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Spend quality time with your parents when you live with them.
- Parents bring us into the world, care for us, and teach us how to grow into independent adults.
- It's considered slightly shameful in the US to live with your parents into adulthood, but it's a common occurrence in other cultures.
- Author Dylan Love moved back home with his parents at age 29 - here are eight things he did to make it work.
It turns out that you can definitely go home again. I know because I did.
I left my childhood home at age 18, bound for college. After graduating at 22, I moved to New York City and began a career as a writer and reporter. The seven years of life and work that followed completely changed my plans, desires, and circumstances. So when I moved back home at 29, my parents had to meet their adult son all over again.
It was an adjustment for all involved. Mom and Dad sacrificed space, routine, and some degree of privacy in hosting me. I had to design a new way to conduct myself; where I had once been a single guy in New York City, largely free to do as I pleased, I now needed to identify new boundaries and carve out a routine within them.
In any event, my live-at-home arrangement with my parents was a simple one: As long as I was earning money, I was free to stay with them. Working from a paranoia stoked by my parents' dictum, "We charge rent when you stop making money," I found myself signing a new apartment lease shortly after my 30th birthday.
Read on to soak up the wisdom I gained in my 11-month-long tour of duty with Mom and Dad. Living with your parents can be a positive, enjoyable experience if you try. Here's what worked for me.