A new study has found that kids from high socioeconomic background are more likely to rely on parental help as adults.
Author Anna Manzoni of the North Carolina State University said that she wanted to know how young adults become independent of their parents, adding that she ended up focusing on what he called ‘partial independence,’ when people don’t live with their parents but still get financial support from them.
In the study, Manzoni looked at data on 6,471 people between 18 and 32 who participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and found that 41.4 percent of the participants who were between the ages of 25 and 32 when the study conducted its most recent interviews in 2008 still relied on financial support from parents.
Manzoni said that those who attended four-year colleges and those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds were much more likely to be partially independent in their early 20s.
However, people who attended college were more likely to become financially independent as they reached their late 20s and early 30s.
She said that this was especially true for people who paid their own way through college, adding people whose parents supported them financially throughout college were also more likely to move back in with their parents at some point.
The study is published in the Journal Social Currents.