In California, Great Recession pushes scores of adult children home, and older parents pay

Californians anticipating an empty nest in their golden years are now faced with a rocky reality: The Great Recession and its jobless recovery have forced many adult children home, increasing household expenses by 50 percent or more for many families, according to a new study by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.   The study includes a county-by-county breakdown of the costs of supporting an extended family in California.   For a variety of reasons — lack of a job, job loss, divorce, home foreclosure — more than 2.3 million adult children in California were living with their parents in 2011, 63 percent more than in pre-recession 2006. There were 433,000 older adults, age 65 and over, who housed approximately 589,000 of those adult children.   "A college degree is no guarantee of a job today, and an unprecedented number of families have been forced to return to a multi-generational household," said Steven P. Wallace, associate director at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and a co-author of the study. "Until the economy provides the kinds of jobs that allow all adults to be self-sufficient, families will need help."   Low-income parents, who account for almost one-quarter of the total number of older parents supporting an adult child, are particularly affected. Despite having incomes that make it difficult to survive at a basic level in high-cost California, ...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news