The Boomerang Generation, Nuclear Family, and Life By Design

If you don’t want to watch my wonderful video, here is the same thing you can read!

Recently, well over the last few years, there has been a new phenomenon. Some call it “failure to Launch”, others call it “the boomerang generation”. Whatever the name, the point is that in today’s world late twenty and thirty somethings are moving back home.

The reasons are several, but the two main ones seem to be that they are struggling in this economy, or, they just plain don’t want to take on the responsibility of adult life; they want to play a bit more.

Now I am not going to malign either reason. Hell, I want to play more too! My point is that this trend may be a resurgence of something that people used to do many years ago. It’s called nuclear family living.

Grandparents, parents, and kids all live in the same house, or very near proximity, to share the burden of life and allow for more freedom for all the members. Grandparents are not sent off to old folks homes, parents aren’t left to be empty nesters and kids have some breathing room to find their way.

The only place I have to criticize is when the kids live at home, expecting mom to do all the cooking, cleaning and so on while they save their money and plan to go off to circumnavigate the globe and then come home to find their bed made. I can’t go with the whole freeloader thing. Parents are remiss is they let their adult child come home and just lay around! If this is really going to work, how about everyone share in the work and the pleasure?

I say, great, move back in, save your money and go for six months to Spain, or wherever. When you get back, you get a job, pay the mortgage and the utilities and I’ll go to Costa Rica for three months. That way we both benefit.

Now I know that part of the reason young people are doing this is because they can’t find work. I understand that, I really do. This economy sucks! I also know several young people, in their mid-twentiesand older, one in his forties that live at home and play video games all day. They haven’t been offered a CEO job so they won’t consider working at some menial job like I did for the first ten years until I worked my way up.

The nuclear family has some drawbacks, my kids may not understand that I like to make my morning coffee in my birthday suit, but it has some advantages too. If we worked together and allowed for the uniqueness of each other and made concessions, we could have some great fun!
 We can learn to live together and live our lives by design!

P.S. Come on! Leave me a comment and let me know what you think about this! I really want to know your thoughts!