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How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution
Burgers and fries have nearly killed our ancestral microbiome.
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff
For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands.
A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber.
Scientists suspect our intestinal community of microbes, the human microbiota, calibrates our immune and metabolic function, and that its corruption or depletion can increase the risk of chronic diseases, ranging from asthma to obesity. One might think that if we coevolved with our microbes, they’d be more or less the same in healthy humans everywhere. But that’s not what the scientists observed.
“It was the most different human microbiota composition we’d ever seen,” Sonnenburg told me. To his mind it carried a profound message: The Western microbiome, the community of microbes scientists thought of as “normal” and “healthy,” the one they used as a baseline against which to compare “diseased” microbiomes, might be considerably different than the community that prevailed during most of human evolution.
And so Sonnenburg wondered: If the Burkina Faso microbiome represented a kind of ancestral state for humans—the Neolithic in particular, or subsistence farming—and if the transition between that state and modern Florence represented a voyage from an agriculturalist’s existence to 21st-century urban living, then where along the way had the Florentines lost all those microbes?
Earlier this year I visited Sonnenburg at Stanford University, where he has a lab. By then he thought he had part of the answer. He showed me, on his computer, the results of a multigenerational experiment dreamed up by his wife, Erica, also a microbiologist.
When the Burkina Faso study was published, in 2010, the question of what specific microbes improved human health remained maddeningly elusive, but evidence was beginning to suggest that diversity itself was important. So despite their relative material poverty, these villagers seemed wealthy in a way that science was just beginning to appreciate.
Where did that diversity come from? Humans can’t digest soluble fiber, so we enlist microbes to dismantle it for us, sopping up their metabolites. The Burkina Faso microbiota produced about twice as much of these fermentation by-products, called short-chain fatty acids, as the Florentine. That gave a strong indication that fiber, the raw material solely fermented by microbes, was somehow boosting microbial diversity in the Africans.
How did the microbiome of our ancestors look before it was altered by sanitation, antibiotics, and junk food?
Indeed, when Sonnenburg fed mice plenty of fiber, microbes that specialized in breaking it down bloomed, and the ecosystem became more diverse overall. When he fed mice a fiber-poor, sugary, Western-like diet, diversity plummeted. (Fiber-starved mice were also meaner and more difficult to handle.) But the losses weren’t permanent. Even after weeks on this junk food-like diet, an animal’s microbial diversity would mostly recover if it began consuming fiber again.
This was good news for Americans—our microbial communities might re-diversify if we just ate more whole grains and veggies. But it didn’t support the Sonnenburgs’ suspicion that the Western diet had triggered microbial extinctions. Yet then they saw what happened when pregnant mice went on the no-fiber diet: temporary depletions became permanent losses.
When we pass through the birth canal, we are slathered in our mother’s microbes, a kind of starter culture for our own community. In this case, though, pups born to mice on American-type diets—no fiber, lots of sugar—failed to acquire the full endowment of their mothers’ microbes. Entire groups of bacteria were lost during transmission. When Sonnenburg put these second-generation mice on a fiber-rich diet, their microbes failed to recover. The mice couldn’t regrow what they’d never inherited. And when these second-generation animals went on a fiberless diet in turn, their offspring inherited even fewer microbes. The microbial die-outs compounded across generations.
Many who study the microbiome suspect that we are experiencing an extinction spasm within that parallels the extinction crisis gripping the planet. Numerous factors are implicated in these disappearances. Antibiotics, available after World War II, can work like napalm, indiscriminately flattening our internal ecosystems. Modern sanitary amenities, which began in the late 19th century, may limit sharing of disease- and health-promoting microbes alike. Today’s houses in today’s cities seal us away from many of the soil, plant, and animal microbes that rained down on us during our evolution, possibly limiting an important source of novelty.
But what the Sonnenburgs’ experiment suggests is that by failing to adequately nourish key microbes, the Western diet may also be starving them out of existence. They call this idea “starving the microbial self.” They suspect that these diet-driven extinctions may have fueled, at least in part, the recent rise of non-communicable diseases. The question they and many others are now asking is this: How did the microbiome of our ancestors look before it was altered by sanitation, antibiotics, and junk food? How did that primeval collection of human microbes work? And was it somehow healthier than the one we harbor today?
The National Institutes of Health’s Human Microbiome Project, the first phase of which finished in 2012, was billed as a “road map” of human microbes. But as Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, a microbiologist at New York University who studies remote Amerindian communities, told me, the effort is “really the American microbiome project; it’s not the human microbiome project.”
