Despite the stigma often associated with living with your family after a certain age, many Americans have discovered the benefits of such a change, especially during a global pandemic.
When Renee Bracey Sherman decided to visit her cousin in New York City, she thought she’d only be staying for a few weeks. As the holiday season approaches, however, she is still living with her cousin’s family, despite continuing to pay rent on her Washington, DC, apartment.
In mid-March, just as states and cities started implementing coronavirus restrictions—as many are doing so again now—Bracey Sherman decided to travel to New York to be with family. At the time, she, like many other Americans, thought the restrictions and stay-at-home orders would only last a couple weeks, and she wanted to spend that time with people she loved.
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“Quarantining alone didn’t feel like something I wanted to do,” Bracey Sherman, 35, told COURIER. “I don’t scare very easily, but I was feeling like ‘I need to feel cozy in whatever is about to happen.’”
Work wasn’t an issue; as the executive director of reproductive justice advocacy organization We Testify, Bracey Sherman worked remotely anyway. She figured she could help her cousin and her cousin’s husband out with their two young children while schools, daycares, and public spaces were shuttered for a while. “It didn’t seem like it was going to be for the long haul,” she said.
But as cases in New York City surged in the spring, the family hunkered down. As weeks slowly turned to months, the family moved to the Hudson Valley in the summer, and Bracey Sherman went with them.
The experience has been overwhelmingly positive, Bracey Sherman said, and “so much better” than the alternative of living alone in DC.
“I assumed at some point we would all be screaming at each other, but we have not had fights,” she said.
Bracey Sherman is one of a growing number of Americans who are taking similar steps to move in with family during the pandemic for a variety of personal, economic, and logistical reasons. And despite the stigma often associated with living with your family after a certain age, many are discovering the benefits of such a change.
For Bracey Sherman, being with her cousin’s family has provided a sense of comfort and coziness during an otherwise tumultuous time.
“Being able to see my two little nieces growing up over the last eight months [means] so much. The youngest started walking in the pandemic, we had a kindergarten graduation, and being able to celebrate all of those moments with them in real time and doing the daily care of co-parenting with them has been really, really wonderful and has filled my soul during a moment where everything feels uneasy,” Bracey Sherman said. “I truly don’t think I would feel as calm as I do … if I did not have these little babies to remind me that there is a future.”
Even on bad days, being around her cousin’s children has been a sort of tonic for Bracey Sherman. “On days that things are very stressful, just going outside with the kids and playing and being like, ‘Actually, there’s so many other things in the world that matter too’—that has just been so grounding for me,” she said.
Over the past year, the percentage of adults who reported living with members of their extended family—a designation that includes parents, grandparents, and siblings—has grown by five percentage points, according to the American Family Survey, released in September.
That trend has been turbocharged by the pandemic. In July, 52% of adults 18-29 lived with one or both of their parents, a 5% increase from February that represents 2.6 million more people, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of monthly Census Bureau data.
Jessica Mendieta, a 26-year-old native of Queens, New York City, is among those who moved back in with her parents for economic reasons. Prior to the pandemic, Mendieta was also living in Washington, DC, where the second year of her public policy graduate program at Carnegie Mellon University was based.
“I graduated in May, and originally I thought I would stay in DC since I was already living and working there, building up a network, and seeing how things worked out,” Mendieta told COURIER.
But as the economy imploded in the spring, Mendieta struggled to find work. She applied to jobs, submitted cover letters, tried to utilize her university’s career services offices, and got several interviews, but nothing took.
“It became a little more stressful to not know what’s going to happen,” Mendieta said. “Ultimately, at the end of my lease I decided to move back to New York instead.”
She moved back in with her parents in August. After months of not being able to see her family, whom she is close to, she immediately felt her spirits lift. “Being on [my] own for the very beginning of the pandemic, like March through June—it was very stressful,” she said. “It feels good to be around each other again.”
Moving home had other benefits for Mendieta as well: She reconnected with some of her friends in the city and even found a job in her area of expertise: working with immigrant communities.
“It’s a match, which feels really good,” she said.
As of now, Mendieta has no plans to move back to DC anytime soon. She’s still riding the high of being reunited with her parents and having found a job she likes. “It does feel good to have a little more stability,” she said.
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For others, like Amy Krystel Jimenez Sanchez, the pandemic extended their time at home. In February, the 25-year-old Sanchez moved back into her parents’ Apollo Beach, Florida, home after losing her job and being hospitalized with what she now believes was COVID-19. She didn’t have health insurance at the time, and her illness left her with a pile of medical bills she struggled to pay because she was unemployed.
It was difficult adjusting at first, Sanchez told COURIER, because she hadn’t lived with her parents since she was 17. But she feels fortunate to have been able to lean on them financially.
“It’s been a little hard to accept that I need help, that I need someone to fall back on while I get myself back on my feet,” Sanchez said. “Even though I didn’t want to accept that I needed the help and I needed to stay with my parents a little longer, I’m really grateful for the fact that I actually did take that step [of] moving back in with my parents.”
Doing so has allowed her to save some money to pay down her thousands of dollars of medical debt. Sanchez said she feels at peace with being back with her family, and plans to stick around for the foreseeable future—perhaps as long as two years—while she saves money and perhaps even returns to school to complete her bachelor’s degree.
“It’s always good to accept some help when you need it, no matter how old you think you are,” she said.
While Bracey Sherman, the Washington, DC, resident who moved in with her cousin, didn’t need financial help, she too said that the support she and her family have provided each other has been something of a godsend, and she has no plans to leave anytime soon. “I’ll keep paying my rent on my place in DC, and I’ll go back to it whenever the time is right and everything’s safe,” Bracey Sherman said.
Until then, she’s going to continue to help out with her cousin’s children while embracing the love and support they provide in return. That exchange of care has proven especially stark for Bracey Sherman in a year that has seen Americans fail to come together to battle a pandemic.
“A lot of this has made me realize how deeply individualistic of a society the United States is,” she said. “The only way I’ve survived through this pandemic so far is because of the love and support of my family and being able to hug the little babes at night. My hope is that this really gets people to think more about how we care about each other as a community and what showing up with unapologetic love and support for family no matter what they need could and would look like.”
Editor’s Note: Bracey Sherman has been a COURIER contributor.
Keya Vakil Keya is a reporter at COURIER, where he covers everything from healthcare to climate change. Prior to joining Courier Newsroom, Keya worked as a researcher in the film industry and dabbled in the political world.
