In our 30s, graduates, but still living at home

By age 30, they were expected to have moved up the career ladder, married, and settled down in their own homes, hopefully with their first babies on the way.

This has was and still is the expected progression of any young Kenyan man or woman.

However, with the country’s high unemployment rate, few jobs being created each year, even fewer satisfying job opportunities, and a fear of leaving the nest, Dan and Anne, along with a group of millennials find themselves either still living at home with their parents or moving back home after a stab at independence failed to work.

The reasons for staying at home vary. For some, it may be to tend to ill family members or provide financial and emotional support to elderly parents. For others, it is due to cultural expectations, such as being part of multigenerational household. Some men also stick around to carry on the family legacy.

Despite these reasons, living at home till the age of 30 attracts ridicule from peers and elders alike. As a young adult in Kenya, it is easy to feel shame when you are housemates with your parents. You are ridiculed by neighbours, siblings and even strangers on social media.

Meet Mercy Odera, a 30-year-old, bachelor of education graduate from Kenyatta University who lives in her parents’ house in Isinya, Kajiado County.

She says circumstances beyond her control forced her to live with her parents at an age when she had hoped to have flown from the nest.

“My child and I came back home and now staying with my parents because I lost my job. I needed to hustle and save money on expenses like childcare, utilities, and rent,” she says.

When Mercy completed her studies, she had high expectations for her life.

“Then I was hit by a harsh job market, student loan debt, siblings looking up to me, having a child…all these left me struggling so much to grow myself and even think of pursuing a postgraduate degree,” she tells Lifestyle.

Mercy moved back home in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, which occasioned her job loss. But she does not just sit pretty. She ventured into the business of second-hand clothes. It did very well for a few months before she closed it down as buyers reduced.

“Living at home has not been easy. From siblings, to neighbours, people talk about you. My parents have accepted me, but deep down, I always have that feeling that I've disappointed them. My self-esteem has been battered. I look at my agemates doing so well and I ask myself ‘why me?”. I keep going, but my consciousness keeps telling me that it is time to leave home,” she says.

One of the challenges of living at home at her age, Mercy says, is that you have to ‘lay low as an adult.’ Parents also have to learn their adult children all over again, sacrifice space, routine, and their privacy.

“You are an adult who is still answerable to your parents. You also have to identify new boundaries,” she says.

There is also the aspect of mockery.

“What I came to realise is that society does not care about you. On many occasions, you’d find that even in a little disagreement, you’ll be mocked for speaking up ‘yet you are still living in your parents’ home’. Such words are killing me mentally. I keep wondering, ‘How do people see me? Why judge me? I’m the one who personally understands my situation, so I have chosen to just ignore them,” says Mercy.  “But if you have a choice move out. Living at home as an adult is a bad idea, it interferes with your growth.”

But the same cannot be said for Taz, [who prefers to go by one name]. He is a 39-year-old with interests in the entertainment industry and has been living in his mother’s house for the past 15 years. He says it is out of necessity, for his late mother’s sake.

As the third of five siblings, his situation dates back to the death of his father 16 years ago. Out of tragedy, came a windfall and his late mother invested it in real estate in Nairobi. Taz’s family lived in one of the houses in the estate.

Since not all children turn out the way parents expect them to in their adult life, one of their siblings is problematic and this necessitates Taz’s constant presence in his mother’s house.

What was supposed to be a temporary living situation for Taz became   long-term.

“Three years later, I am still at my mum’s house because my brother is unfortunately mixed up with the wrong crowd and I fear for my parents’ properties. Four times, I left home. I went to Mombasa, Nakuru, Pipeline in Nairobi, and Bungoma to work, but every time my mother instructed me to return home. I always enjoyed the independence and freedom while living away from home but whenever I saw her phone calls and her telling me to ‘rudi nyumbani’, I always felt divided. I wanted to keep my freedom, but I also missed home, and I understood why she needed me back. So I returned home,” says Taz.

His younger siblings became dependent on him as a father figure. This dependence has changed how he spends his money because he has to provide for his problematic sibling who still has not found his footing in life.

“But I now have plans to move out of my mother’s main house to another unit in the same compound. I intend to pay rent for it because it is a business at the end of the day, and I will still be close by to continue helping protect her investments for future generations. Posthumously, I will no longer be fully dependent on my parents’ investments, and I will be channelling cash back into their properties for future developments,” adds Taz.

Multigenerational living has also seen some people in their 30s continue living at home. In 2021, the Pew Research Center found that one in four adults, including those aged 30 to 34, lived in a household that included two or more generations. Finances and caregiving were the key factors found to be driving multigenerational living, as well as the level of education of these millennials.