So a remarkable and somewhat quixotic effort has begun to catalog and possibly preserve, before they disappear, the microbes of people who live in environments thought to resemble humanity’s past—people whose microbiomes may approximate an ancestral state. Researchers are motoring down rivers in the Amazon, off-roading in the East African savanna, hiking into the mountain villages of Papua New Guinea. They see themselves as rushing to catalog an ecosystem that may soon disappear.
“It’s really our last chance to harvest a lot of these microbes from around the world,” Rob Knight, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. “We have to do it before it’s too late—and it’s very nearly too late.”
He and others suspect these populations won’t retain their traditional ways much longer. Antibiotics, thought to deplete microbes, are already used frequently in some communities. And as modernization and acculturation progresses—as these peoples move toward the sanitized, indoor-dwelling, junk food-eating reality that characterizes much life in developed nations today—some human microbes, or perhaps certain configurations of those microbes, may be lost forever.
For now, scientists are careful to characterize the quest as purely descriptive; they want to know how these human microbiomes affect our bodies. Yet a kind of microbial ark—a storage vault for potentially endangered human microbes—is perhaps implied. Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at New York University and Dominguez-Bello’s husband, argues that because Westernized peoples may have lost important microbes, we may have to repopulate ourselves with microbes derived from more traditional-living populations—from, say, Amazonian Amerindians or African hunter-gatherers.
That’s certainly a long way off. No one understands much about the dizzying variety documented so far—which microbes are good, which harmful, which irrelevant. One constant, though, is that people living subsistence lifestyles have tremendous diversity compared to westernized populations—up to 50 percent more species than North Americans or Europeans. That includes not only bacteria but eukaryotes—single-cell protists and large, multicellular worms. These organisms, which are often missing in the West, have historically been considered pathogens. But some evidence now suggests that they can favorably shape the microbiome, benefiting the host.
The other constant relates to diet and the soluble fiber that Sonnenburg studies. Whereas North American microbes orient toward degrading fat, simple sugars, and protein, the microbes of subsistence communities so far studied are geared toward fermenting fiber.
Most study subjects live in the tropics; their microbial communities may reflect tropical environments, not an ancestral human state. Yet even “extinct” microbiomes from higher latitudes—including from a frozen European mummy—are similarly configured to break down plant fiber, adding to the sense that the Western microbiome has diverged from what likely prevailed during human evolution.
The Sonnenburgs think fiber is so important that they’ve given it a new designation: microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, or MACs. They think that the mismatch between the Westernized, MAC-starved microbiome and the human genome may predispose to Western diseases.
Scientists studying these communities suspect that while mortality is high from infectious diseases, chronic, non-communicable diseases are far less prevalent. At the same time, researchers since the late 20th century have repeatedly observed that even in the West, people who grow up on farms with livestock, or exposed to certain fecal-oral infections, like Hepatitis A and sundry parasites—environments that, in their relative microbial enrichment, resemble these subsistence communities—have a lower risk of certain Western afflictions, particularly hay fever, asthma, and certain autoimmune disorders.
Many who study the microbiome suspect we are experiencing an extinction within that parallels the extinction gripping the planet.
No one wants to bring back the killers of yore. But the suspicion—and the hope—is that beneficial microbes can be separated from the dangerous ones, and that “good” ones can be restored. Or perhaps we can simply treat the community we already harbor better by feeding it healthier fare.
The United States Department of Agriculture recommends between 25 and 38 grams of fiber for adults daily; most Americans consume substantially less fiber-rich food, including nuts, whole grains, certain fruits, and vegetables. The guideline stems, in part, from the research of an Irish-born physician named Denis Burkitt. While working in Uganda in the 1960s, Burkitt became convinced that the high-fiber African diet explained the Africans’ relative lack of colon cancer.
The problem with the fiber hypothesis, however, has always been twofold. People who eat plenty of fiber seem to have a lower risk of many diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. But when scientists have fed fiber to volunteers, they haven’t historically observed much benefit. And this underscores the real mystery: By what mechanism does fiber improve health?
Soluble fiber is an umbrella term for complex plant sugars—including some polysaccharides, oligosaccharides, and fructans. The molecules consist of simple sugars linked together in long, hard-to-dismantle chains. If you dump a load of fiber—or microbiota-accessible carbohydrates—onto a colonic community of microbes, those that specialize in fermenting it will bloom. And they’ll start churning out short-chain fatty acids, including butyrate, whose smell you might recognize from aged cheese, and acetate, which gives vinegar its sharpness.
