Number of adults living with parents in England and Wales rises by 700,000 in a decade

It is enough to make parents wonder: whatever happened to the bachelor pad?

At least 620,000 more grown-up children are now living with their parents than a decade ago – and most of those doing so are young men, census figures reveal.

Soaring rents and the cost of living crisis mean that on a typical London street, you will find at least one adult child in one in four families, the Office for National Statistics has revealed.

The pandemic may have played a role, too, experts said, with many people having returned to the roost, while others are not ready to move out after being sapped of social confidence.

Across England and Wales, young men living with their parents outnumber young women by about three to two, and there has been an almost 15% rise in the number of “non-dependent adult children” living at home. The average age of this growing population of 4.9 million homebodies is now 24.

The figures suggest that the nuclear family – in some form at least – is persisting for longer, whether through children never leaving home or “boomeranging” – leaving for a while before coming back.

The ONS said that, despite the census being taken during the pandemic in 2021, the trend appears to be long-term rather than symptomatic of that era.

Related: Number of households renting has more than doubled since 2001, census reveals

“It can improve family dynamics,” said Sue Atkins, a parenting coach whose 27-year-old son moved back during the pandemic for a couple of weeks and ended up staying for five months. “He didn’t behave like a spoiled teenager. If he had sat around and behaved like that, it wouldn’t have worked.”

But Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist, said moving out is important for young adults for several reasons. Not only do they need to prove that they can live independently before their parents die, but older siblings staying at home can also stunt the development of younger children. Parents must also find new meaning in their lives once their children are grown up.

The raw data fails to capture the joys and tensions of increasingly inter-generational co-habitation, such as the fraught question of when a child should start paying rent and chip in for the weekly shop, or over the awkward lack of privacy as more adult lives are squeezed into the same space.

But it does show a clear long-term trend. In 1997, according to a separate ONS survey, more than half of 21-year-olds had already left home. At that time the most common living arrangement for an 18-34-year-old was in a couple with one or more children. By the time of the census in 2021, most people in their early 20s were living with their parents – just over half of all people aged 23 and under.

“Perceptions are changing,” said Katharine Hill, UK director of the charity Care for the Family. “Once socially taboo, adult children choosing to continue to live at home is now seen as economic necessity. There are pros and cons on both sides – lack of privacy and personal space on the one hand, a decision that makes financial sense with the opportunity to build supportive relationships on the other. For both parents and children, it requires clear boundaries and agreed expectations to work well.”

And it is not always young adults who are increasingly staying at home. About 30% of 25- to 29-year-olds now live with their parents, and more than one in 10 (11.6%) adult children aged 30 to 34 – up from 8.6% in 2011.

The driving forces behind the trend are multiple.

“Adults were more likely to live with their parents in areas where housing is less affordable,” the ONS said. “Adult children were also more likely to be unemployed, or providing unpaid care.”

In the north-east of England, the most affordable area to buy a house, the proportion of adults living with their parents actually fell in the decade to 2021, as the overall number of families rose.

But in London – the most expensive region of the UK to buy or rent a house – there was the fastest growth in adults living with their parents over the last 10 years.

The impact of the capital’s high house prices means the average age of an adult child living with a parent is now 25, compared with a year younger for the rest of England and Wales. In the London Borough of Haringey, where house prices almost doubled in the decade to £591,000 on average, the average age rose from 24 to 26 in a decade. By contrast, in Selby in Yorkshire and the Humber, where prices rose just 40% over the decade, the average age was 23 – the same as in 2011.

Related: No increase in young adults living with parents after Covid, UK study finds

In light of a loss of confidence among some young adults resulting from social isolation during lockdowns, Blair urged parents to give adult children a timetable that will help them move on. This could including asking for rent and setting a timeframe for getting a job, even if it means creating “a little discomfort”.

Atkins, author of the book Parenting Made Easy – How to Raise Happy Children, said adults living with their parents had potential upsides of relieving financial pressures for parents, and for older parents could provide a source of emotional and practical support.

She cautioned that parents also need to learn to adapt the parent-child relationship if cohabiting, “because sometimes they can still treat adult children as if they were 15 years old”.

Linda Blair’s tips for parents of adult children at home

• Share rights and responsibilities as if you were all renting together. Divide up chores collaboratively rather than issuing instructions. What you say is: “Here’s a list of all the jobs we need to do in the house. And what we’re going to do is take turns choosing one. Eat together at least once a week and you could take turns cooking.”

• Privacy should always be respected. Everybody should have a space no matter how small. On the matter of sex, you have to play it by family. You have to take into consideration whether there are younger siblings who might be distressed and if the walls are thin. I would hope parents would welcome their child’s partner, but when it comes to spending the night, the situation must feel appropriate. And if your child and their partner are having noisy sex and it puts others off, wait until the partner has left and say, “I’m sorry, you probably don’t realise, but actually we were all sharing in that event. And I don’t think you would want that to happen.”

• Be patient if encouraging them to move out. Many “children” came home during the lockdown to live with their parents and it was comfortable. But many lost a lot of confidence brought on by this terrible sudden period of isolation. And so, because to make a change takes confidence, it’s harder than it would have been for them to decide to move out.

• Give them a framework. If they’re already employed, you can say: “You need to start paying rent, because this is no longer a freebie. I have to help you be more independent because I’m not going to be here for ever – and anyway, eventually you’ll want to be independent.” If they aren’t working, put some energy into helping them find a job and set a timeframe.