It is clear that the current generation of youth is likely to live with their parents for a significantly longer time after completing formal education as a shortage of jobs thwarts their ambitions for financial independence.
Questions are however emerging over how long young adults should continue living with their parents. Bizarre situations arise where middle-aged men and women, sometimes well into their forties, continue living with their ageing parents. In some cases, the grown-up children marry and bring their own children to the family homestead. The entire household comes to depend on the elderly parents’ pension.
Andrew Mwanyalo, a retiree, sees the trend in his village. "There are 45-year-old men who have never held a job or married. Every evening they go back home demanding food from their widowed mothers. They should be the ones providing food, not their mothers,” he says.
The situation is distressing for everybody in the homestead. The parents feel disappointed at the inability of their children to mature into independent adults, wondering where they failed in raising the children. On their part, the adult children say they have no choice but to live with their parents because of rampant unemployment. “I have done countless job applications, attended many interviews, but I still don’t have a job,” says one young woman in her early thirties.
The tendency of adults living with their parents has given rise to terms such as the “Boomerang Generation,” “delayed adulthood” and “extended adolescence.” Boomerang Generation is a term applied to young adults who choose to share a home with their parents after previously living on their own, thus boomeranging back to their parents' residence.
In Italy, they are referred to as "bamboccioni," meaning "big babies." In Japan, they are called the "Hikikomori," or the lost generation. These are individuals who got so ashamed of not getting jobs with prestigious corporations that they isolated themselves in their bedrooms for many years. The term “parasite single” has been used to describe people who have jobs but choose to live with their parents beyond their early 30s to enjoy a more carefree life.
Families need to be aware of the trend of delayed adulthood in order to ease pressure on both parents and their adult children. While some young people remain at their parents’ homes due to alcoholism and drug abuse, many others cannot set out on their own because they lack jobs. They don’t engage in bad behaviour but are trapped in economic circumstances affecting employment. The current emphasis on self-employment could shift mindsets away from looking for jobs to creating jobs.
More young people should consider taking up technical and vocational training. Reports suggest that Kenya faces a shortage of qualified electricians, plumbers, carpenters, masons and related technical persons.
Technical jobs are scorned because they look like hard, sweaty labour. Despite the negative views, these crafts could be very useful for school leavers and college graduates aiming at financial independence.
