Bonnie Goldman, a 64-year-old retired engineer, was living alone with her husband in a four-bedroom house in Laguna Niguel, Calif., when her daughter ran into financial trouble and was forced to sell her home. Now the daughter, 40, her husband, 46, and their two daughters, ages 5 and 7, have moved into Goldman's house.

Goldman not only lives with her daughter, who is a chef, but works as the director of catering on her daughter's culinary enterprise. She says everything is going pretty well, but acknowledges it's been an adjustment and that she and her husband discussed having her daughter's family remain in the house while renting another place for themselves. They dropped the idea for fear her daughter wouldn't be able to make the mortgage payments.

"My husband and I have been alone for a number of years, and to then have two very active little girls, tweenies, running around is a challenge. But we love it. We get to see them grow up every single day." But she adds, "I'd say it's our 12-step work that makes it doable."

She hasn't set a time limit on the arrangement-she says she could never put her grandchildren out on the street-but she anticipates that her daughter's family will be out of the house soon anyway. Her daughter is now teaching to bring in extra income, and her son-in-law's business has picked up. "Sometimes you just like your space-especially with the two little ones running around. They have no boundaries whatsoever," she says.

Goldman's situation is not unique. In a persistent economic downturn that's seen far more people fired than hired, many of the unemployed are now moving back in with their parents to make ends meet.

Indeed, a November 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 13% of parents with grown children reported that an adult son or daughter had moved back home that year. "We're having this conversation with our clients much more today than we were just a year and a half ago," says Larry Rosenthal, a CFP licensee who owns a firm in Manassas, Va. Rosenthal says he has at least a dozen clients in this position today. And he belongs to a network of financial advisors across the country who are seeing the same thing. There were a million foreclosures last year, many of them on people's primary residences. And those people have to land somewhere.

In most of the cases Rosenthal has seen, the children at home are in their mid-20s and actively looking for jobs, accepting underemployment or being paid far less than they are worth. In any case, it's difficult for them to find their own housing.
Karen Gail Lewis, a marriage and family therapist based in Cincinnati, says most commonly the children have either just lost their jobs or never found one after college. They might be recently divorced and facing financial difficulty.

Such situations can be very stressful on both the parents and the children, she says, because everybody falls back into the old roles they had when the children were in high school. The parents can become bossy and dictatorial, even though the children are no longer teenagers. Sometimes the children have already gone out into the world and had their own apartments, even houses. They no longer respond well to being told when to come home at night or when to get up in the morning.

"A lot of the complaints I hear are, 'My son sits around all day long and sleeps till 3, and stays up till 2 in the morning," Lewis says. "For the unmarried ones who've moved back home, the adolescent struggle seems to continue, where mom and dad still want to be mom and dad, and the young adult wants to be independent."

Women who come home can be particularly problematic because friction with their mothers can be reignited as the two struggle over how to raise the child, Lewis says.

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