How To Live With Your Parent As An Adult (And Not Go Crazy)

February 26th, 2024

If you’re an adult living with your parents for any reason, you may be experiencing some unique challenges.

Adults are living with their parents for a variety of reasons, like health issues, disability, caring for ailing parents or younger siblings, high housing costs, student debt, and inflation.

US Census Bureau 2021: One in three U.S. adults ages 18 to 34 live in their parents’ home.
Pew Research Center 2021: Americans were likelier to see young adults living with their parents as a bad thing than a good thing for society.
Harris Poll for Bloomberg 2023: Roughly 45% of people aged 18 to 29 live at home with their families — the highest figure since the 1940s. Over 60% of Gen-Zers and millennials reported moving back home in the past two years, often because of financial challenges.

If you’re an adult living with your parents for any reason, you may be experiencing some unique challenges. I want to walk you through some of the challenges I have worked on with individual clients and in our Calling Home groups and provide you with some tips to navigate this time in your life.

How To Live With Your Parents As An Adult Without Losing Your Mind

Try not to slip back into old roles. It’s easy to become the “child” version of yourself under your parents’ roof. This is even more likely if you’re back in the same home or bedroom you lived in throughout your childhood. Work on embodying the adult version of yourself, especially during difficult or tense moments with your parents. This also means acting like an adult when faced with rules, boundaries, or roommate-like issues.
Remember you’re sharing space with other adults. Your parents have likely become accustomed to doing things a certain way in their home. The longer a child has been out of the house, the harder it can be to adjust to them moving back. This is an adjustment for both of you, and it is essential to remember that when things get tense.
It’s easy for your parents to slip back into old roles, too. It’s essential to remember that your parents will likely go through their own period of role confusion if and when you move back into their home. Try as much as you can not to take this personally and to have reasonable, adult conversations if and when this happens. They may become too strict or overbearing with specific rules because they see you more as a child than an adult when you’re living in their home.
Reasonable rules and expectations are allowed and should be discussed in advance. Your parents are allowed to have rules (within reason) about their home, and sometimes those rules are a condition of living there. Many adults experience whiplash when they move in with their parents and can no longer do everything they did when they lived alone. This is understandable, and adult children and their parents need to have healthy, reasonable conversations about expectations and rules in the home. These rules or living standards work best when communicated calmly and clearly in advance.
Try to imagine you’re living with a roommate. It may be difficult to share space with your parents because you have different home cleanliness and noise standards. And you and your parents are exactly like adult roommates sharing a space. How can you all be considerate of one another? Are there specific standards about cleanliness, noise, etc., that need to be discussed?
Try not to think of this as a step-back or a shame-inducing event. Many adults must move back in with their parents for reasons totally out of their control. A lot of conflict occurs between adults and their parents when the adult child feels ashamed that they are living at home. This shame can make you more argumentative, defensive, and difficult to live with. It’s not ideal to have to move back in with your parents as an adult, and working through that in other ways is important.
You don’t have to tolerate abuse. Some adult children end up in a challenging situation: they cannot afford to live on their own, and they’re forced to live with an abusive parent. This is a complex situation that no one should be forced into. If you are an adult living with an abusive parent or in a situation where there is emotional abuse and/or domestic violence, please know you do not deserve it and should not have to be in this situation. Try to access resources like a domestic violence center, a friend who can help, other family members, a therapist, or affordable housing in your area. You can also seek safety by limiting your contact with this parent and attempting to create a schedule that eliminates time in the home or exposure to the abuse. Abusive relationships are incredibly nuanced and challenging to leave.
If your time with your parent is temporary, try to stay focused on your goals and plans. Having a set goal and plan to achieve it can make living with your parent more manageable in adulthood. This might include finding employment, finishing school, saving money, securing other housing, or working on achieving independence even while living under your parent’s roof.
Accept who your parent is. Sometimes, we expect to move in with someone different from who our parents are at this time. Remember who your parent is and that you cannot change them, even when living together. Try to direct your energy towards yourself and your goal instead of attempting to fix your parent.

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