These acids, Sonnenburg thinks, are one of the long-sought mechanisms by which fiber prevents disease. Rodent studies suggest that as they diffuse into circulation, they stimulate the anti-inflammatory arm of the immune system—cells that help you not attack tree pollen and other harmless proteins—preventing allergies and other inflammatory diseases. The calming effect reaches as far as the bone marrow and lungs, where, as a recent Nature Medicine study showed, the acids reduced animals’ vulnerability to asthma.
As Justin Sonnenburg put it, “We have this unsupervised drug factory in our gut.” The question facing microbiologists today is how to properly tend to that factory.
Here, studies of populations living more traditional lifestyles may provide clues. In the past, most people likely imbibed many times more fiber than today. If you eat minimally processed plants, which humans have for millions of years, you can’t avoid fiber. Modern hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists certainly eat loads of it. The Hadza of Tanzania, for instance, consume at least 10 times more than Americans, in tubers, baobab fruit, and wild berries. Agriculturalists, like those Burkina Fasans, also eat more fiber than Western populations, in porridges and breads made from unrefined grains.
Given this constant supply of microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, human microbiomes of the past, the Sonnenburgs argue, likely produced a river of these short-chain fatty acids. That probably changed some with the transition to agriculture, which made diets less diverse. But an even more drastic shift occurred quite recently, with the advent and widespread adoption of refined foods. As a result, westernized populations, the Sonnenburgs think, have lost healthful, fiber-fermenting microbes. And we suffer from a kind of fermentation byproduct deficiency.
So why can’t we supplement our diet with short-chain fatty acids? When I visited Sonnenburg, he showed me one reason why: The ecosystem that produces the acids may be as important as the acids themselves. He brought up two cross-sectional images of fecal pellets still in mice intestines. Most microbiome analyses take a tally, from genetic markers, of what microbes are present and in what abundance. That’s equivalent to imagining what a forest looks like from a pile of wood chips, and gives little sense of how the forest was organized. By some ingenious tinkering, though, one of Sonnenburg’s post-docs had developed a way to freeze the ecosystem in place, and then photograph it.
The resulting picture was unlike any rendition of the microbiome I’d seen before. One animal had eaten plenty of fiber, the other hadn’t. In the fiber-fed ecosystem, similar bacteria clustered with one another, not unlike schools of fish on a reef ecosystem. An undulating structure prevailed across space. But in the non-fiber diet, not only was diversity reduced, the microbes were evenly distributed throughout, like a stew boiled for too long.
At this point, Sonnenburg sat back in his chair and went quiet, waiting for me to notice something. To one side of both images, microbes were mostly absent—the mucus layer on the lining of the gut. But that layer was twice as thick in the fiber-fed mice than the non-fiber fed. That difference amounted to about 30 nanometers, far less than the width of a human hair. But one day we may look back and shake our heads that Western diseases—from diabetes to colon cancer—stemmed from 30 nanometers of mucus that, somewhere along the way, went missing in the developed world.
We think of the Western diet—high in unhealthy fats, sugar, and proteins—as overly rich. But what’s missing from the diet may be just as, and perhaps more, important than what’s abundant.
Years ago, while still a post-doc, Sonnenburg discovered that something very odd occurs when those MAC-loving microbes go hungry. They start eating mucus. “This is the stage where you say, ‘Oh my God. They’re eating me.’ ” Sonnenburg said. “You can see it.”
Our ancestral microbe variety may have faded over time due, simply, to our fiber-poor diet.
We need that mucus. It maintains a necessary distance between us and our microbes. And as it erodes with a poor diet, the lining of the gut becomes irritated. Microbial detritus starts leaking through. One of the more striking discoveries in recent years is that you can see this stuff, called endotoxin, increase in the bloodstream immediately after feeding people a sugary, greasy, fast-food meal. The immune system responds as if under threat, leading to the “simmering inflammation” the Sonnenburgs think drives so many Western diseases.
We need inflammation to combat infections, or aid tissue repair. But chronic inflammation—a danger signal blaring indefinitely—can lead to all manner of cellular dysfunction, contributing to many degenerative diseases.
