Why Gen Z Will Never Leave Home

In 2021, 46 percent of all twentysomethings in Canada lived with a parent. In this Maclean’s March cover story, Claire Gagné paints a picture of “emerging adulthood,” a stage of life that now lasts throughout one’s twenties. As Gagné reports, many young adults may strike out on their own after university, only to later return to their parents’ nests. In decades past, this idea of the “boomerang kid”—a young adult who settles back into their childhood bedroom—was associated with failure and not making it in the real world. Today, there are various reasons why adult children live with their parents, including high housing costs, stagnant wages, and an embrace of multigenerational living. Gagné’s piece shows this big shift: one in which young adults are taking their time to find their places in the world, and whose parents are often willing, even happy, to accommodate them.

For Canadians coming of age in 2025, economic independence is a pipe dream. Two of the country’s biggest cities—Toronto and Vancouver—are among the most unaffordable in the world. Across the country, the benchmark price of a home has ballooned from around $163,000 to $700,000 over the last 25 years. Meanwhile, the median household income in that time period has increased by just $15,000, from $65,100 in 1999 to $80,500 in 2022.

The Western fixation on moving out at a young age and becoming economically independent doesn’t exist in many parts of the world. Rather, families live together in a variety of configurations, with interdependent economic, domestic and emotional support—grandparents take care of babies, grown children take care of their aging parents, all working members contribute financially and money is saved for future collective prosperity. Many newcomers to Canada live in multigenerational households, and they’re partly responsible for the rising number of adult children living with their parents.