High housing costs prompted Nateisha Riddell, her partner and their two young children to move in with her mother.
“Financially, it just makes sense,” said Riddell, who is a 32-year-old doula in Montreal.
But there has been a surprise bonus. The extra pair of hands makes parenting easier. So much easier, in fact, that Riddell and her mother plan to make co-living permanent.
Riddell joins the one third of young adults aged 20 to 34 years who live with at least one parent, according to a 2021 Statistics Canada report.
Tight housing markets tend to lead to Canadians living with their parents, says Nathanael Lauster, associate professor in the University of British Columbia’s sociology department.
“As rents rise, as housing becomes more scarce, one adaptation that people do is they just stay and live with their parents for longer,” said Lauster, whose current research looks at changes to the family over several decades in different Canadian cities.
Adult children living with their parents is not new, said Lauster. It happened in the 1970s due to housing shortages.
But since 2000, the portion of Canadians aged 20 to 34 who live with their parents has increased from 30.6 to 35.1 per cent, according to Statistics Canada.
The old stereotype of the 30-year-old who fails to launch, who ends up playing video games in their parents’ basement, isn’t the reality, says Esme Fuller-Thomson, director of the Institute for Life Course and Aging at the University of Toronto.
Younger generations are better educated than previous generations and gainfully employed. But big cities have become more expensive, and a one-bedroom apartment is unaffordable for many, says Fuller-Thomson.
For parents who want to help their adult children buy their own houses, letting them move in is one option to help them save money and have a shot at entering the housing market later on, she says.
Other young adults opt for multigenerational living for cultural reasons. For many newcomers to Canada, living with parents is the cultural norm.
‘Really helpful’
The relationship between adult children and their parents is little understood, says Umay Kader, Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia, who studies the co-living dynamic. From late 2022 to February 2023, Kader interviewed 23 young adults, between 25 and 34 years old, who live with their parents in the Metro Vancouver area.
Her study aims to better understand how young adults make decisions and relate to their parents, on everything from finances to chores to handling conflict. For many, emotional support was a major benefit to co-living with parents. Sharing their daily lives and getting to know one another better as grownups was also beneficial.
“Some said the parents had told them they liked having them around so much they didn’t want them to move out.”
But the emotional support given and received depends on the health of the family dynamic.
Riddell, who last lived with her mother more than a decade ago, spoke many times a week with her mom in the years before living together as adults.
Riddell says living with her mom makes parenting easier.
“It’s been really, really, really helpful to have an extra adult in the house,” said Riddell. “And it’s the grandma so she wants to spend time with them — she’s happy to babysit them.”
This dynamic is healthy for multigenerational families, says Fuller-Thomson.
“The grandchildren feel loved — they have people to rely on… if the child’s sick, there’s somebody else to do the pickup, and it just makes life easier.”
After moving in with her mother, Riddell found she could easily book date nights with her partner. Before, they would drive more than 30 minutes to drop off the kids at her mom’s to get a few hours at a restaurant nearby. Now, Grandma can tuck the kids into their own beds before heading into her living space.
“About once or twice a month we get to have date night,” said Riddell. And once or twice a year they get away for a few nights together.
But living peacefully together takes work.
“There is some conflict that originates from being a different generation, being an immigrant generation or having different political [or] religious values with family,” said Kader.
Setting up boundaries before living together is key to a healthy dynamic, especially when kids are involved, said Fuller-Thomson.
Riddell and her mother have worked out schedules and rules to divide the co-living space.
“For instance, the washer and dryer, we share that. So we came up with a schedule,” said Riddell. The appliances are in her mother’s living space. To give her more privacy, they decided on a day a week when they wouldn’t do laundry.
Grandparents who live in a multi-generational home can share in parenting, said Fuller-Thomson. But that takes establishing parenting rules that the whole family follows.
“Usually, the parents got the final say, and the grandparent needs to follow and be consistent with the parental rules,” said Fuller-Thomson. “And sometimes there can be tensions around that.”
Riddell says that, luckily, her mom has adapted to her parenting style. For example, they praise the child’s effort, rather than excessively praising the outcome — avoiding saying “good girl” when a child completes a craft project — a parenting method to encourage childrens’ motivation.
Different ideas
Co-living could become more popular, not only due to the housing crisis, but as Canada accepts more immigrants.
Ethnic communities evolve over time, over generations in Canada. The tendency to live in multigenerational homes tends to diminish over time, said Lauster. But it is possible that could change.
“Children go to school surrounded by folks with different ideas. And then children who are from non-immigrant families recently go to school and learn from immigrant families,” said Lauster.
Kader, who studied mainly white and Asian participants, said no one reported feeling pressure to move in with their parents.
Riddell has co-lived with her mother for more than a year now and says they do not want to separate.
“We’ll just rent for a few years and see if the market comes down,” said Riddell. “But we have every intention to buy together.”
Disclaimer: Nateisha Riddell is a friend of Hadassah Alencar.
Correction: A prior version of this article incorrectly said that Umay Kader interviewed hundreds of patients aged 25 to 40.
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