Members of the graduating class at the Savannah College of Art and Design commencement in Atlanta. For the first time on record, living with parents is now the most common arrangement for Americans age 18 to 34. (John Amis/ASSOCIATED PRESS) 
 
 It’s true: Kids Today are more dependent on their parents than Kids Yesterday. 
 
 At least when it comes to housing. 
 
 Nearly a third of Americans age 18 to 34 were living with their parents in 2014, according to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center. That’s the highest share since the Great Depression. 
 
 It was also the first time since at least 1880 that young adults were more likely to live in their parents’ homes than in their own households with a spouse or other romantic partner. 
 
 Crusty old pundits will surely declare this a sign of millennials’ failure to launch. They will bemoan young people’s insistence on mooching off of beleaguered boomer parents rather than going into the real world and getting their own grown-up jobs, spouses and mortgages. Millennial basement-dwelling — along with millennial musical tastes, millennial slang and millennial fashions — is thus clear evidence of a generation-wide crisis of character. 
 
 The millennial generation is now the largest, most ethnically diverse generation in American history. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post) 
 
 But there are a few reasons all this re-nesting may not be such a bad thing. 
 
 For one, consider the macroeconomic and social conditions that today’s young adults face. 
 
 Their unemployment (and underemployment) rates remain relatively high, as do their student debt burdens. Their wages have stagnated. 
 
 Young adults want to live on their own and aspire to purchase homes. But homeownership remains far out of their reach. National home prices today are not so far below their pre-recession peaks, with some metro areas even reaching all-time highs. 
 
 Meanwhile, rents, too, have skyrocketed, fast outpacing inflation. 
 
 Young people are also living with their parents in higher numbers in part because they’re delaying marriage. This is a consequence of both precarious job prospects and a growing perception that financial security is a prerequisite to tying the knot — which the vast majority of singles say they still very much want to do. 
 
 In this context, swallowing their pride and living above the family garage rather than frittering away money on rent looks rather financially prudent. 
 
 Second, the growth of intergenerational households shouldn’t be so alarming given how common this living arrangement is everywhere else in the developed world. In fact, the share of young adults here who live with their folks is still relatively low compared with the rate in many of our peer countries. 
 
 According to a recent census survey, 42 percent of Canadian adults age 20 to 29 live in their parents’ homes. Across the European Union, nearly half of young adults age 18 to 34 live with their parents. In Japan, about half of unmarried 20-to-34-year-olds (dubbed “parasite singles”) live with their parents, too. 
 
 But, you cry: American exceptionalism! We don’t want to be like everyone else! 
 
 It’s not clear, though, why a society in which young singles live on their own is more desirable than one in which the same demographic errs on the side of doubling up with relatives. This norm is especially puzzling in the United States, where for decades the tax code has incentivized home buyers to purchase as much house as possible, whether or not they need the space. 
 
 Perhaps it makes sense to use the housing stock we already have more efficiently, rather than insisting that young people move out as part of some artificial adulthood milestone. 
 
 Of course, boomers may object to bunking up with their boomeranging offspring, even on occasions when they do have ample space. 
 
 Well, boohoo. 
 
 Today’s boomers have benefited for decades from huge public intergenerational transfers of wealth. Is it really so much to ask that they make some much smaller private intergenerational transfers to their own children? 
 
 The public infrastructure that boomers have enjoyed all their lives was largely built by their elders. Those who went to college paid very low tuition and received much more generous public subsidies for their schooling. For decades they have paid tax rates far too low to actually fund the government services they receive. They have racked up trillions in federal debt and handed the tab to their kids. 
 
 As boomers increasingly age into Medicare eligibility, those intergenerational transfers will further balloon. 
 
 Take a two-earner couple who worked every year of their adult lives, with both spouses receiving the average wage until turning 65 and retiring last year. For every $1 that they paid into the Medicare system, they will receive $3 back in benefits, according to estimates from the Urban Institute. 
 
 Guess who has to pay the difference? Yup. Their good-for-nothin’, basement-dwelling, parasitic boomerang kids. 
 
 In this light, the return home of young adults should be seen less as an act of morally bankrupt mooching and more as a step toward balancing the intergenerational ledger. ||||| It could be that the new generation of millennial women is delaying having children even longer than the women who came before them, as prime childbearing years are also critical years for advancing in a career. A recent study shows that the marital pay gap that springs up after a first child is born typically does not close if the birth happens between age 25 and 35. 
 
 Shannon Hettinger, a 32-year-old from Washington, D.C., said she definitely wanted children. She grew up in a large family in a small town in Pennsylvania and almost all her high school friends are married with children. But she moved to Washington, and spent her 20s deciding on a career. Now that she has one she loves — she works in residential real estate sales — she is not going to stop until she gets established. That means not having children for a while. 
 
 “I just want to build my book of business and see where I can go from here,” she said. “My whole focus is career growth. That’s my No. 1 priority.” 
 
 “Once I achieve a certain level of success,” she added, “then I’ll start thinking about a family.” 
 
 Ivy Gray-Klein, 26, who lives in Philadelphia and works at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, said she was open to having children but cannot imagine doing so until she is 30 or 35. She wants to feel settled in her own life first. Now she has three roommates, is paying down her student loans and is working to build a little bit of savings. 
 
 “I’m just really trying to get myself to a place that is solid,” she said by phone. “Having a child right now would be so destabilizing. Children just seem like such an enormous financial undertaking.” 
 
 The country has had declines before. The longest period of continuous decline on record was from 1958 to 1968, according to Brady E. Hamilton, a statistician and demographer with the National Center for Health Statistics. The United States has been tracking the number of births and birthrates since about 1910. 
 
 The most recent decline has been deepest for minorities. The fertility rate among Hispanic women dropped more than 27 percent between 2007 and 2016, the most recent year of data by race. The rate for whites has dropped about 4 percent, for blacks about 11 percent and for Asians about 5 percent.
– The Pew Research Center is out with an interesting stat: More people ages 18 to 34 are living with their parents than with romantic partners—the first time that's happened in more than 130 years, which is when the data starts, notes NPR. At the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell runs through some of the reasons, including high unemployment among the young, student debt, rising home prices and rents, and stagnant wages. Considering all that, it's "rather financially prudent" for millennials to stay with mom and dad longer, a situation that's not all that unusual in the rest of the world, she writes. But her bigger message is for those "crusty" baby boomers complaining about a lack of character in the younger set: "Well, boohoo." "Today’s boomers have benefited for decades from huge public intergenerational transfers of wealth," writes Rampell. "Is it really so much to ask that they make some much smaller private intergenerational transfers to their own children?" They've paid low tuition and too-low taxes for the services they get back, and they'll hand over an enormous public debt. Plus, today's millennials will have to make up for their out-of-whack Medicare benefits. "In this light, the return home of young adults should be seen less as an act of morally bankrupt mooching and more as a step toward balancing the intergenerational ledger." Click for the full column.