For some lucky families, the unexpected time together brought on by the pandemic often felt like a gift, a bonus year to bond with parents and siblings.
Why Leaving the Nest Is Harder the Second Time Around
After moving back in with their parents during the pandemic, some young adults are struggling to adjust to life on their own.
Credit.Janik Söllner
June 4, 2021
For Tiana Mason, a 26-year-old research assistant at Boston University, moving back to New Jersey to live with her parents during the pandemic was hard at first. But that didn’t compare to the overwhelming anxiety she felt several months later after she left the nest again to go back to Boston.
When Ms. Mason was living at home during the first six months of the pandemic, she relied on her mother for food shopping and company. In the fall, she returned to an empty Boston apartment where she worked remotely. Taking public transportation to the grocery store and laundromat brought her unexpected stress.
Do You Have Pandemic Empty-Nest Syndrome?
How parents can cope when kids leave home a second time
by Sarah Elizabeth Adler, AARP, May 24, 2021 |
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Terry Vine/Getty Images
Homemade bread and backyard chickens weren t the only trends to take off during the pandemic. Cohabitation between parents and young adult children skyrocketed, too, with the number of 18- to 29-year-olds living at home reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression, according to 2020 findings from the Pew Research Center.
But as colleges and workplaces across the country begin to reopen, many young adults who returned home in the last year are preparing to leave the nest once more. It s a change that can find parents grappling with feelings of loss and sadness but experts say the transition to an empty nest doesn t need to be fraught a second time around. Here are their strategies to ease the adjustment.
The pandemic has left millennials more divided than ever before Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
The pandemic has amplified and created divisions within the millennial generation.
It s intensified a millennial wealth gap, with some faring well while lower earners are struggling.
Several more chasms are now yawning open, from the way millennials live to how adult they can be.
The pandemic has had a lopsided effect on millennials, a generation already divided before 2020 by wealth and opportunity, among other things.
Millennials first recession the financial crisis that began in 2007 split the generation down the middle, as the older cohort graduated into a stagnated job market and the younger cohort caught the tailwind of the recovery. Pre-pandemic, millennials were marked by high income inequality that looked even starker along racial lines.
Photo illustration by Alex Cochran
Like a lot of siblings who are close in age, Kelsie and Taylor Wakefield, 16 and 17, have butted heads often. Over the years, feuds regarding who got the blue cup evolved into disputes over who got to drive the car. Unsurprisingly, their mom Heather Wakefield wasn’t sure how things would go when COVID-19 shut down their school and forced them to spend more time together.
But instead of bickering more, Kelsie and Taylor bonded over an unlikely shared project: a 1979 RV. Their younger brother, Adam, 14, found it in a classified ad for $300. In a time when school, dance classes, soccer games and basically everything else was put on hold, the Wakefield teens spent their time gutting an old house on wheels. They slathered on coats of paint, wired up an entertainment center and transformed the old RV into a grown-up clubhouse. Days spent sanding floors and reupholstering furniture turned into evenings streaming movies and telling each other storie