I came away from Sonnenburg’s office with a sense that I’d glimpsed a principle underlying our relationship with microbes. Wringing calories from wild, fibrous fare required a village—microbes specialized in distinct tasks, but each also dependent on its neighbors. The difficulty of the job encouraged cooperation between microbes. When you withheld fiber, though, you removed the need for that close-knit cooperation. The mutually beneficial arrangements began to fray.
Sonnenburg’s experiments help contextualize what others are finding in peoples who hunt and forage. The Hadza, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherers on Earth, live near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, a region of east Africa thought to be the birthplace of our species. An analysis of their microbes published last year detailed an immensely diverse community, including a number of microbes new to scientists.
The Hadza harbor a variety of bacteria called treponema, which are absent in the developed world. They’re spirochetes related to the pathogen that causes syphilis. Every rural, non-westernized group studied so far, including various Amerindian groups, also have treponemas, as do our primate relatives.
Cecil Lewis, a geneticist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman who studies the microbiomes of native people, including of Amerindian populations, suspects they may belong to an “ancestral microbiome”—a community that accompanied us since before we were human. Maybe anti-syphilis medication wiped them out in the West, Knight speculates. When I asked what they might do, or what their loss might mean, Lewis and others responded that no one really knows.
Yet the treponemas have genes that help in breaking down complex carbohydrates, suggesting a role in fermentation. And that dovetails with the other striking feature of the Hadza and Amerindian microbiomes. Where we have just a few strains of, say, prevotella bacteria, the Hadza have a kaleidescopic variety. Again, diet is implicated. Breaking down tough, wild plants may require a diverse team of microbes. What happened to Western diversity? It’s possible we’ve inadvertently killed that wealth, or never possessed it at all. But another possibility, as Sonnenburg’s experiments suggest, is that because we haven’t fed those microbes, we’ve lost them. Our ancestral variety may have faded over time due, simply, to our fiber-poor diet.
Sonnenburg’s mice live in plastic bubbles, cut off from new sources of microbes. Humans do not. One outstanding question is whether, if I began eating wild tubers and baobab fruit, the microbial complexity necessary to ferment the new fare would simply appear, seeded from the environment.
Trials testing prebiotics, food for the fiber-fermenting bacteria, suggest that you can increase microbial richness with more fiber, and improve metabolic function. But here’s the wrinkle: In studies from Europe, only individuals who already harbored a baseline diversity benefitted from these dietary interventions. Those whose microbial communities were too impoverished didn’t—or couldn’t—respond to the new diet. They seemed to lack the ability.
The Sonnenburgs point to these studies as evidence that we need the right microbes—their unique alchemical talents—to unlock nutrients from food. Where do we get them? Our particular genes can influence the makeup of our microbiome, perhaps influencing our propensity to develop disease or put on weight by shaping our microbial community. But another reason for lacking a bacterium is more straightforward: We may never have encountered it in the first place.
Those environments where a relatively prolific sharing of microbes still occurs—daycares, cowsheds, homes with lots of siblings, and homes with dogs—seem to protect against allergies, asthma, some auto-immune diseases, and certain cancers. These observations, often grouped under the rubric of the “hygiene hypothesis,” appear to highlight a phenomenon separate from diet: access to microbial wealth, and possibly to unique microbial heirlooms.
Consider the spiral-shaped, stomach-dwelling bacterium Helicobacter pylori. For at least a century, H. pylori has been declining in the developed world. Most of our great-great grandparents probably had it; now less than 6 percent of children do. Unlike the microbes that interest Sonnenburg, H. pylori doesn’t eat what we eat. It eats us, its host. And unlike microbes thought to jump aboard from food, water, soil, or other animals, H. pylori only comes from other people—particularly, scientists think, our mothers. It’s a human-adapted microbe that’s passed between generations.
H. pylori is infamous for causing ulcers and gastric cancer, but mounting evidence also suggests that, by subverting the immune system to ensure its own survival, the bacterium may protect against asthma, obesity, and possibly other inflammatory diseases. If there’s an ecosystem restoration project implicit in the study of the ancestral microbiota, H. pylori serves as an important counterpoint to the emphasis on diet. You can eat all the fiber you want (unless your food is contaminated with feces) and you’ll never re-acquire microbes like H. pylori. The only way to restore such microbes may be to deliberately reintroduce them.
