Forever Your Mom
Between adult kids & aging parents, caretaking never ends. Can we afford it?
This one right here goes out to all the baby's mamas, mamas
amas, mamas, baby mamas, mamas…. and women who will never stop taking care of someone until they are almost unable to care for themselves.
The Kids Are Still Here
Roughly 45% of young adults are now living with a parent.1
Even though Gen Z is more likely to have a FT job and degree than their parents were.
61% of adult kids at home do not contribute anything to household expenses.
And of these young adults, one-third neither work nor go to school.
Wait, who are “young adults?” Pew categorizes them as ages 18-34. 34?!
Absolutely. A full third of 30-34 year olds are taking financial help from a parent. One survey says the number is 48%.
Working parents contribute nearly 2.5x more to adult kids each month than they do to their own retirement accounts.
36% of parents told Pew Research said this is harming their finances “at least some.” Parents in a savings.com study were far more grim.
This is not sustainable.
It is a lot of numbers, which for the math-resistant boils down to: sinking financial independence for those under 35 means a serious danger to older women.
Moms:
America’s Unpaid Caregivers
Congrats, your 30 year-old is now an adult. You’re finally ready to catch up financially, energetically and spiritually—oh $@#$.
17% of adults care for an adult over 50. And the average caregiver is 50.
75% of these are women—and they’re pulling a major second shift to do it. Up to 23.7 hours a week if they do not live with the family member and 37.4 hours if they do. This goes on for an average of 4 years.
According to AARP, this unpaid labor was equivalent to $600 billion in 2021.
It’s essentially the same second shift as women with young kids, who spend 37 hours a week on domestic duties and childcare.
So you do it for kids, then they won’t move out, then you do it for your own parents and probably later again for a spouse.
Neat.
The NYT ran a piece about carefluencers recently, regarding those who post about caregiving on social. Two were men. All were under 35. Because caretaking as a older woman is not celebrated or interesting, just expected.
With rising numbers of mental illness (up 3x) and neurodivergence, care for adult kids vs aging parents or spouses will only get more complex.
And just to make things scarier: There will be 4x the centarians by 2054. Historically, this population has overwhelmingly been white women.
A vision of AI care robots just flashed before my eyes.
How did we get here?
Sure, the pandemic was a factor. But the numbers were climbing pre-pandemic, too.
The multigenerational household actually peaked in 1940.2 Families cohabitated to do things like work farms, and unmarried women faced pressure to live with—and maybe care for—their parents.
It was a time of stricter moral codes, bigger families, the end of a 10-year Depression and impending world war. Adult stuff.
Now?
“We talk in psychology about emerging adulthood as a new stage in life. It’s this sort of in-between land,” - Carol Sigelman, developmental psychologist at George Washington University
The emergence? Age 29.
Have we simply lowered our expectations of each other, of our employers and our government while everyone just keeps holding the line on us?
It’s not just money or the elderly. Depression rates are 2x for younger adults vs. olders. So the lack of mental health services, neurodivergence support and daily bullshit all gets pushed to women.
Millennial moms are rising up about the mother load now but toddlers are quite literally only the beginning.
Retirement? Haha just kidding
35% told Pew helping their adult kids has hurt them financially. That upped to 51% of respondents in a savings.com poll.
How will women in this cycle retire? Let alone stay sane until they do?
Women live longer and need more financial security, yet a full third of working women have no retirement strategy.
A Northwestern Mutual study found only 38% of GenX women expect to be financially prepared for retirement—the lowest of any generation.
Current median retirement accounts for 55-64: $185,000. And despite what we hear about the greatest wealth transfer ever coming, most of that wealth will bypass most Americans.
The Future: A City With No Children in It?
Does anyone else assume childlessness and never-married-ism will continue to skyrocket? For women by choice and men by necessity?
Let’s see: changing abortion laws, ever-improving vibrator technology and the right wing coming next for no-fault divorce3 and birth control, climate change, seeing what their moms had to do…
Will women even have kids in 15 years?
How low will the birth rate go?
And how fast can they get those AI care robots going?
The nuclear family is a 20th century marketing construct, is it possible we could get beyond it? Most of the families helping each other the most (especially kids actually helping parents) are lower income and not white.
As the squeezes gets tighter, will “chosen family” community reign?
My near-futurist predictions:
Golden Girls style shared retirement communities of female friends (been talking about this with friends for years)
A return to boarding houses (huge in late 1800s-early 1900s), but 21st century rebranded by some hotel group
More shared houses amongst adult siblings
More upscale retirement communities offering subsidized housing to artists, makers and performers etc. to vibrance to their communities with less programming lift
Single old people + single-mom families in semi-communal living to replace fractured or distant biological families
Adapting distressed properties like suburban office centers, malls and older apartment complexes to do all these things.
Um….
Nothing good, though the CMO from Target who went to Wal-Mart sure has paid off.
Busy’s New Late Night Show is on QVC+ ?
Late-stage capitalism fist pumped and retouched its lipgloss when Busy Phillipps debuted her new talk show on QVC+. With live shopping refusing to give up and social shopping becoming a norm, this will be interesting to watch.
Busy This Week is the show and her schedule:
She publicly called out the HGH/Ozempic male/female double standard and got called up by Oprah this week.
“People hate women so much. We didn’t create the system that we live in.”
Over here, folks are fighting no-fault divorce and wanting to nationally track and surveil pregnant women (hello, Katie Britt!)
Meanwhile, Canada has pledged to make all female birth control (pills, hormonal patch, IUD, etc) FREE.
Marketing tip: In our bizarro-world culture, expect brands to get increasingly mindlessly escapist OR more wildly ideological. The middle will not hold—attention, anyway.
A poll! Write-ins welcome in the comments.
This Week in Ozempic: The Mall & Oprah
(1) Inching closer to the future I foretold where Ozempic is as easy to get as a flu shot at Costco/Walgreens/grocer - Vitamin Shoppe is now in telehealth, code for: selling GLP-1
(2) Oprah took on her critics and got them to feel better about WW (Bwahhahaha)
Her long live streamer Thursday tried to clean up her GLP-1 special aftermath + Weight Watchers reign + the weight narrative she’s been doing since forever.
Is it reputation management? Super Soul searching? Or does she still have a few shares post-board seat? Unknown, but Megababe’s Katie Sturino was there along with Busy and a fire Tressie McMillian Cottom that hinged on this from her NYT piece:
Preach.
It all ended in hugs.
How motherhood has felt to me, but with a lot more laundry:4
Happy Mother’s Day. Go read Good Bones and spend the rest of your day however you damn well please.
Harris Poll for Bloomberg
Number of European immigrants from 1900-1915 equalled the combined total of the prior 40 years.
This has been in press for a while, but it’s popping in X.com and podcasts now.
That includes owning dogs. I don’t refer to my pets as children, but the obligation can feel like it.