A University of Saskatchewan PhD student is researching the relationships young adults have with their parents when they live at home.
Kathrina Mazurik is in the process of interviewing 20 people, aged 25-35 years old, who are roommates with their parents.
“The goal is to take something that we find pretty unintelligible and confusing, a cultural or social phenomenon, more understandable,” Mazurik said.
Mazurik asks the millennials living with their parents about things like family meals, household work, personal space and how they have intimate relationships while living with their parents.
According to Mazurik, 42 per cent of Canadian people in their 20’s live with their parents.
Mazurik said the most surprising thing she’s found since starting her research, is how content the young adults are with living under their parents’ roof.
“These young adults and their parents find ways to have autonomy and privacy from one another in the household, whether it’s spending all day at school and going home when your parents are already asleep, then leaving after they’ve gone to work in the morning,” she explained.
Mazurik lived with her parents until she was 24, which ignited her interest in the research.
“It was a choice between two different kinds of suffering: suffering from debt or suffering from living with my parents. And for me the suffering of living with my parents was the lesser of the two,” Mazurik said, adding that financial instability, rooted from expensive tuition is a common reason for an increase of young adults living with their parents.
Mazurik received $100,000 from the federal government's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to conduct her research over five years. She aims to finish her interviews by August.
