Hi mom. I'm home! A growing number of 20-somethings are moving back in with their parents after college meet the boomerang generation.

• Author: Davidson, Adam
• Position: Cover story

Let's say you're about to graduate from college with a degree in literature, and you owe $44,000 in student loans. You're not sure what you want to do for a living, because there are endless career possibilities out there but none of them seems as fulfilling as you think they should be. Meanwhile, you have a low-wage job at Home Depot that won't help you pay off your debt.

What do you do?

That was the dilemma faced by Monica Navarro during her senior year at the University of California, San Diego. She ended up following a path that a growing number of young people are taking: She moved back in with her parents.

It wasn't easy. Returning home meant living in her old room and relinquishing some of her freedom, while working at Home Depot often made her feel like she was letting her family down.

"I definitely was of the mind-set, Oh, a college degree is going to be my ticket to get a job. I thought it was the key to everything," says Navarro, 25, who still lives with her parents in Escondido, California. "As soon as I was getting to that graduation mark, I realized that it was half the battle just getting the degree."

Today, one in three people between the ages of 18 and 34 live with their parents. And 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from them. That's a big increase from a generation ago, when only 1 in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support.

One of the main reasons why this is happening is the economic recession that hit the U.S. in late 2007. Since then, the number of young people who make up the so-called Boomerang Generation--20-and 30-somethings who move back home--has increased significantly.

Today, one in four recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, which means they're earning smaller paychecks by working part-time or in jobs that don't require a college degree. And they face the highest debt burden of any graduating class in history (see graph): Students graduating in 2014 have an average student-loan debt of $33,000, up from $9,300 in 1993.

Longer Childhoods

The result is young people becoming economically independent much later in their lives: In 1968, a vast majority of 20-somethings had moved out of their parents' homes; more than half were married. But by 2007, before the recession even began, fewer than one in four young adults were married, and 34 percent relied on their parents for rent.

There's some evidence that greater dependence on parents is a natural progression, given the manner in which modern society has treated its children.

For most of recorded history, children often began working by age 4--typically on a farm--and were working full-time by 10. The tide began to turn in the U.S. in the 19th century, when school attendance started to become mandatory. By 1918, all American children were required to attend at least elementary school.

By the turn of the 20th century, child labor laws--which set standards for the age at which children could be employed, what kinds of jobs they could do, and for how many hours--started emerging. The result was fewer young children working. As the U.S. grew wealthier, childhood expanded along with it. Eventually, teenagers were no longer considered younger, less-competent adults but rather older children who should be nurtured and encouraged to explore.

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a psychologist at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, sees boomerang kids as the continuation of this centuries-long trend. Returning home, he says, is also a rational response to a radically different economy.

"It doesn't mean they're lazy," Arnett says. "It's just harder to make your way now than it was in an older and simpler economy."

Starting in the 1980s, machines and computers began taking over thousands of jobs in factories and later offices, and more jobs were outsourced abroad to lower-wage workers. The labor market became increasingly competitive.

Today, it's even more so. Fewer jobs are available for recent graduates. A college degree is an advantage, but it no longer offers any guarantee. In a way, a degree is the expensive price of admission to the workforce. Young people now need to learn skills before they get a job, which often means unpaid internships.

At the same time, work is no longer seen by middle-class youth as simply a means of earning money to put food on the table: It's viewed as a defining part of their identity. They want it to be meaningful and enjoyable. That's why, faced with a competitive job market along with the seemingly endless...