Adulting Cost: Why Young People Are Moving Back Home

A story shared by WorldStarHipHop, about Carly Guddrow, a 34 year old businesscoach earning $60,000 a year, who after a breakup, moved back into her parents’ home with her two dogs because rent, student loans, car payments, and everyday expenses had become too overwhelming to manage alone. What might sound like a familiar “adulting struggle” is actually backed by a much larger reality. It was reported that in 2025, a record 25.2 million Americans under 35 were living with their parents, making up about 33% of young adults. Even more striking, around 70% of those aged 25 to 34 were employed, meaning many are not jobless but simply unable to afford independence on their current incomes.

That is what makes Guddrow’s situation bigger than one woman’s financial struggle. The United States is the world’s largest economy by nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP), yet earning a salary does not automatically translate into being able to afford a home, pay your bills, and still have enough left to breathe. The share of Americans aged 25 to 34 living with their parents has climbed to levels close to the pandemic peak, with the current 33% rate only slightly below the 33.6% recorded in 2020. It raises an uncomfortable question, if adulthood is becoming this expensive in America, what exactly are young people elsewhere supposed to do?  And America is far from being alone. The European Union’s 2025 Global Generation Survey, covering 10,000 young adults across 10 countries, found that 60% still lived with parents or caregivers, even though 86% considered themselves adults.

The European countries covered in the survey include Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Belgium, Greece, and Portugal. In the United Kingdom, 28% of people aged 20 to 34 lived with their parents in 2024, up from 25.6% a decade earlier. The reasons are not always financial, culture, education, caring for family, and personal preference all play a role, but housing affordability has become a major factor. So perhaps the better question is not, “Why are young adults refusing to grow up?” but, “At what point does living with your parents stop being a choice and become an economic necessity?”

For Nigeria, that question hits even harder. There is no reliable national figure showing exactly how many Nigerian adults have never left their parents’ homes or have moved back after leaving, so it would be misleading to state one.However, it is clear that Nigeria has a massive young population entering an already strained economy. The
country’s population was estimated at about 237.5 million in 2025, while the statutory minimum wage is ₦70,000 a month. At the same time, the cost of basic independence has significantly risen and Nigerians are facing a severe cost of living crisis.

The National Bureau of statistic (NBS) has data that shows the average city bus fare hiked  from ₦470.83 in December 2021 to ₦999.27 by April 2025, an increase of about 112%, while a 2025 housing market study recorded average rent increases of 105.6% in Lagos and 81.1% in Abuja. Reuters also reported that petrol prices have risen roughly sixfold since reforms began, while the cost of a typical jollof rice meal has more than doubled.
So if an American earning $60,000 can find independence financially exhausting, imagine what independence looks like for a Nigerian earning a fraction of that while still paying rent, transport, food, electricity and often supporting family.

The bigger problem, however, is not simply that young people cannot afford rent. The traditional expectation to adulthood itself is becoming harder to follow, finish school, get a job, leave home, marry, buy a house, and raise a family. Globally, young people are already struggling to secure stable work. The International Labour Organization (ILO) says youth unemployment rose to 12.4% in 2025, while around 260 million young people were neither employed nor in education or training. In poorer countries, the problem is even more severe, with the ILO putting the NEET rate at 27.9%. That means the conversation about young people living with their parents cannot be reduced to laziness, entitlement, or “Gen Z refusing to hustle.” Sometimes the hustle is happening; the salary simply disappears before the month ends.

Perhaps the most profound lesson from Guddrow’s story is that financial independence may be evolving from a typical phase of adulthood into a privilege. In Nigeria and many other cultures, living with parents is not inherently a failure. Across generations, cohabitation has always been normal and can even be financially practical. However, when millions of employed adults in both wealthy and developing countries struggle to comfortably establish independent households, a deeper issue is at play.

The question has shifted from whether young people are “ready to leave home” to whether the global economy is producing sufficient well paying jobs and affordable housing to enable them to actually do so. If $60,000 cannot guarantee a comfortable adult life for an American, perhaps the real problem lies not in young people’s reluctance to leave home, but in the fact that staying has become the only viable option for many.

Awobajo Soliat

Written by Boom RadioNG