Parents are meant to live through their children – isn’t that how it goes?
But what about the child who tries to live through their parents? The child who sometimes cycles through six different rental houses a year, the child who can never quite get the money together for a housing deposit, the child furnishing their house with op-shop odds and ends, the child whose employment history makes them a bad loan prospect.
The parental home – long after you leave it - can be an oasis of stability. Calm, with nice furniture.
Yes, it’s more comfortable than the child’s rental property, but it’s also psychologically important – the safe harbour to return to after living a much more restless, uncertain life.
Recently baby boomers were urged to sell their enormous houses with massive gardens, so the generations below (condemned to flats sometimes with little balconies, sometimes with nothing except a strip of concrete below) could live somewhere large enough to accommodate pets, a partner, children.
But for every baby boomer selling their large house surely there must be people like me – adult children running alongside the removal truck screaming an enraged “No!”
Living a fairly hectic, uncertain life is much easier if you have stable parents, if you have a base, if you can press your nose to familiar sheets – the same sheets you had as a child (the same scratchy towel, the same cutlery, the same bowl, the same vase holding the flowers from the enormous gardens).
Emotional and geographical upheaval can be better navigated if you can return to a place unchanged by time – go on autopilot – a place where there is no new input to compute.
Don’t change mum and dad ... and more importantly don’t change the locks!
The parental home is the safe harbour for anyone knocked around not just emotionally (the parental home has long been a refuge for middle aged divorced children) but anyone subject to the forces of the post boomer-world: anyone whose work was full time but has since been broken into tiny pieces of “contract” work and now finds themselves without stable income. It’s anyone who’s adrift in the world of modern courtship: apps and online dating where love is highly competitive and conditional. It’s anyone saving for a house that now costs 12 times their annual income, instead of four times.
It’s a safe harbour for anyone whose workplace has been subject to the economic forces of disruption and disorder, when all the co-ordinates have been removed and you are not quite sure where to place yourself.
The reality is that many Australians will only be able to afford housing that is smaller or of a lesser quality than the houses they grew up in.
They’ll raise families in apartments or rental properties.
Big old houses are out of most people’s price range – and anyway, large houses with gardens are being sold and demolished to make way for townhouses or apartments on smaller blocks.
The old family homes in suburbs such as Kew are being auctioned off to investors who see no value in five people living on a massive block with a huge garden.
The reality is that many of us won’t enjoy the standard of housing – and the space – enjoyed by our parents.
In order to enjoy this standard (even if only temporarily) we need to go “home.”
There’s nostalgia for the family home but there’s also a whole generation of sad cases like myself who live the housing dream through their parents.
We don’t want our parents to downsize because where would we go to hangout when we get sick of our tiny apartments?
How this shapes character is up for grabs. Are the generations of post boomers who haven’t been able to afford their own homes more resilient, adaptive and non-consumerist, or are we forever in arrested development, stasis, childlike, returning to childhood bedrooms where we can cling to something unchanging in the world?
Was Joe Hockey right when he told us, somewhat exasperated (sounding exactly like a fed-up parent might) just to get a “good job” if we want to buy a house in Sydney?
We need to redefine what it means to settle down. Owning your own home (getting the deposit, making the repayments) is now so stressful and out of reach of most people, it should no longer be used as a marker to say “you are now a proper adult.”
Our expectations and sense of entitlement about the amount of space we need also has to change.
Nothing brings nostalgia about the family home into focus like sorting through years of your decades-old school reports that your parents have kept for you in their garage.
There’s this and so much about the story of housing in Australia that we need let go.
