[Dion]

Originally Posted by The Yen Man

I think you're generalizing too much here. Of all the baby boomers that I know of, none of them fit your description. If anything, they're the ones supporting their kids well into their 20s because their kids cannot afford to buy a house and are thus forced to live at home and save. Meanwhile, some of those kids have given up ever owning a home and are the ones buying expensive cars, iphones and ipads, and go on backpacking trips to Europe and Asia.

Don't forget the boomerang generation....

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/...ty/#more-12968

In the current edition of The Atlantic magazine, Michael Kinsley writes that many Baby Boomers, having paid publicly and privately for their parents’ generation to retire in comfort, now wake up to find that they are also supporting their children, into their 20s and beyond. This week’s New Yorker has a man in a cartoon saying, “I never thought I’d have to move back in with my parents.” He’s in a graveyard, sitting on the stoop of the family tomb.

Stay-around offspring exasperate parents, and can humiliate all concerned. Those who comment on it in public often imply that if young people would only try harder they could work things out for themselves and avoid being a burden. But Marni Jackson’s lively and thoughtful book, Home Free: The Myth of The Empty Nest, published today, avoids the blaming and shaming that often erupts around this subject. Her great virtue is that she comes through this experience with both her sense of humour and her love for her now 27-year-old son intact.

Jackson sets out to write about how people in their 20s “are taking their time to grow up and leave home.” She calls it a “twilight stage,” when they move out, move back in, then leave again. Naturally, she worries about the results of parental support. Do parents playing the role of landlord undermine the independence of their adult children, or are they simply helping them tackle a much tougher world than the one they faced when starting out?