I'm on several Japanese dating sites. It's not uncommon to see people in their 40s and even 50s living at home. I have a friend in her mid 40s still living at home. It's common to see mom's (50s-60s) and daughters (20s-30s-40s) going out together. One of my closest friend's from Malaysia in is 40s, his older brother lives at home with parents, his wife, and their 10yr old son. It's normal.
I know in the USA the culture tells you "GET OUT!!! YOUR PARENTS SUCK!!! FREEEEEEEEDOOOOOMMMM!" and I'm sure I could name 100+ cultural references but that's hardly the norm for the world. And I gotta say, I'm kind of jealous of people who have no issues spending lots of time with their parents. I love mine dearly but it would be hard to live with them for some reason.
I suspect that 40s/50s in dating sites is biased datapoint.
I moved out of my parents’ home when I was 16 and never looked back. My 16 year old isn’t likely to be leaving anytime soon. He spends his evenings with his family and drives a good bit of the dynamics (game nights, weekend agendas, etc). He simply likes it at home. I’m vigilant about the time at which he’s probably going to need to separate in ways he hasn’t signaled yet, but for now, we’re all happy to be together.
But he’s not 18 and in the job market and making an economic selection. But when the world is as crazy as it is now, maybe those who like their parents enough to return home are harbingers of something could that can come out of this — stronger familial connections. Certainly, my generation doesn’t seem to have it going backwards...
My brother who now has kids lives with my parents. He works with my dad and they get along well. He’s now had like 2 rental properties on the side and probably has at-least 3X higher net worth than me.
So while I enjoy the freedom of being in another country alone, I sometimes do ponder how life would have been if I stayed with/near them. Our kids would have enjoyed spending time with grandparents for sure. My wife could use that help. Right now she is stay-at-home mom. If we had grandparents close by, she could work. Day care is just too far expensive to be worth it.
Staying with parents has a lot of benefits (esp with covid WFH thing) if you have good relationship with them.
IMHO Day care is one of the best investments a society can make, I would not like living in a political environment that makes it too expensive.
Those were called "squats" when I was young, that's where I ended up at 19. Although I wasn't trying to escape my parents at that point, I was planning on leeching off of them. I ran away for the first time when I was 14, by the time I was 19 free food and rent in the suburbs sounded pretty nice. My parents weren't having it.
Looking back, I should have ran away at ~16, things would have been much better.