Unlearning the Shame of Living with My Parents As an Adult

I’m already leading a different life than the nuclear family I’d envisioned. There’s freedom in stepping away from that, but I find it uncomfortable too.

My pulse went wild and my hands shook when my realtor told me the sellers of the cutest duplex in the Philadelphia suburbs had narrowed down their offers to mine and one other potential buyer. This was the first house I’d walked through, and while touring, I took a moment to close my eyes in each area, rearrange the furniture in my head. I could picture turning one of the three bedrooms into an office with a desk by the window, rehearsing with my a cappella group in the backyard, and gleefully doing laundry with the washer and dryer on the main floor (score for those of us with chronic pain).

But when my realtor said I had to increase my offer or step out of the way, I choked. I’d been living with my parents for the past three years, and even though I thought I wanted this house, it didn’t feel right to leave yet. I couldn’t fully understand my feelings—Fear? Uncertainty? Fear of uncertainty?—but I had to honor them. After an agonizing hour of weighing pros and cons, calling loved ones for opinions, and getting progressively more overwhelmed, I told my realtor not to escalate, knowing I’d lose the house.

My body has tried to warn me like this before. The first time I remember feeling this way—cavernous stomach, sand-dry mouth—I slumped across the middle row of the family minivan as my parents drove me to the Philadelphia International Airport, where I’d fly on a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. I couldn’t believe I was getting sick during my big move. But it wasn’t illness. It was raw fear and anxiety stemming from the anticipation of loneliness. I was twenty-two and I had a dream: to write for TV. I’d spent years nurturing this vision for my future, but I forgot a critical piece—community. I didn’t appreciate what my parents, and community in general, meant to me until I was truly alone.

Wherever I’ve lived—in a dorm in Massachusetts, with a Craigslist roommate and then alone in Los Angeles, with roommates in the suburbs of New York, and alone again in Maryland—I’m always flushed with relief approaching my parents’ house outside of Philadelphia. It hits me on Belmont Avenue, the road after the highway exit: My road home. Yet when I reached Belmont Avenue three years ago, in the summer of 2019, my usual sense of security was absent. I’d turned twenty-nine the month before, and I was moving in with my parents after back-to-back toxic jobs left my mental and physical health in shambles. For months, they’d begged me to quit and move home; let them care for me; figure out what kind of work would be fulfilling. Watching movers haul everything I owned up the stairs into my childhood bedroom, I dropped the box of toiletries I was holding in the middle of the foyer. What was I doing? Was this a mistake? The gulf was vast between what I’d expected my adult life to look like and how it was turning out.

The morning after I moved in with my parents, I woke up at no particular time for no particular reason. And I felt it: The depression lifted. A lightness. A steady, quiet heartbeat. For nearly a year I’d tried horrific cocktails of medications to quell my symptoms. These left me nauseous, mentally cloudy, up all night, quite literally falling asleep at the wheel. None of the meds put a dent in my mood, but the day after I moved back home, I woke up feeling an unprecedented shift in my mental health.

Living alone, I didn’t laugh much.

Three years later, I’m still here with Mom and Dad—Patty and Stu—very much by choice. I’m completely capable of being independent. I’m mentally well with the help of medication, and I generally remained so through the height of pandemic isolation, when almost everyone I know struggled with loneliness and depression. I developed my own writing and tutoring business. I have a full social life. I could leave. But I couldn’t have imagined the extent to which living with my parents has become an important part of my identity, even though I was hesitant to do so at this stage of my life.

Living with my parents has afforded me more physical space than I could ever dream of alone. I’ve benefited from sharing costs—I was able to pay off my graduate school debt and save money again—and it’s more environmentally friendly. I look forward to eating dinner together on the couch in front of the TV after an intense day of work. We laugh as we personify our cats with high-pitched voices and jokingly argue over who their favorite child is (me, obviously). Living alone, I didn’t laugh much.

As a single person, I tend to cringe when people describe their lives in the first-person plural. Since moving home, however, I find myself saying, “We had pizza last night!” “We’re watching Abbott Elementary!” We’ve navigated a lot together over the last three years. A global pandemic. My dad’s estrangement from a sibling. My parents moving their office to our basement. (That’s right, we all work from home. It’s bananas.) The deaths of three elderly cats. Me building my business and coming into my queerness. (I don’t recommend doing that last thing under your parents’ roof, but I’m making it work.) We take care of each other. I set my dad’s breakfast of Mountain Dew and a granola bar halfway up the stairs because he’s too tired to go down to the kitchen. He lifts the forty-pound bags of cat litter. My mom shops for groceries and makes lunch and dinner, chores I despise. They notice how hard I work and tell me they’re proud of me. I reciprocate by doing dishes, taking out the trash, acting as resident organizer, and being an ear for whoever needs it.

There are downsides too. When my parents talk on the phone, their voices fill the entire house. They’re forever clued in to my whereabouts. Last month, my dad crawled into my office during a Zoom tutoring session because I’d texted him that the Wi-Fi was spotty. I was mortified when my very observant fifth-grade student said, “Excuse me, Miss Sam? I think there’s a man crawling across your floor?”

