Adults forced to move back with parents: a necessity, a luxury, a relationship challenge

Audrey Vogel, a 23-year-old elementary school teacher in Berkeley, moved into her parents' Lafayette home two years ago after graduating from college. Audrey Vogel, a 23-year-old elementary school teacher in Berkeley, moved into her parents' Lafayette home two years ago after graduating from college. Photo: Courtesy Audrey Vogel Photo: Courtesy Audrey Vogel Image 1 of / 20 Caption Close Adults forced to move back with parents: a necessity, a luxury, a relationship challenge 1 / 20 Back to Gallery

Audrey Vogel's story is one oft-told: After graduating from college, she moved back in with her parents to save money and jumpstart her next chapter.

"I moved back to Lafayette so I didn't have to pay for housing during grad school," the 23-year-old teacher said

She still lives there, to save money and bide time until her long-term boyfriend finishes his degree, she said.

"But also, I'm really happy ... It sounds crazy, but it's been incredibly harmonious."

When you return to the place of your childhood as an adult, the concept of "home" becomes flimsy. As a child, home is the place you live, likely with parents. Then you grow up, take flight from the parental nest and drop anchor in another place with different people. Home then splits into two; it's simultaneously the place you currently reside, but also the place you grew up.

Confronting such cognitive dissonance can be too much for some, who drop thousands of dollars on a cramped apartment in a nearby city. Others have a less severe reaction to moving back in with mom and dad — they like it.

A 2016 Pew Research study found that 15 percent of Millennials, those aged 25 to 35, were living in their parents' homes. That's five percentage points higher than the previous generation and nearly double that of the Boomer and Silent generations, eight percent of whom lived at home in 1981 and 1964 respectively.

In a place like the Bay Area, where the cost of living is egregiously high and the prospects of owning a home dismal, the numbers are unsurprisingly higher than the national average. One recent study estimated that nearly 1 in 3 Millennials live with their parents in the Bay Area, and not for lack of employment. Fewer than 10 percent of Bay Area Millennials are unemployed.

When one lives in a region with arguably the most expensive rental market in the United States, moving in with parents takes on a different tone. It's a necessity for some, an acknowledged luxury for others.

During her two-plus years living at home, Vogel has found her relationship with her parents evolve in surprising, satisfying ways. The trio attend concerts together, share bottles of wine, snuggle around the television. Most mornings, dad makes breakfast and packs lunches. Vogel and her mom, a teacher at the same Berkeley elementary school, carpool to their respective classrooms.

Vogel says it feels similar to her experience living at home in high school – "except now we're all older and have more responsibilities."

Responsibility fell into 23-year-old Allie Hembrough's lap unexpectedly last spring. She moved home after college — "did the financially responsible thing" — to catch her breath after four years away.

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Most days involved token "post-grad moping." Then she got a job in San Mateo, a long commute from her house in Los Gatos, and discovered she was "not a nice person" after three hours spent in a car.

Discontented, she made plans to move and began applying to graduate programs.

Then her dad was diagnosed with throat cancer.

"It made me realize how very glad I was to be home," she said, "because I needed to be there."

The direction of her post-grad year took on a new trajectory and purpose – helping her father heal. Hembrough's mother continued working and the twenty-something became largely responsible for her father's care, driving him to daily appointments, administering food through a feeding tube, cleaning. She was with him through chemotherapy, surgery and the months of recovery that followed.

The recovery months were the most trying, Hembrough said. When the feeding tube was removed, she had to track her dad's daily calorie consumption and feed him protein shakes.

"I had to basically force him to drink them sometimes," the 23-year-old said. "That was really hard."

Her dad would sometimes express sadness that he had "sucked up" his daughter's "whole life," Hembrough said, but she didn't see it like that.

"I'm a caretaker, it's my personality type," she said. Finding a "new balance" was key for maintaining sanity.

"Here I am, having lived my way for four years, and my parents having lived their own way for four years," she said. "Then, we came back together. The dynamic shifted."

"Then, introduce the fact that you have to take care of your parent," she said. "That was complicated."

Hembrough's father has since gone into remission. She plans to attend graduate school on the East Coast this fall.

