Why Gen Z Will Never Leave Home
At age 21, Liam Tully was living on his own in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a house. He loved being on his own—working, paying rent, buying groceries, doing laundry, watering plants, blasting music with his friends every night. He had the kind of financial independence most people his age could only dream of. The catch: he was living on a tiny island off the coast of Honduras called Utila, paying just US$500 a month in rent. Tully went down to Honduras during COVID to get his scuba certification. But it was always meant to be temporary. In 2022, when he returned to Toronto to start a career, he moved right back into his childhood home. Soon after, the family sold the house. Tully, who was working for a real estate agency, harboured no illusions that he could afford to rent an apartment in the city on his salary of $3,000 a month; the average rent in Toronto at the time was $1,685. So Tully, his younger brother, his mom and the dogs all moved together. Their new space, a condo in Toronto’s Canary District, has a bedroom for each of them and two bathrooms.
Liza Finlay, Tully’s mom, was happy to make room for her boys when she downsized. “It’s hard to launch these days,” she says. “Young adults who live at home aren’t taking advantage of their parents. They don’t have much choice.” Tully is now working for a tech startup, making $65,000 a year. His contributions to the household have grown over time: first he covered some of the grocery bills, then took on a small amount of the rent. He gives his mom $700 a month—a significant contribution, but much less than he’d pay on his own.
In years past, Tully would be called a boomerang kid: someone who moved out with a plan for an independent life but wound up back under mom and dad’s roof. In the old days, this trajectory might suggest that the kids—or the parents—were screwups. Incapable. Incompetent. The proper course of action, the one instilled in me, my friends and many of the parents I interviewed for this story, was this: you graduate high school. You get some education. And you get out.
That idea has flown out the childhood bedroom window. Canada’s astronomical housing costs and stagnant wages make real-world finances daunting for a newbie. Modern intensive parenting doesn’t stop once a child hits 18—parents are often there with a safety net. And there’s a growing appreciation for multigenerational living, which has caught on in part due to the influx of immigrants from places where these arrangements are built into the fabric of family life. Suddenly, we have a new picture of young adulthood in Canada. StatsCan data shows that, in 2021, 46 per cent of all twentysomethings lived with a parent. That’s up significantly from 30 years ago, when only a third of people in their twenties were still under their parents’ roofs. Kids are staying in the nest well into their adulthood, too. Close to a third of people aged 25 to 29 are still living at home compared to 11 per cent in 1981. And these numbers were gathered before the post-pandemic inflation of housing and living costs. Kids who started university at the beginning of COVID have graduated into an environment where a starting salary will barely pay for a front foyer in many parts of Canada. Parents have the one thing their kids need: shelter.
As a result, youthful independence—the kind that Tully tasted in Honduras and that many parents remember fondly from their own twenties—starts later, delaying a lifetime of milestones like marriage and parenthood. For parents, it means those heart-tugging memes of “only having 18 summers with your kids” are a load of crap. They’re emotionally and financially supporting their kids for much longer than expected, forcing them to reimagine their retirement years. Instead of an empty nest, they now have a roommate who keeps forgetting to empty the dishwasher.
The late launch into adulthood has been decades in the making. Before 1960, few Canadians attended college or university. Instead, they found work, got married and had kids in quick succession. As the economy transitioned from manufacturing and agriculture to one based on knowledge and technology, universities began filling up. By the early 1980s, some 20 per cent of Canadians between 18 and 24 attended post-secondary school. Now it’s nearly half. Even after graduation, a few more years typically pass as people find their footing in careers and relationships. They push off marriage and parenthood until a job and a steady paycheque are in hand. Jeffrey Arnett is an American psychologist who studies the transition from adolescence to adulthood. In 2000, he proposed that people in this life stage weren’t even full adults. Instead, they were “emerging adults,” finding their place in a world that no longer held just one or two possible paths. When he first coined the term, he set the age range at 18 to 25; he now considers this life stage to last until about age 29. “People are taking longer to find a stable place in the adult world,” he says. He’s experienced this firsthand: one of his 25-year-old twins moved home last year.
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. According to a 2024 report by RBC, to own an average home, a household with the median income would spend about 63 per cent of their earnings on home ownership costs, including mortgage payments, utilities and property taxes. Renting is also largely off the table: as of 2023, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Canada was about $1,700, a 35 per cent increase from five years ago. “Even my friends with high-paying corporate jobs are living at home because 90 per cent of their money would be going to survival,” says Liam Tully.