The only downside that has deeply affected me is cultural shame. My situation isn’t even that unusual—since the 1970s, the number of people in the US who live in multigenerational households has quadrupled across the board. Still, I don’t know anyone else around my age who bunks with their parents. I’m also single in my thirties and queer. I’m already leading a different life than the nuclear family I’d envisioned and that was modeled for me. I’m sure there’s freedom in stepping away from that, but I find it uncomfortable too. I only ever wanted to be normal.

I worry about my living arrangement surfacing on dates, to new friends, or to the students I tutor. My younger self would most certainly judge me, so why wouldn’t they? Little Sam had many expectations for what her adult life would look like—all of which were based on TV and movie versions of idealized, heteronormative adulthoods—and didn’t consider mental or physical health hurdles, abusive workplaces, identity shifts, or the enrichment of community. It’s been brutally hard over the last three years to get past the stigma I’ve internalized about what I should be doing at this age and in this heteronormative society.

Although the nuclear family—children residing with two married, heterosexual parents­­—is still aspirational for many people, it wasn’t a successful model for long. In fact, the nuclear family really only seemed to thrive from 1950 to 1965—what columnist David Brooks calls “a freakish historical moment.” It felt validating to learn that America is actually a country founded upon multigenerational living. In 1800, most people lived in multigenerational households to sustain family farming businesses. Ninety percent of families in America had a corporate family structure, organized around a family business.

When factories came to US cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and farming declined, multigenerational living followed suit. Men moved away from their families to make money in the city, where loneliness led them to get married several years younger than in previous generations. By the 1920s, capitalism had made the nuclear family the predominant housing structure. It worked best in the period, a little over a decade long, when women were forced to stay home with children, neighboring nuclear families were interdependent, and the postwar period was prosperous. It also worked (and continues to work) best for the wealthy, who could hire tutors, babysitters, therapists, and coaches for support, while families who couldn’t were (and are) left to struggle.

When the nuclear family began to crumble and divorce rates rose, Americans began experimenting with a variety of ways of living, primarily when adult children make room for aging parents and parents welcome back young adult children. The 2008 financial crisis accelerated this shift, as did the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, which saw families and friends moving in together for reasons including childcare, financial burdens, caring for aging loved ones, and the loneliness of quarantine. Today, only one-third of people in the US live in two-parent nuclear families.

When life gets unmanageable, we turn to our support systems. Feeling cared for when we need it matters more than judgment.

According to an AARP/CulturIntel study that examined 100 million digital conversations in the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia about multigenerational households before and during Covid-19, social stigma was initially the most significant psychological barrier for people considering combining households. By June 2020, that concern decreased to zero. While it’s surprising to see such a steep decrease, the concept is one I’m intimately familiar with: When life gets unmanageable, we turn to our support systems, and feeling cared for when we truly need it matters more than the potential judgment. My concern about stigma unfortunately hasn’t gone down to zero, but experiencing the benefits of my situation confirms I made the right choice. And reading about how we weren’t designed to live all alone—and how for most of history, we haven’t—has helped me adopt a more expansive, less judgmental view of myself.

Unfortunately, I can’t stay here forever. In order for my parents to retire, which will likely happen in the next five years, they’ll need to downsize. I think by searching for houses now, I’m trying to prepare for and protect myself from what I know is coming. That’s probably why, when I tell people I’m house hunting, I use air quotes as I say the phrase. I’m flooded with ambivalence—uneasy about the kind of money I’d have to spend, living and working at home by myself all the time, and taking care of every task on my own. I’m also terrified my mental health will suffer. I’ve been working on quieting my fear in therapy, and I can continue to do so, but I can also embrace what the research has shown me: We all have our own reasons for living the way we do. They are varied and valid. Even if this particular scenario can’t last, maybe there’s another way to cultivate the community I seek.

In queer communities, we talk about chosen family—people we’re not related to but who we’ve invited into our lives as family. One of my favorite (queer) musicians, Brandi Carlile, created a chosen family on her Washington land by inviting multiple families to build their homes on her compound. In a strange way, at least right now, my parents are both my biological and chosen family. Maybe I’ll stay here until they sell the house. Maybe I’ll buy a duplex and have a tenant. Maybe I’ll look further into cohousing. Maybe I’ll get a house with my parents that has a separate space for them but where we could still share costs, they could lend a hand if I have kids, and I could be there for them as they age. I recognize that I’m writing from a position of privilege, and what I’m doing isn’t a path for many people, especially those whose biological families provide the opposite of comfort. This is why chosen family is so important.

Recently, my therapist asked what my life would look like if I had complete freedom to live the way I want. Freedom from expectations and shame—my own and society’s. How would I choose to walk through the world? Aside from persuading everyone I love across the country to move to my neighborhood, I’m not sure what I’d do. But I know I’m interested in figuring out how to live beyond the boundaries society has established for me. I didn’t always believe I was capable of that, but I am. We all are.