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This is a guest post by Wren Schultz of BlogduWren

For anyone over 18 years old, there is a stigma associated with living with your parents—much to the chagrin of those of us who choose to do so(for reasons outlined later). Supposedly it is an indication that you can’t make it on your own or that your life is at rock bottom, not to mention what effect it allegedly has on your dating prospects. If you shed these stereotypes and preconceived notions, however, you may realize moving back home after college makes more sense than you thought.

Historically speaking, family dwellings used to really contain the whole family. Grandparents, aunts, uncles–everyone lived together under the same roof. If a child went away to war, university, or business, he or she always had a home when they returned, which many did. That trend continues today in many countries outside of the United States. Households in such places as China, Ecuador, and Italy are frequently composed not only of parents and their adult children, but also often included are their children’s spouses. It is a living situation that has persisted through the years and has only become passe in the United States in the last 75 years or so.

If historical precedent won’t get you to reconsider those prejudices, let’s have a look at the practical aspect. Living at home for a time after college is a great way to start paying down those college loans or start a rainy day fund. When you don’t have the hassles of a home of your own to deal with, you have more time to look for just the right job, try out different jobs to see how you like them, or build valuable experience with low to non-paying internships that would be next to impossible to take on while living on your own. Even aside from the financial and employment benefits you stand to gain, the list of benefits continues: higher occupancy homes are much better for the environment, living together leads to good family relationships (for you to get know your parents as people rather than just parents and them to get to know you as the adult you’ve become), not being tied to a living situation (with the house plants, bills, mail, and pets) allows you the freedom to travel, whether it is a well-planned trip around the world or an impromptu week-long trip to Omaha.

Hollywood has had its go at adult children who live at home. Sometimes it is the main focus like in Failure to Launch and
other times it is a minor reference like Will Ferrell’s pathetic character in Wedding Crashers. Whether large or small, the
references are rarely positive. But when was the last time your life imitated Hollywood. Are all Russians really evil? Will a pinto automatically explode if you accidentally tap its back bumper? No. And just as all of those Hollywood images are mis-represented exaggerations, so it goes with living at home.

You may not be the only person who will need to adapt your thinking to this retro concept. While almost all parents claim that their love for their children knows no bounds, some find those bounds really quickly when the topic of moving home for a spell is breached. Or maybe it is after the new arrangement is tried out for a while that your parents will start to reconsider. As a friend who has gone through it all recently pointed out to me, it wasn’t his parents so much that had the problems, but it was pressure from their friends that made the situation tense. It is important to take into account that it won’t only be you who is adapting to a new living parameters; they will be too. It will [necessarily] be a different arrangement from those days of high school when the laundry went into the hamper dirty and magically showed up clean and folded on your bed the next day. Let your parents know that you understand this and that you will be a great roommate. There you go–now you’ve even got a great start on that communication we were talking about.

The moral of this story is: as you think about what your next step is, DON’T discount returning to that twin-bedded room with sports posters covering the walls. You may just find that by allowing yourself a little breathing room between you and the real world, your pockets will become fuller (or at least less empty), your options will become more plentiful, and you will develop a whole new relationship with your parents–I mean roomies.

Wren Schultz is a graduate of Bates College in Lewiston, ME. He is now a freelance web developer and author of BlogduWren; he happily lives with his parents in Anacortes, Washington.

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