By Kyra-Lin Hom

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…”Hi Mom and Dad, I’m home!”

One of the latest media ‘it’ topics is that of the boomerang generation. In general this refers to the 18-25 years-old range recently designated by demographers as the new tweeners. According to them, we’re not adolescents anymore but we’re not quite adults either. By returning home after college, I have become a 22 year-old walking statistic.

Many of you may (or may not) remember me as the author of the column “In Transition” published in this same paper, which ended about four years ago. When I last left all of you I was graduating from Garfield High School, set to start my freshman year at Loyola Marymount University in California. “In Transition” was an exploration of oncoming maturity and, hopefully, an honest glimpse into the lives and opinions of teenagers at that time. Now, I find myself at yet another crossroad.

I graduated last May, after four years, with Bachelor’s Degrees in both Asian Pacific Studies and Screenwriting (very practical, I know). I was both in the Honors Program and on the Dean’s Honor Roll all four years.  The first semester of my junior year was spent studying abroad in China, a place I returned to the following summer on a grant for independent research. And I was awarded multiple scholarships for academic excellence. Stay with me, I swear I have a point.

After all of that, one might expect me to be fast-tracked to the fancy domain of so-called maturity and ‘adulthood.’ Don’t feel bad. I was suckered too. The truth of the matter is that my credentials are not really all that special or unique. Many of the ‘boomerangers’ have transcripts and resumes that could grind mine to dust. And it’s becoming more and more true that higher education doesn’t equal increased job security.

So I have boomeranged back home to this growing neighborhood soon to be collaterally quarantined by the viaduct closures. Am I bitter about the system? Not particularly. Frustrated perhaps. Maybe even cognitively constipated but not yet bitter. I’m young, educated, well spoken (when I want to be) so it shouldn’t be overly difficult for me to find a nice comfy salary once I really put my mind to it, right?

According to a study by Twentysomething Inc. and popularized by almost every US news distributor, 85% of the college graduating class of 2011 will be forced to move back home. According to all of these articles, the contributing factors can be wound down to three conspirators: vast student loans resulting from soaring tuition rates, decreased availability of above minimum wage jobs and increasingly high housing costs.

If you’ve kept in touch with the news, you know all these things already. So what? What aren’t they telling you? Well for one, the claim that the negative stigma associated with moving back home is all but gone is false. We may no longer judge each other by these standards of independence, but we certainly judge ourselves.

The reason that demographers don’t consider us adults is that we don’t know how to be adults. We try and we try to be as independent and self-respecting as we can, but how grown-up would you feel if your parents still decided when your friends could come over? That decision (and multiple others) is and should be entirely within parents’ rights – I am absolutely not saying that it isn’t. Subtle restrictions like these are damaging to the confidence many twenty-somethings have in their self-worth. They make us feel like kids. And even kids only like feeling that way on their own terms.

Finding the balance between social and economic practicality and emotional and psychological maintainability is up to each individual family unit. No two are the same so the rules shouldn’t be either. But there should be rules. For me it is monumentally important that I contribute to the household, especially since I am allowed to live rent-free. It makes me feel less the worthless freeloader that I am.

Increasing people’s self-confidence is an extremely lucrative industry in this country. We obviously value it. Everyone wants to feel like they are worth something. So to conclude the first column of my new series, Take Two, I’d like to remind parents with grads living at home like myself that the majority of us want to be grown-up. Don’t coddle us. We aren’t long lost children wandering in from the desert. We’re adults who need a little help finding our way on the map even if that occasionally means rolling it up and hitting us upside the head with it.