Women Living With Parents at Highest Rate Since 1940

Is your last child getting ready to leave the nest? Are you getting lonely thinking about your empty house? Never fear: There's apparently a pretty good chance one or more of your adult children will move back in with you at some point. A Pew Research Center analysis of US Census Bureau data finds that last year, 36.4% of women from age 18 to age 34 lived with their parents or relatives. That's the highest number since at least 1940, when 36.2% such women lived with family, the AP reports. (Less newsworthy is the fact that 42.8% of young men lived with parents or relatives last year—historically, more young men have lived with family than young women, the AP explains, and 42.8% is well below the 47.5% of young men who lived with family in 1940.)

The percentage of young people living with family fell after the 1940s in part because marriage rates increased and the workforce expanded; more women also joined the workforce. At the time, the median age of marriage for women was 21.5. Nowadays, it's 27, which is part of the reason more adult women are living with their parents: They're half as likely to be married as women of the same age were in 1940, but are more likely to have a college education, a Pew senior economist explains. There's also the fact that they're facing student debt and a higher cost of living these days. As for men, their median age of marriage was 24.3 in 1940 and is 29.3 now. Young adults of both sexes started increasingly moving back home after 2000 thanks to the uncertainty of the job market, but the job market is better now than it was in 2010 ... and yet, more adults are living with their parents now than that year. (More parents stories.)