BOOMERANGER

boomeranger: translation

(BOO.muh.rang.ur)

n.

An adult child who returns home to live with his or her baby-boomer parents.

Though many students only stay for a few months, others linger at home even after they are on their feet financially. They are attracted by a room of their own, disposable income, and eager-to-help baby-boomer parents who are welcoming their "boomerangers" — as they are being called — back to the nest.

— Kim Campbell, "More graduates opt to live with mom and dad," The Christian Science Monitor, July 9, 2001

"Well, the dog hadn't died, but when my children were finally grown and out of the house, my wife and I had a pretty blissful situation." That was until last August, when Jones's 25-year-old son moved back home. He was in rough shape financially, having quit a selling job on the West Coast. ... Jones laughs again. "Thomas Wolfe is wrong. You can come home again, if not spiritually, at least physically." Sociologists and marketing experts call them "boomerangers", adult children who have returned to the family nest.

— Mary Amoroso, "boomerangers," The Record, November 29, 1987

Regardless of what Thomas Wolfe thought, you can go home again, and young adults today are doing it in droves.

Parents who thought that their college-bound children were beginning a journey away from parental dependence are finding that the journey was a round trip. At the end of a four-year educational excursion, a lot of kids — like boomerangs — are coming back home...

What is most puzzling to the parents of this Boomerang Generation is the ambivalent feelings they have toward their grown, live-in children.As angry and frustrated as the parents can get with the renewed chaos that returning children bring to their lives, these are the same children they would lay down their lives for without a second thought.

— Joanne Bonwick, "Don't look now, but your chicken came home to roost," The New York Times, July 13, 1986

adultescent

club-sandwich generation

geezer glut

grandboomer

kidult

kipper

middle youth

middlescence

NEET

quarterlife crisis

rejuvenile

thresholder

waithood

People

Pregnancy and Parenting