In the US context, it has historical connections to the glorification of pioneerism and expansion through the western frontier (along with the genocide that accompanied that).
After that, in the post WW2 period, opportunity in the US was so abundant that a (commonly white male) school dropout could walk into a factory and get a job with benefits. The same person could then afford a modest house (not the gigantic houses of today), support a family on a single income, and had access to affordable health care and good public education for their kids.
In the context of that sort of opportunity, staying at your parents' home in adulthood was far more indicative of personal failings, and that's where the current trope disparaging adult (mostly male) children living at home originated.
But given how diminished all of those opportunities are today (no lands to forcibly take from less technologically advantaged peoples, no new factories, expensive housing where jobs are available, high qualifications required), it's a trope that's pretty irrelevant today.
If I wasn't engaged I would have gone home to WFH immediately during the pandemic, it would have been nice to spend time there and be with family (rare opportunity for easy ability to work remotely and spend time with family on the east coast).
That said, most of the successful people I know moved out to areas with more opportunity and those that stayed behind (particularly those that live at home) are more likely to have 'personal failings' of some sort.
Maybe this isn't true if you were lucky enough to grow up in an economic hub to start, but if you didn't there's still some truth to it.
Obviously during the pandemic this changes and no longer becomes relevant since remote opportunity and being able to save money by living home (since everything is locked down anyway) makes way more sense. Most people don't think independently from the cultural context though so it'd take a while for this to update.
Why live in Palo Alto and waste lots of money on rent because of stupid housing policy when you don't have to? When you can't go out and do stuff?
I hear sentiments like this a lot lately, and it feels short-sighted to me. COVID restrictions are not going to be around forever. There are financial, professional, social, and other costs that come with moving somewhere else.
For people who genuinely don't like it in $HCOL_AREA regardless of the pandemic, and see this as a way to get out permanently, then that's great, and they should do that. If it's more like "it's expensive here and I can't go out to my favorite bars/restaurants right now", the latter half of that situation should fix itself by next summer, and hopefully earlier in some fashion. Sure, that's a while to wait, but isn't much time when considering that an alternative is to uproot your entire life.
Still a year or so where it's not worth it.
Maybe that's not enough for some people to be worth the effort, but if your lease was ending and you don't have a ton of stuff it's pretty easy to do.
> That said, most of the successful people I know moved out to areas with more opportunity and those that stayed behind (particularly those that live at home) are more likely to have 'personal failings' of some sort.
Sounds like you are almost defining "personal failings" as "unable to gain the skills to compete and thrive in a high opportunity area".
If that's the case, perhaps we should reconsider whether such a high level of achievement should be required in order for a person to establish a basic non extravagant life on their own independent of their parents.
Get a job? Why? Go to school? Why? Things are fine. I have someone to cook my meals and a warm bed to sleep in.
My uncle ended up booting my cousin out of the house. It was the best thing that happened to him. He matured significantly, went back to school, has a great job. He even admits it himself that he was in a rut that would have never ended had he been able to keep living at home. Living at home sheltered him from the real world.
The case of a totally unmotivated individual not engaging themselves in school or work is totally different than the case of working young adults who want to live independently of their parents, but can't afford to do so due to high cost of living, high debt, or other financial factors. I know people who have been in both categories, and they are not much alike.
It wasn't even considered normal for me to cook anything in the kitchen while I still lived at home. It was like being in someone else's workshop and using all their tools and putting things back not quite where they like them or wasting soap/water when washing implements or being too messy or abusive to the equipment. It was impossible to not cause some sort of trouble, I literally started grilling outside daily to not touch the kitchen and still feed myself real food as a young adult.
One could argue it was the parents refusing to grow up, but it's also arguably a predictable outcome when the husband works like a blue-collar dog to pay the bills and the wife doesn't have to work a formal job. Obviously the husband is going to expect the wife to keep the house clean and do all the cooking, if she slacks off on these relatively trivial duties while he's grouchy and overworked, bad times for sure.
The fact that it's somehow related in American culture is very unfortunate.
I'm tempted to admit that the expression of this otherwise shared culture might be intensified by some of the more distinctive aspects of American culture (e.g. pioneer spirit, as mentioned elsethread), but I hesitate because assuming America is exceptional is a bad habit I'm trying to kick =)
[1] That paper is something of a rebuttal to the argument that NW European culture (including North American culture) was always strongly nuclear. But the lack of multigenerational living seems pretty clear; what they seem to show instead is that the trend of the elderly living alone is relatively new. Which doesn't seem surprising. A culture that pressures children to move out of the home doesn't imply a culture that pressures the elderly to live alone.