Monday, April 21, 2014

Stop cooking with cheese!

That's all I can think of when faced with an LA Times article like this.

At a time when the still sluggish economy has sent a flood of jobless young adults back home, older people are quietly moving in with their parents at twice the rate of their younger counterparts.

For seven years through 2012, the number of Californians aged 50 to 64 who live in their parents' homes swelled 67.6% to about 194,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.

The jump is almost exclusively the result of financial hardship caused by the recession rather than for other reasons, such as the need to care for aging parents, said Steven P. Wallace, a UCLA professor of public health who crunched the data.

"The numbers are pretty amazing," Wallace said. "It's an age group that you normally think of as pretty financially stable. They're mid-career. They may be thinking ahead toward retirement. They've got a nest egg going. And then all of a sudden you see this huge push back into their parents' homes."


Thanks, DemocRats!

The Phantom


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stop cooking with cheese really made me laugh. (Never!)

I wonder why people moving in together is always considered a bad thing and never family discovering the joys of living together...and how many of those older people are doing it to help their parents?

Sigh.

The Phantom said...

Hi, arhyalon. According to the study these are people -not- moving in to help their parents, they are moving in because its forced upon them by financial ruination. Ruination is not a joyous thing, generally. I suppose you could learn to love it, but then the Buddhists tell us that if you work at it hard enough you can transcend this veil of tears and become a Bodhisattva. I don't know any Bodhisattvas, myself. I do know a whole bunch of people who tell me they love their parents but the old coots drive 'em crazy. On balance I'm going to have to go with "bad thing" because Bodhisattvas are, like, rare.