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As many post-secondary graduates return home for the summer, many parents may find themselves with a full nest again as Canadian youth struggle with a challenging job market.
This begs the question — is having your kids staying home into adulthood less a sign of a “failure to launch,” as some used to call it, and more of a wise financial decision in 2026?
“There really does seem to be a shift. It’s an economic shift,” says Ilona Doherty, managing director of the Youth and Innovation Project at the University of Waterloo.
“It’s harder to find jobs, but also the reality is that young people are in education for longer and longer, and we see a delay of a lot of the traditional markers of adulthood.”
It’s not a new trend either, as recent data from Statistics Canada shows each generation with more people staying home for longer.
In 2021, 16.3 per cent of millennials between the ages of 25 and 39 were living with at least one parent. That’s almost twice the figure as Baby Boomers living with their parents in 1991.
“Staying at home now is probably more desirable than it was certainly when I was younger because your living costs, especially when you’re just getting out of school or you’re just starting in your career, it’s so much more expensive,” says financial expert Clay Jarvis at NerdWallet Canada.
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“It makes perfect sense that people would want to stay home and save that money.“
Living at home with parents, guardians, or roommates for little or no cost means being able to save money for investing, a down payment on a home, or paying off debt like student loans as examples.
High inflation and housing costs mean it’s never been harder for so many young people to reach their financial goals, unless they have an opportunity to get ahead.
“[The trend has] been driven by the cost of living situation where it’s just harder to, especially in some of the cities, it’s really hard to move out, and that’s interesting because it does raise a question about getting ahead and mobility,” says sociology professor Scott Schieman at the University of Toronto.
“We always were proud of ‘this generation is going to go beyond what their parents did’ and then the previous parents, and a big chunk of that was getting out of the house, starting your own household, transitioning to serious adulthood.”
Nowadays, it may make more financial sense to stay at home and save money where possible, especially because the alternative may mean putting off long-term savings goals or sinking further into debt.
Doherty notes how the traditional idea that young people should move out of the house as soon as they’re 18 is mostly a Western cultural trend that appears to be changing.
“Throughout human history…kids living in their parents’ home until they got married has been norm. Also in a lot of cultural communities, this never changed,” she says.
“It was really this Western construct of the nuclear family and of independence that happened for just this tiny blip in human history and now is sort of shifting back.”
If society is moving to becoming more accepting of young Canadians living at home for longer, then current economic pressures facing them may be the catalyst.
“I think today there is more of that rationalization around it being more acceptable because of the cost of living and the financial element, and wage is not necessarily keeping pace,” says Schieman.
But in order to maintain healthy relationships with parents and guardians alike, Jarvis says that it’s important for young Canadians to have clearly established financial goals.
“I think it’s good to talk to your kids about what their plans are, and how they plan to achieve those plans. And if they don’t have a plan in place, well, you have these parents with years of experience supporting themselves and managing their finances,” he says.
“You can’t just have a complete lack of a framework. I think it’s good to have some sort of boundaries. Some sort of plans in mind so that a kid is working towards something.”
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
