ABSTRACT
Introduction This book is about multiple generations of families living together in Australian cities.
Like many social scientists, we embarked on this study out of curiosity. Having worked in Australian universities for a number of years, we noticed that more and more of the young adults who came through our doors seemed to be living at home with their parents instead of ‘slumming it’ in share houses as so famously portrayed in the UK television series, The Young Ones, or more recently the US television series, Felicity. Other studies have also found that the proportion of young adults (aged 20-34 years) living at home in Australia has steadily increased since the mid-1980s (Pink 2009), a trend also reported in several studies conducted in other Western societies (e.g. ONS 2012; Fry and Passel 2014). Indeed, when we first started looking into this household form, we thought that households with young adults living at home with their parents while completing their university education would comprise the bulk of multigenerational households in Australia. As we found out, that was only part of a much more complex story.
