Lost in transition?

Julia Mesina, her husband, and their three young children faced a dire situation. He'd lost his job, and their savings soon dried up. His parents, in Naperville, Ill., offered to help out. Before long, the young family moved in.

Scott McDowell, on the other hand, says he needed a break. The student at the Berklee College of Music also needed to save money - a difficult feat while paying rent in Boston. He decided to move back home in Marin County in California for a year.

Melody, a senior at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, never even left home. She stayed with her mom during college to save on room and board, but it strained their relationship; Melody suspects her mother still sees her as a teenager.

For those who remember adulthood as beginning definitively at 18, it's a different world today. Julia, Scott, and Melody are among a growing number of 20-somethings who rely on their parents - emotionally and financially - years after they are legally considered adults.

Between 1970 and 1990 the number of 20-somethings living at home increased by 50 percent, according to the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Today, 63 percent of college students say they plan to live with their parents after graduating, according to JobTrak.

Young adults are flocking back to the nest for varying reasons, but the trend is now so pronounced that many sociologists and psychologists no longer define them as full-fledged adults but rather as "emerging adults," a term coined by sociologist Jeffrey Arnett.

"I became convinced that it's a mistake to just talk about them as making a transition to adulthood," says Dr. Arnett, at the University of Maryland. "It's really a separate period in life. They're not settled into a long-term occupation. They're not married by and large. Their lives are still very much in flux."

While a lagging job market, unaffordable housing, and modest first incomes are obvious factors, social expectations and parent-child relationships have also contributed to what Arnett calls a "quiet revolution."

The shift has more to do with parenting than with money, says Daphne Stevens, a psychotherapist in Macon, Ga. "Speaking as a baby boomer, I think we just wanted to be buddies with our children," she says. "We didn't want to be old like our parents."

Susan Shaffer, coauthor of the book "Mom, Can I Move Back In With You?" to be released in May, couldn't agree more. "Our generation grew up with very clear expectations - an inevitability of living on our own when we reached our 20s. Our children have grown up with a very close generation, where the parents were highly involved. And that didn't stop at some mythical, magical age."

In many parts of the world, children rely on their parents well into adulthood. In Canada, for instance, 41 percent of 20-somethings live with their parents, according to the Canada Census Bureau reports. In several European and Asian cultures, many children don't leave the house for college at all.

But in America, where previous generations of young people have reached traditional markers of adulthood - a career, a home, a spouse - just out of high school or college, staying close to home isn't always easy - for the parents or their children.

When Mrs. Mesina moved in with her husband's parents, it was one of the most difficult choices she made in her adult life. Not only do she and her husband have less privacy in her parents-in-law's home, but she also feels a twinge of guilt for taking up their space, cutting into their retirement savings, and simply relying on them at all.

"Two families coming together is a hard thing," says Julia, a stay-at-home mom. "We'd like to let them have their space and do what they want. They worked their lives, and we want them to use their money in ways they want."

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