One such family member is Maria Anyango, 28, from Kisumu County, who witnessed her first born sister, 35, return home. Her reason? A bout of life-changing misfortunes involving death and finances.

“She moved back to our parents’ house in Busia County. She is an adult, and I expected her to be more independent and support our parents, not vice-versa,” says Maria, the lastborn of three siblings.

In the silence of her thoughts, without any plans of stirring the family pot with drama, Maria, says her older sister became a burden to her parents.

“I feel like she is a burden to my mother, yet most of my adolescence and all of my adulthood, I have been left to fend for myself while my parents focused on the more immediate needs of my elder sibling,” she says.

From her experience with her older sister, Maria says, if you are to move back home in your 30s, make sure it is short-term. This would allow you to “bounce back” much quicker than wallowing in depression in your childhood bedroom.

John Juma, a father of six, is living with one of his sons, who is 30 at his home in Nairobi’s Dandora estate.

Mr Juma says life did not financially pan out as they expected, so, the son did not get a chance to further his education, which hampered his prospects of finding well-paying jobs in the blue collar industries.

Today, the young man depends on meagre earnings from casual labour such as construction sites around Dandora to earn his daily bread. Juma also supplement’s his son’s earnings, making the 30-year-old largely dependent on him too.

“I find that our relationship is not the same as it used to be because of both our unmet expectations. I had high hopes for him and I feel sad when I see his agemates succeeding in life while my son is still at home with me. There is nothing I can do so I just say ‘let him stay at home and figure out what he can do to make ends meet',” he says.

The father and son often argue.

“I want to pressure him to leave home and establish his independence but he is stuck at home. I know that his premature exit may lead him down a path of hanging out with the wrong crowd, so I just leave him to figure things out alone. It's not easy but as a parent, what can you do? The much I can also do is just ensure that there is food remaining in the house for him to eat,” says Mr Juma, who is a pastor.

His advise to parents in similar situations?

Mr Juma says parents should not pressure young adults and millennials still living at home- no matter the age- to prematurely leave the house. In his opinion, smoking, drinking and other addictive vices may await such millennials who have no idea where to begin; and they may end up boomeranging back home with negative behaviours. At this point, he adds, such parents may end up having alcoholic adults in their hands who return home very late at night with outrageous behaviour such as demanding food loudly.

What, then, does moving back home do to these millennials who find themselves at the end of their rope?

A psychology study on Living with Parents and Emerging Adults’ Depressive Symptoms found that nearly two-fifths of millennials who moved back home with their parents reported “significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms,” especially among those experiencing unemployment or employment problems, higher levels of student debt and poverty.

“Real-life difficulties encountered by emerging adults are undoubtedly the key contributing factors to emotional difficulties. Thus, employment problems, divorce, and a long roster of other negative life events may be directly implicated to an unknown extent in the higher levels of depressive symptoms observed in the subset of individuals who returned to the parental home,” the study notes.

As Kenya’s unemployment rate keeps rising, there will likely be more graduates staying at home past the age of 30.

“These are recent graduates who are looking for a job, and then 30 hits while they are still at home. Then there is a second category of people who are past 30 or even in their 40s, and things didn’t work out, so they went back home. It could be something to do with work, or they were married, then their spouse kicked them out of the house, and they went back. The high cost of living, especially in urban areas like Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu, and things like rent, utilities, and food prices could also make people rather stay at home and be dependent on their parents,” says Jackline Mwangi, a Nairobi-based financial advisor.

For many people in the 30-39 age bracket, financial muscle and freedom continue to rank among the top life aspirations. To have the ability to lead independent lives, enjoy the freedom of time and the power of purchase—to own a home, cars, capital for investments, savings for rainy days, and spare cash to play around with for random trips and vacations at the drop of a hat—is the dream of many of these millennials.

Yet, living in their parents’ homes and actualising these dreams presents another uphill task.

Ms Mwangi says these millennials can dig themselves out of muddy financial holes, bounce back, and lead better lives than before.

“Start small. Get a source of income of even Sh30,000. Live very leanly,” she says, “Ask your family for small soft loans and develop a healthy investment, repayment, and saving culture.”

“Life is about the compound effect of your habits. One can look at the mistakes they made that saw them living with their parents after 30. Moving forward, they can learn from their mistakes and be aggressive with the big picture in mind. They can give themselves timelines of where they want to be and start taking those baby steps, honing their journey, and celebrating,” adds Ms Mwangi.