When they moved out, it was a sign to us, their doting, parents that we had succeeded in bringing up young people who could function as adults, without needing to sponge off their ageing folks.

A new book, Multigenerational Family Living, edited by Edgar Liu and Hazel Easthope tells us financial reasons are the main drivers for children to stay home. It's not that they don't leave – or have never left home. They move back because it is quite difficult for young people to manage financially. And young people now work in an environment where an undergraduate degree may not be enough to work in the target profession.

Some of my friends cried when their kids moved out. My view was that the move was an indication of the excellent parenting, not a sign of rejecting us. But I also had lots of strange ideas about what it meant when kids stayed at home. One thing I knew for sure about myself was that I was sick to death of being a parent to children.

Let me make this clear. I love my children with great intensity. This was not about being sick of my kids, it was about wanting a life free from worry. What I learnt when they moved out is that you never stop worrying.

You do, however, stop doing 14 loads of laundry. And you stop waiting to hear the key in the door. But you keep worrying because these are your children and mostly, they live in precarious circumstances. Many are poorly paid because we have encouraged them to choose fields which they love, rather than fields which pay well. They may be fortunate enough to have full-time work but they work on a contract basis. Or they may have felt the impact of casualisation in their industries.

Liu, one of the book's authors and a research fellow at the City Futures Research Centre at the University of NSW, left home when he was 30. He wanted to move closer to work. He also scored a prestigious fellowship which meant that he had a good income. But for the years preceding his fellowship, he lived at home with his parents, two hours from uni, because someone who is studying needs somewhere to live. He completed his undergraduate degree and then his PhD while still at home.

Liu says adult offspring and their parents must negotiate a whole new way of dealing with each other. These are not children any more. You can't be telling them what to do or what to wear or when to be home (and good luck trying).

Parents need to see their children as adults. And children? "They need to see their parents as friends and housemates."

And definitely not as parents who perform many menial tasks just for the joy of ensuring their children are clean and well-fed. (This was a thing for me. My husband is a much much better cook than me and did – and does – most of the cooking. But I took great pride in the muffins I would bake for the kids to take to school.)

In the past few years, our kids have come home for one reason or another, mostly staying a few weeks or a few months. And it's not at all what I imagined it would be like. They don't expect us to pick up after them. They cook! They clean! They even do a good job of pretending to be interested in whatever turgid daily anecdote I have to offer.

Why the push to push them out of home? Liu says it began in the post-war period.

"It was a great push for individualism, you needed to live by yourself in order to become independent," he says.

It was, he says, particularly prevalent in Australia, in the US and in Britain. In southern Europe, it is much more normal for young people to live at home with their parents until they marry. OECD research shows that 59 per cent of those aged 15-29 still live with their parents and in Italy, Slovenia and Greece more than 75 per cent still live at home. Australia, at 54 per cent, isn't at the OECD average of 59 per cent yet but as Matt Wade wrote earlier this year: "In the 1970s only about one in five under-30s in Australia lived with their parents but now it's one in two. The rate of increase has been especially rapid since the early 2000s." Canada, Sweden and Denmark are at the bottom, with around one third of young people still at home.

So do I wish my kids could all live at home so they could be more financially free? It's a tough question because I did have a ridiculous urge to pack lunches for adults (my excuse for this deranged behaviour? I was packing my own anyway...).

So we want them to move out but we also have reservations.

Liu says some of the fears parents have about kids moving out is that they will lose touch. We've always had Sunday night dinners together and even when I am anxious about them (does that ever go away?), the fact we are all in a room together, eating, drinking. It's reassuring.

There is one thing I know now. You never stop worrying, even when they move out. Ha. Perhaps especially when they move out. Just sometimes, I wish I could hear the key in the door.

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