Staying on the gravy train!

The millennial are staying home longer. The Y Generation has become more at home with staying at home than almost any other previous generation. If you were born roughly between 1980 to 1994, then I’m talking about you. The Millennials, Y generation, and even the Echo Boomers are the names put to everyone in that age group. Even if the experts can’t agree what you call you guys they can all agree how much in demand the Echo Boomers are…. And also that many of them seem to be going back to their parents’ homes after graduation.
                It’s not that they are crashing on their mom’s couch in the basement to play guitar hero professionally. Some of them have professional jobs as accountants, editors, and MBA’s. But they choose to head back home.
                If you sense a little trepidation in me it’s because I couldn’t wait to shoot out from underneath my parent’s wing after undergraduate, and the baby boomers seem to mirror my opinion. The boomers echo my feelings in theory because in practice they are letting their kids move back in after they graduate.
                Many of the gen X’s (remember them?) are left scratching their heads, but ultimately shrugging. On the other hand the involvement Millenials have with their parents on the career front sets many Baby Boomers to grinding their teeth.  In Career Conferences you can hear the older crowd start to rumble whenever the word “millennial” pops up as a topic.
                So what makes someone head back to their parents’ home after graduation? Some would say enmeshment and they may not be wrong, but I would say the best reason is common sense.
                The Y Generation is all about lifestyle! They’ve seen it on TV and they see how their parents live. They want to live large so why not move back to home base for awhile? Find a good job, get a plasma TV?  Oh yeah and some wheels! Then ease out into the real world. Choo Choo goes the gravy train!
                We’ve seen the same trend across the globe in large cities where real estate prices make being a homeowner a lifelong process. My senior year, I backpacked through Europe with the last of my school loan money (another way to escape my parent’s home). I somehow ended up on a slow train headed to Turkey and met a group out of London and Paris that were in a same unfortunate situation of getting ready to graduate college (or University as they called it). Every one of them was living at their parents’ home and they planned on staying there for a few years. The reason the return to the dad-pad was to save up money to buy a house (or flat). In fact, many of their friends thought they were crazy to spend money trotting around Europe when they should be saving for a house. I remember how the group spent an afternoon debating on how many years the trip was setting back buying a house.
               

But what are the Baby Boomers saying?

Experts differ on the exact dates of all the generations but, give or take a year, the Boomers were born between1945 and 1960. The Baby Boomers I know in the career field often express shock at how tightly the Y generation seems to be attached to parents and they worry about the world they worked so hard to create. When the grumbles and worrying start I like to remind the Baby Boomers the Millennials are their children.