’s lonely, and whatever useful “life skills” I’m picking up right now, I could’ve just as easily picked up by taking on more responsibility in my parents’ home, as I might’ve if I lived with them post-graduation. I don’t particularly care about having the freedom to bring partners home since I don’t date anyway. It’s obviously impossible since I’m never moving back to Ohio unless I’m literally forced to by being unemployed, but I wonder how long it’ll take American culture to catch up to economic reality and accept that adult children living with their parents is not some horrible failure but rather a common practice throughout the world.
feminist-space
Jameela is funnier than all of us