The first time I moved back in with my parents was in September 2020. I was then working as an engineer in a company in the aviation sector in Hauts-de-France. Hard hit by the Covid crisis, she expelled some of her staff and I found myself just a year after joining. Before that, I had simply made the mistake of buying a car to… go to work.
Without enough savings or unemployment to live on, I made a “strategic retreat” by moving back in with mom and dad at age 25. A few months at most, I told myself, will be time to stabilize my situation and start again on the right foot. Four years later, the “strategic withdrawal” continues. I am one of the approximately 5 million young adults who will still be living with their parents in 2024.
This return home, overnight, in the context of general astonishment over the health crisis, seemed to my parents and me like an admission of failure. They had thrown their son into life and I was returning to knock on their door. But this return went pretty well. Fortunately, my room had not yet been transformed into a storage room. I found it just as it was with its white walls, my bed, my computer desk where I always liked to play, my library… This room had all the reference points I needed in this moment of doubt about my future.
Graduated from an aerospace engineering school in 2017, I had time to try life independently for three years, during internships and professional experiences in France and abroad. Obviously I never imagined returning one day to this suburban house, in Seine-Saint-Denis, where I grew up. If this return was initially an economic necessity, I also saw it as an opportunity to retrain myself, seeing myself dissatisfied in my job as an engineer.
I found training and a work-study contract in the field of finance starting in 2021. But the apprentice salary was not enough to pay the rent. I stayed with my parents so I wouldn’t have to invest my entire salary in housing and could continue living nearby. It was a necessity.
Then I got a contract as a financial controller with a fixed-term contract, in 2023, with a much better salary. But the uncertainty of the future kept me from wanting to take flight again right away. Rental prices in the Paris region are very high, the supply low, the quality variable and the owners very demanding.
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