Your parents bought a house for three nickels and a handshake, and here you are, barely able to afford rent. So what if the answer is moving back home and becoming the world’s best roommate? Last year, the game show Jeopardy! had an episode where a man named Brendan Liaw asked host Ken Jennings to introduce him as a “stay-at-home son.” The 27-year-old, who has a master’s degree and won nearly $60,000 in three episodes, was dead serious. Like any good Internet trend, this one has a nickname: hub-son (a play on husband/son). Hub-sons are adult sons who live at home with their parents and handle all the household stuff instead of working a traditional job. That involves cooking, cleaning, yard work, running errands, driving Mom to her book club — the whole domestic shebang. If you can’t grasp hub-son, think of them as “stay-at-home sons.” The benefits include a deeper connection to their parents, an escape from the daily grind, and an affordable place to live. For many young men, being a stay-at-home son is just a pit stop on the journey to independence, while for others, it may become a chosen lifestyle. Oddly enough, a lot of parents love the arrangement. They gain emotional companionship and the freedom to go out and do what they want without worrying about the ordinary tasks of daily life. After all, that’s what they have a stay-at-home son for. What people are learning is that there’s more than one way to build a meaningful adult life. As for Liaw, he says he’s figured out that success doesn’t have to look the way we’ve always been told it should.
