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Living with your parents as an adult might not be considered cool, but it’s become a necessity for many Canadians, according to new data by Statistics Canada.
The number of adults, aged 25 to 64, living with at least one parent has more than doubled in the past 20 years, from 900,000 in 1995 to nearly 1.9 million in 2017.
Although pop culture has always depicted adults living at home as lazy freeloaders, the Statistics Canada report found that this is not the case, today, across the country. In fact, 74 per cent of Canadian adults living with their parents in 2017 were employed. However, they were less likely to have full-time permanent jobs.
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A lack of job security and benefits makes living with parents a more economical choice, Nora Spinks, CEO of the Vanier Institute of the Family, told CTV News in regards to the new data.
In 2017, 12 per cent of adults living with parents were students, and 70 per cent reported they were single (meaning they were neither married nor in a common-law relationship). This makes sense considering how high tuition fees can be, and the high cost of living alone.
But financial pressures aren’t the only reason some adults choose to live with a parent. For some, culture also plays a role, the data found. Twenty-one per cent of South Asians — which includes people of Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan descent — and 19 per cent of Chinese adults lived at home in 2017, according to Statistics Canada. This is significant compared to the 9 per cent of Canadian adults across the country.
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For certain cultures, multigenerational living is the norm.
In an interview with Global News, Saman Alavi, a 28-year-old Torontonian who lives with her Pakistani parents, attested to this. “In our community, there’s no stigma attached to coming back and staying with your parents, so you don’t feel that pressure to be independent as other communities do,” she told the site.
Although there’s still a stigma around adults living with parents, it clearly hasn’t stopped Canadians from rooming with mom and dad. In 2017, three-quarters of 25- to 64-year-olds, or 1.4 million Canadians, said they have always lived with at least one parent, Statistics Canada reports.