Though less severe than Hembrough's parental paradigm shift, 29-year-old Taylor Lahey also felt his relationship with his mother take on a different flavor when he moved back home for six months after quitting a job.

"It was weird being treated like a kid again after having made a salary that was higher than my mom ever had," he said. "I led the household financially and was treated like a child. That was odd."

The evolution of relationship roles and modes of coexistence is a hallmark of the experience of moving home, whether child or parent, said Margie Ryerson, a marriage and family therapist based in the East Bay.

In many cases, when a child first leaves home, he or she is exactly that – a child. When they return, hopefully older and wiser, the parent-child relationship takes on a more peer-centric slant.

"It gives [parents] an opportunity to get to know their child on a different basis than during the sometimes turbulent teenage years," Ryerson said.

Those interviewed for this story say the one thing their parental relationship lacked in high school becomes necessity in adulthood: communication.

"Communication is the most important thing to make this situation work, since so many conflicts arise from misaligned expectations," said Christina Newberry, the founder of AdultChildrenLivingatHome.com and author of "The Hands-On Guide to Surviving Adult Children Living at Home."

Newberry recommends each family member put his or her expectations in writing, including "a timeline and milestones to work toward."

"A clear timeline is the best way to make an adult child's stay at home productive," she told SFGATE. "It helps keep everyone sane, since even if things get stressful, everyone can keep the end goal in sight."

For those who have moved back in with their parents, the median length time spent living at home was three years, a 2014 study by the Federal Reserve Board found by analyzing credit report data. This duration increased by six months between 2005 and 2013.

Not all those who live with their parents are Millennials. Some move in during their twenties and stick around. A long-term living situation can blur the lines between parents and roommates, with one relationship designation sometimes edging out the other, as was the case for 44-year-old CarolAnne Marioni.

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When Marioni became unexpectedly pregnant in her twenties she moved into a spare cottage on her mother's Sonoma property. The temporary setup proved a blessing when the baby girl arrived. She was "a very sick child," Marioni said of her daughter, who underwent multiple surgeries for the first six years of her life.

Marioni's mother, a former ICU nurse, was there when the baby stopped breathing one night and then through six years of multiple surgeries and treatments.

"My mother is excellent in crisis mode," Marioni said.

With the illness came exorbitant insurance payments, sometimes spiking to $900 a month, she said. While living with her mom, rent was one less thing to worry about.

The child outgrew the illness in elementary school, but Marioni, an artist and nanny, decided to stay on with her mother, for predominantly "financial reasons."

"In lieu of rent, I maintained things, took care of the property," Marioni said.

After the sprawling family compound was sold in 2007, the three generations moved into a new house together. They lived that way for seven years, until Marioni's daughter left for college in Southern California. She decided it was time to leave, too, and moved in with her boyfriend in a nearby neighborhood about two years ago, after almost two decades living with her mother.

"It got to the point where I could not live with her in the way that she likes to live," Marioni said.

Cleaning was a common source of friction. "I'd see stuff that needed to get done," Marioni said, "and she wouldn't let me do it."

Marioni and her mother haven't spoken in six months.

"We're like oil and water at this point," she said. Living together as "roommates" exacerbated the relationship, Marioni thinks.

"I would not do it again," she said. "There are no warm, fuzzy feelings about it."

Born of necessity, the live-at-home dynamic takes on less of a stigma in a small town like Sonoma, where family members often stick around and live close to the home they grew up in.

But even in a more urban suburban setting, the Bay Area housing crunch pushes people to live with parents for periods of time. It's so common here, there isn't much of a stigma about it anymore.

"I haven't seen many people in their early twenties feel shame about living with parents," Ryerson said.

"They may not always like it, but it's become much more culturally acceptable due to economic reasons throughout our country, and particularly in places like the Bay Area," she said. "Many of their friends are doing this, too."

Nicole Thompson, 26, moved into her parents' home in Pleasant Hill upon returning from an teaching program abroad. She says the stigma arises, mostly, from within.

"If I'm meeting someone new I approach the subject with kind of a sarcastic tone, but then feel the need to really over-explain myself," she said.

Moving back in with her parents has forced her to grow and mature in new ways.

"It's definitely been a test of focusing on myself and what's best for me rather than worrying about if people might be judging me."

Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf.