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

• Author: Boo, Katherine

Ten years ago, my high school English class read James Joyce's short story "Eveline," about a young Irish woman torn between staying at home with a needy, unappealing father--a "life of commonplace sacrifice" and occasional warmth--or escaping with a slick new lover on a ship bound for America. As Eveline confronts her literal and figurative point of departure, Joyce intends the moment to be a wrenching one; he'd felt his own guilt on leaving family and country. But we 16-year-old Americans were unmoved by Eveline's panic and--when she finally chooses family over freedom--utterly mystified. Why in the world wouldn't you leave home?

Those kids would have been horrified if it had occurred to them that a decade later, they might be making the same choice as the pathetic Eveline. Today, thanks largely to high rents and low wages, more than 18 million single adults aged 18-34 live with their parents--a phenomenon that has the psychologists apoplectic. "Failed adults," they term these young people: a generation of budding Norman Bateses spoiled by affluent parents. They dump their own kids on grandma, their problems on dad, and their cap on the living room floor. It's a pandemic so ominous that "doubling up"--relatives sharing space--have even earned a label from social statisticians: "borderline homeless." America's adult children are coming home in droves for the first time since World War II, and that seems to us a serious violation of the natural way of life.

If the economic reasons for the phenomenon are not exclusive to America, the distress associated with it surely is. What makes us so unhappy at this new necessity is a peculiarly national notion of success, one predicted on separation. Long before the cult of codependence, America's concept of mental and material normalcy included a break from our families. (In 1776, after all, we declared independence from the "motherland.") And from Thoreau to Thomas Wolfe to James Baldwin to Jay McInerney, the link has been perpetually underscored: leaving the claustral parental home is requisite to emotional, economic, intellectual, social, and sexual independence. Sinclair Lewis's repressive Main Street probably has fax machines and a gay bookstore by now, but the necessity of leaving home endures as one of the great unchallenged assumptions of American life.

That assumption is undergirded by a certain amount of psycho-logic. Though true maturity and independence have never come so cheap (the intrepid Thoreau routinely left Walden Pond to take his laundry back to mom), leaving home is in general pretty good way to find yourself; never leaving is a pretty good way to be a loser. But what's frustrating about all the attention paid to a few newly crowded houses is that it blinds us to the real problem with American families, a trend caroming in precisely the opposite direction. As the media pouts about "boomerang" kids, many more millions of Americans--single mothers, old people, even kids--are going it alone.

For decades we've grimly noted the demise of the dining room table, the death of extended families, the exodus of the young from their hometowns, and the indifference of children to their aging parents--and those trends simply aren't reversing. Americans still have, by far, the highest divorce rate of any industrialized nation and the highest proportion of single-parent households--probably the most economically vulnerable segment of the population. We still institutionalize our parents at a rate unequaled anywhere but in Northern Europe, and the urge to disentangle from our families has spawned a vast industry of self-help books and tapes. Too much familial dependence? The real problem is that we don't have--and don't want--more.

Ironicaly, the side effects of the despised coming-home phenomenon might be the very ones we ought to covet in an era of fragmented families. Just as the Depression held kids and parents together--there were four generations of Joads--this recession could strengthen our frayed familial bonds and yield significant public benefit. A renewed commitment to familial support might keep a few people off the dole, or off the ledge; it might make us a little less selfish and a little more willing to share. It might even make us happier, another notion Americans value pretty highly.

About the same time that the L.A. times ran an article on how to kick kids out, a study by two University of Wisconsin sociologists appeared in The Journal of Marriage and Family. Despite all the horror-story news accounts, they found that 70 percent of parents and adult kids were actually pleased to live together against the zeitgeist. Good Lord, they liked it. Perhaps they'd discovered, as some other cultures have, that there are some compelling reasons for doing so. Perhaps, despite our gut reactions, sticking together isn't a pathology after all. Maybe it's a genuine social possibility.

House broken

At the House of Ruth, a D.C. Shelter for battered women, a 31-year-old resident receives thousands of dollars'...