Kylie Brown is one young Canadian feeling the financial pressure. Brown graduated with a psychology degree from McGill in 2023. She wanted to take some time off before grad school, so she moved back to Toronto, her hometown. She found a job in her field, working full-time at a reading clinic helping kids with learning disabilities, ADHD and autism. It’s a great fit, as she’s interested in studying school psychology for her master’s. But she only makes $24 an hour; if she rented, nearly half of her earnings would go to a landlord. Instead, she moved back into her childhood bedroom.
Today’s young adults are also the unfortunate casualties of lagging productivity, or the inability of the economy to get as much value out of its resources as it did in the past. When that happens, the accumulation of family wealth, rather than earned income, becomes a more important determinant of someone’s success. For Francesco Amodio, an economics professor at McGill University in Montreal and a member of the university’s Centre on Population Dynamics, the situation in Canada is reminiscent of an economic decline that began in his home country of Italy in the 1970s. “Now in Italy, and in other countries in southern Europe, you have this ingrained idea of building wealth for your kids,” says Amodio. He thought his children, aged five and three, would come of age in a different economic reality, but he’s already looking out the window of his condo in Montreal wondering where they’ll live when they’re grown.
There are countless pop-psychology names for contemporary parenting: helicopter, snowplow, lighthouse, to name a few. No matter what you call it, parenting now is a different beast than it was just a few decades ago. It’s not enough anymore to get your kid dressed, feed them and send them off to school. Raising a child is a 24/7 preoccupation. A kid’s success in life, the new thinking goes, relies on a series of carefully orchestrated opportunities provided by parents who believe a child’s future prosperity rides on the right choice of Mommy and Me class. The supercharged involvement continues throughout childhood. Parents spend all their waking hours crafting emails to teachers about how their kids learn best, hopping from one activity to the next, hoping to discover their child’s “thing” and diving into rabbit holes of internet research about the right way to get their kid to eat their vegetables.
Other modern parental stressors like youth mental health and social media addiction require a hands-on approach, just at a time when our own parents were taking the foot off the gas and letting us pursue our teenage independence. The result is that parents and kids are now fused together in a way that isn’t easily disentangled when the age of majority hits. Even after they’re legal adults, kids continue to see their parents as a vital source of support. And parents, who have invested so much in their children, are happy to keep them around for a few more years. Many of the families I talked to admitted that, if necessary, their child could move out. Parents proudly recounted their own scrappy young adulthoods—getting out right after school, living in dodgy apartments, scrimping and saving. But now, they figure, there’s no point in their kid spending the money on overpriced rent when there’s a childhood bedroom with a comfortable mattress, and everyone enjoys each other’s company. “It’s great having my kids around,” says Finlay. “They can stay here as long as they want.”
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.
The benefits of this lifestyle go well beyond economics. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a global public-health concern, with mortality effects equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Having built-in housemates can fill that void. Two years ago, Tatjana, a 57-year-old single mother of two in Toronto, became an empty-nester when her son, Maxim, moved out to attend university in Montreal. But it wasn’t long before her 33-year-old daughter, Maša, lost her job and moved back home. Just a few months after that, Tatjana herself was laid off. “It’s good for my mental well-being that my daughter is with me, and it’s good for her that she’s not going through this financial burden alone,” says Tatjana. She buys the groceries, and Maša cooks the meals. Maša likes to keep the house warm, so she covers the household utilities. “The only thing we don’t agree on is her reality shows,” says Tatjana. She sometimes feels guilty about how much she enjoys having Maša home. “I want her to be independent and spread her wings,” she says. “But I’m from Europe, where it’s normal for kids to stay at home longer.” The house is set to get even fuller: Maxim plans to move back to Toronto in March. If Maša is still there, she’ll take over the basement suite Tatjana normally rents to a student. Once Maxim finds a job, she expects him to pay some rent.
Many of the parents I spoke to liked having their adult kids around. Helen and her husband, both retirees, live with their 36-year-old son, James (we’ve used a pseudonym to protect his privacy). He stayed at home in Dundas, Ontario, while attending university and getting a degree in economics. It took him a few years to find a job in his field. He’s now working full-time, but there hasn’t been any real reason for him to move out. Rent is high in Dundas, and he’s got a nice room at home. James is single, quiet and fits into the household just fine. He helps prepare meals, does his own laundry and vacuums the house. Some days, Helen and James have a glass of wine together. Thinking back to her own young adulthood, she would never have wanted to live with her parents. But things are different now. “Several of my friends have kids living with them. Some are smoking pot with their kids and partying. So I guess we’re enabling it, in some ways.”
