The questionable assertion that Spanish young adults are returning to their parents’ homes
What figures support the alleged mass return of young people to their parents’ homes? None, in fact: the truth is that most of those hit hardest by the crisis are the same people who never managed to leave home.
Various official indicators show that the crisis is drastically affecting young people in Spain, however they do not confirm the reported return of young adults to their parents’ homes. That is because the insecurity facing young people in our country is not only due to the current economic crisis. On the contrary, the various characteristics of youth employment (very temporary jobs, unemployment, low-quality jobs, low wages, atypical employment, etc.) have become engrained in the system and our society. The deregulation of industrial relations and the economic liberalisation processes that have even reached the key public services, have not merely failed to improve the living conditions of the majority, but threaten to leave today’s young people with an even more precarious outlook than previous generations.
One of the most direct effects of the problem is the curtailing of emancipation: only the small percentage of young people with better types of jobs have been able to leave their parents’ homes to live on their own, and they are also the ones who are currently being affected less by the crisis. The rest – huge swathes of young people between 16 and 35 – have never managed to get a sufficiently stable job to leave home, so the economic crisis has come as an additional shock.
Those facts directly contradict the avalanche of news reports from a range of media expressing alarm at a supposed mass return of young people to their parents’ homes owing to the crisis. Without wishing to deny or trivialise the dramatic individual cases, large sets of socioeconomic statistics from the Active Population Survey paint a different picture, albeit an equally worrying one. Various indicators report stagnation dating back several years, as demonstrated by the systematic nature of youth job insecurity and its effects on emancipation, and the lack of effective methods for tackling it. To summarise, the vast majority of Spanish young people of home-leaving age have had to put plans to leave their parents’ homes on hold as they try to find better jobs.
The importance of getting hold of reliable statistics is key when addressing issues as complex as that of youth insecurity. Claiming that a high percentage of people are returning to their family homes owing to the crisis includes the false premise that young people had a decent work situation in recent years and that most of them managed to leave home. It is clear that job insecurity has become a fact of life for young people for several years now, and that if we fail to tackle the roots of the problem it is likely to persist.
