Grow up, twenty-somethings. You can go home again

Washington Monthly, April, 1992 by Katherine Boo

Go rest, young man

One testament to our aversion to the concept is that some affluent parents shell out hundreds of dollars a month for years to maintain their progeny in their own apartments--"kept kids," as New York magazine dubs them. (The dirty little secret of the avant-urban scene is how many Nebraska moms and dads are footing the bill.) Unfortunately, economics isn't cooperating with our expectations. Rents have risen 28 percent since 1982, 10 points more than other components of the consumer price index, while 25- to 34-year-old workers are bringing home smaller paychecks. Yet as parent-child "independence" grows more difficult for economic reasons, experts now advocate the erection of artificial barriers. A New York Times column recently advised cohabiting parents and adult kids to draft a "business contract" in which parents specify the amount of time the child may dwell with them and children declare the kind of emotional and financial support they'll be requiring for the duration. (Three months, 10 loads of laundry, and half a dozen demonstrations of unconditional love?)

Is it just cohabitation that makes us nervous--or is it the emotional closeness those arrangements demand? "In a previous generation it might have been expected that adult children would spend every Sunday night with their parents," Dr. Matti Gershenfeld, an expert at Temple University, noted darkly in the Times. "But that's inappropriate these days."

Ah, the insidious, emasculating Sunday-dinner trick! Comments like that suggest the narrowness of our idea of what a "normal" family does. And in a way that reaction is inevitable. We're not used to familial togetherness anymore. It's not just that we purchase child care from institutions and deputize hospitals and nursing homes to care for our relatives; we purchase emotional support, too, from self-esteem therapy to job counseling to help in getting off the sauce. (Is it any coincidence that the sixties, the decade of family dissolution, launched the psychotherapy boom?) Our urban public schools now spend an estimated fifth of their time inculcating values, offering birth control advice, conducting dental screenings, and performing other services in loco parentis, and most of us don't think twice about it. After all, we say knowingly, the kids probably don't get that stuff at home.

As conservatives are eager to note, government policies tend to reinforce a subtle antifamily tilt. When a resident of D.C. public housing wants to take in a son or daughter in crisis--even for a week--the parent is forced to break public housing law and risk his own tendency to do it. It may be better for a poor 19-year-old saddled with two kids to move in with her mother, but she may risk her welfare check if she does.

It's not just the beggared who feel the push. A middle-class mom can get a nice write-off by sending her three-year-old to the Kindercare Center on K Street in the District, but not to grandpa's house in the Suburbs. If grandpa gets sick, she can count on Medicare to put him up in a bleak $2,000-a-month "skilled nursing" institution. But if she want to take him in, she'll find the government much less helpful with the bills.