Emerging adulthood is a time to find yourself, make friends, maybe meet a life partner. I lived at home during my undergrad at the University of Manitoba, then moved to Toronto to pursue more education at age 22. I rented an apartment with a friend. Learned how to take the subway. Got a part-time job in retail to pay the bills. Drank in too many pubs. Travelled to Europe. In short, I lived a lifetime in a couple of years by taking chances on myself that I never would have taken under the watchful eye of my loving parents. It can be hard to hit those milestones when your Gen X or boomer parents are your roommates.
The social adjustment hit Kylie Brown hard when she moved back into her childhood bedroom in Toronto after four years in Montreal studying at McGill. Many of Brown’s friends in Toronto also have jobs and live with their parents, and she doesn’t see them often. “The hardest thing I’ve experienced is not being able to talk to people my own age,” she says. “Obviously, I’m not going to discuss the same things with my parents as I would with my university roommates.” She finds herself slipping into her old childhood roles. “I feel like I haven’t been helping out enough,” she says. She and her parents talk about her making dinner more often, but the last few months she’s applied to nine grad schools while working full-time, so her parents have picked up the slack.
There’s no handbook for rooming with someone whose butt you used to wipe. Liza Finlay, Liam Tully’s mom, is a psychotherapist who sees many teens and young adults, as well as parents of adult children. She says the biggest concern for parents having grown kids at home is confusion over appropriate expectations. Do they still have a curfew or can they come and go as they please? Who does their laundry? Kids, on the other hand, especially those who have already lived away, wonder why their parents care where they’re going on a Saturday night.
Janet and her husband, Brian, live in Kelowna, British Columbia. They didn’t imagine they’d still be supporting their daughter, Evie, when she was 27. (We’ve changed the family’s names to protect their privacy.) Janet is 62 and semi-retired, while 72-year-old Brian is fully retired. During Evie’s childhood, they saved money for her education and paid for her first three years of undergrad studies in Kelowna (Evie paid for her fourth year). She got accepted to Western for her master’s, but it was the middle of the pandemic, and she didn’t see the point in paying for residence while taking classes online. So she stayed at home and did her master’s in Kelowna. Evie quickly got a job in her field, supporting youth with mental health challenges and making about $70,000. But the average rent for a one-bedroom condo or townhome in Kelowna is in the $2,100 range, and she and her parents decided she would live at home for a few years to build some savings.
Evie’s parents don’t charge her for rent or groceries, but she bought her own car, covers her own gas, pays her car insurance and phone bill and shells out for her own clothes and makeup. Janet likes to eat healthier food than the others so she cooks for herself, while Brian and Evie take care of their own meals. Brian vacuums and handles the dinner cleanup, and, in typical mom fashion, Janet picks up the rest of the housework. “Why would I move out when I have it so good here?” Evie has joked. Their dynamic feels more like what you’d expect from a parent-teenager combo. Janet hates clutter, and Evie often leaves her stuff all over the kitchen table, which gets on Janet’s nerves. Evie can sometimes get a bit surly with her mom, and Janet tries to let it roll off her. When Janet has her friends over, Evie camps out in her room, which makes Janet feel guilty about how long her friends are staying. And a few times, Janet and Brian have gone out so Evie could host her own friends. These are minor adjustments, really. Still, Janet says she’s ready for Evie to get out. “No offense to her. We get along great. But you know, it’s time.”
For many parents, having twentysomething kids stay with them requires a reconfiguration of what their late middle age and retirement will look like. Even the emerging adulthood guru himself, Jeffrey Arnett, had to adjust when his daughter moved back home last year. “It can be a nice time for a marriage when kids move out,” he says. “But then you throw an adult child into that mix, and it’s an adjustment.”
For one thing, having a grown child live at home puts new pressure on a parent’s finances. A two-parent, two-kid family with a combined income of more than $135,000, for example, will spend $403,910 raising a child to age 17. That number is almost halved for parents making less than $83,000. Across the board, the amount goes up by about 30 per cent when a kid stays at home until age 22. And these costs can have long-term ramifications. Parents in their thirties and forties often have difficulty saving for retirement when they’re in the thick of child-rearing. Once the kids move out, their cash flow frees up and they can start funnelling money into those RRSPs. But if the kids are still in the house, the window for saving shrinks.
