The experience of co-residence: young adults returning to the parental home after graduation in England

Finishing full-time higher education is one of the main reasons for returning home to live. Graduates who return to co-residence with their parents experience a delay in achieving full adult independence, which may pose problems for them and for their parents. In this article we use face-to-face interview data to explore the feelings and perceptions of 27 co-resident graduate 'returners' and one of their parents. We classify parent–returner dyads into groups according to whether the members of each dyad are positive, negative or ambivalent about co-residence and identify the salient issues for each group. We find that more parents are negative about co-residence than adult children and that almost half the sample is ambivalent. We also discuss the factors accounting for differences between groups of dyads and between parents and adult children.