Eshun Mott and her husband raised their three adult children in an east-end Toronto home. When their eldest son, Max, left for university, they thought he was gone for good. “It felt the same as when my husband and I went off to school, which is: you’re moving out, you’re starting on your path, you’re moving forward and not looking back,” recalls Mott. Max recently graduated with a double major in business and computer science from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, and although he found a job in his field that interests him, the starting salary isn’t enough to sustain him in Toronto. So he moved back in with his parents, sharing a room with his 21-year-old brother, Rory, who works in film production. Their 18-year-old sister, Moira, who is pursuing a college program in theatre, is in the third bedroom.
Mott recently started an online business selling spices, sauces and baking products that can be hard to find in traditional stores. Her plan was to run it from home, taking over the two bedrooms that would free up when her kids moved out and using them for storage and an office. “I have neither of those rooms, so I’ve rented a storage space and I’m stashing products in various corners of the house,” she says. “It’s the least efficient way to run a business, running up and down the stairs.” But she’s happy to give her kids a safe space where they can build up their savings before taking on the responsibility of a lease or mortgage—even if it means doing a few extra loads of laundry and still having to nudge them to start dinner. “I moved out with $20 in my savings account and have been scrambling ever since. I don’t want that for them.”
For Mott and her husband, the unexpected full house affected their plans for retirement. “We met with a financial adviser years ago, panicking about the fact that we were focusing on putting money in RESPs rather than RRSPs. She said, ‘Come back once the kids have moved out, because your finances will have shifted by then.’ ” They’re one-third of the way there: Rory moved into his own apartment this month.
Many families are unprepared for the financial obligations of parenting adult children: more than half of the respondents in a TD survey last fall said they expect to financially support their children after they become adults, but two-thirds of them don’t feel well-equipped to do so. Many people don’t have enough for retirement, even without the added burden of grown kids. According to a survey commissioned by the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, 64 per cent of Canadians aged 55 to 64 are concerned about having enough money for retirement, and 44 per cent of them who are not retired have less than $5,000 in savings. Three-quarters have less than $100,000—nowhere near enough to sustain themselves through the golden years. For those who have ridden the rise of the housing market with a plan to downsize to help fund their retirement—well, that plan is bust until the last bird has flown away.
My eldest child turns 18 this year. As she plans for university, my mind can’t help but wander to what comes after that. We’ve made it clear to her that she’s welcome to stay at home as long as she needs, to find her footing. Still, her goal—just as mine was all those years ago—is to have a place of her own. One where she can make her own rules, like keeping Christmas decorations up all January long. One where she’ll be forced to learn how to cook more meals and do homework. None of the families I spoke to for this story expect the situation to be permanent. Despite the growing acceptance of intergenerational living, many people still prefer a space of their own. Even Helen, with her 36-year-old son at home, drives through Dundas, wondering if the buildings she passes could be affordable options for him. “Maybe next year,” she says.
Some of the grad schools Kylie Brown applied to are out west—which means freedom may beckon again. But if she winds up at the University of Toronto, she’ll have a choice to make: pay rent, or settle in for a few more years with Mom and Dad. Long-term though, despite the high cost of living, she wants to stay in Toronto. It’s where she grew up, she’s always lived in a big city and it’s home. Tully and his girlfriend recently travelled to visit her dad in Kelowna, and fell in love with B.C. For a moment, they thought perhaps they had found a place they could settle, but quickly realized that prices there are almost as expensive as Toronto. He thinks maybe they could make a financial go of Calgary or Edmonton, but the idea of a prairie winter scares him. Now, he’s got one eye on Portugal, where his dad has moved.
For many young people like Brown and Tully, the question of where they will eventually settle looms large. How does a person who has grown up in a city decide when it’s time to cut their losses and leave? Does a person stay where they grew up, live in a small apartment, pay through the nose in rent? Or do they start fresh, close their eyes and spin the globe to see where they land? According to a poll of B.C. residents, almost half of 18-to-34-year-olds have considered leaving the province, largely due to cost-of-living concerns. Their Ontario counterparts are similarly disillusioned: in a survey of Ontarians between the ages 20 to 32 with a university degree, 49 per cent said they were considering leaving the province for somewhere more affordable, while another 13 per cent were unsure whether they’d stay or go.
Some stay-at-homers are starting to see a future beyond their parents’ walls, however. After two years of working full-time in Kelowna, Evie’s been able to save a $40,000 nest egg and, this spring, she hopes to get a place in a new apartment building that’s opening up, where she’ll be paying about $2,300 in rent. Her parents have talked to her about keeping money on hand for emergencies (“I’ve got friends whose kids are always asking them for money,” Janet says), and Evie knows she’ll have to cut down on some extras, like travelling and takeout, to pay her rent. But for all intents and purposes, she’s ready to launch.