Even that idea is complicated. Years ago, Dominguez-Bello discovered a unique Amerindian strain of H. pylori in an isolated Amazonian tribe, a bacterium whose ancestors had presumably come over the Bering land bridge with the forebears of native Americans some 15,000 years ago. The native strain was disappearing, however. When people of different ancestries mixed in South America, Dominguez-Bello found, imported strains outcompeted native ones. African and European H. pylori strains were driving Amerindian ones extinct.
Why did that matter? We may fare better with “our” particular microbes. A study on Colombians last year found that when people of primarily native American ancestry harbored imported European or African H. pylori strains, their risk of gastric cancer increased dramatically. The introduced bugs didn’t match the native genotype. And that mismatch seemed to increase the risk of malignancy.
“This type of thing could be happening in many microbes,” Barbara Schneider, molecular biologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and coauthor on the study, told me. “There’s no reason to think that helicobacter should be unique.”
We might call this the “family heirloom” problem. Some fraction of our microbes may be uniquely adapted to our particular genetic quirks—to our particular branch of the human family. Once they’re lost, there may be no recovering these microbes. Meaning that, because I was born and grew up in the U.S., “my” helicobacters and treponemas may be gone forever.
In their recent book, The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health, the Sonnenburgs argue forcefully that boosting fiber intake is the best way to cultivate a healthier community of microbes. Given the many unknowns, their advocacy surprised me. The science wasn’t settled; what if they were wrong?
They’d fretted over this scientific uncertainty, they said, but decided that the diet they pushed—really a variant of the Mediterranean diet—would probably not cause harm, and would likely benefit adherents, even if everything they thought about the microbiome was wrong.
Not long after we spoke, Stephen O’Keefe, a gastroenterologist at the University of Pittsburgh, published what may be the best evidence yet (in people) that supports the Sonnenburgs’ microbiota-accessible carbohydrates hypothesis.
O’Keefe has long puzzled over the high risk of colon cancer among African-Americans compared to native Africans. Like Burkitt 60 years ago, he suspected that a diet rich in fiber might explain what he quantified as a 65-fold disparity. To prove it, he put 20 rural South Africans on a high-fat, high-meat diet—including hot dogs, hamburgers, and fries; and he put 20 African-Americans on a high fiber African diet, including corn porridge, beans, and fruit. In contrast to earlier studies, however, his team visited the subjects at home, preparing their meals and supervising them.
Changes occurred quickly. Inflammation of the colon, which increases the risk of cancer, decreased in the African-Americans on the African diet; and it increased in the Africans on the American diet. Production of the fermentation by-product butyrate, thought to prevent colon cancer, increased in those eating African fare, and declined in those eating American-style. And here’s what struck me: In the fiber-poor, meat- and fat-fed microbiome, O’Keefe saw a “loosening” of those tight-knit communities oriented toward fermenting fiber. He’d done in people what Sonnenburg had done in rodents—rattled the ecosystem—and it took just two weeks on an American-type diet. He also demonstrated that regardless of the microbes you may not have inherited, what you feed the microbes you have can make a big difference in how they behave.
Years ago, impelled in part by their oldest daughter’s constipation problems, the Sonnenburg family revamped its diet. They threw out all processed food-stuffs, and began eating plenty of veggies and whole grains. They bought a dog. Justin Sonnenburg began hand-milling his own wheat berries for bread. He took up gardening. And when he compared his archived microbes from years ago with recent ones, he discovered that his microbial diversity had increased by half. “That’s a huge difference,” he told me, “as big as the difference between Americans and Amerindians.”
It remains to be seen what detailed analysis will reveal about this diversification—how many came from his dog, from soil, from the sourdough he handles; how many might have been there all along in depressed numbers, and bloomed on a fiber-rich diet. What it showed the Sonnenburgs, however, was that without fully understanding how the microbiome works, you can still push it in a healthier direction.
“If we wait to the point where we are beyond a shadow of a doubt, with double-blind studies translated to regulations, we’re going to be waiting decades,” Sonnenburg told me. “But right now, all the arrows are pointing in the same direction, toward fiber.”
Moises Velesquez-Manoff is a journalist and author of An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases.
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*Why go to temple?*
Just loved this guy's answer, enjoy it and pass it on....
▪︎ If you're spiritually alive, you're going to love this!
▪︎ If you're spiritually dead, you won't want to read it.
▪︎ If you're spiritually curious, there is still hope!
A temple goer wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper and complained that it made no sense to go to temple atleast once a week. He wrote:
_"I've gone for 30 years now, and in that time I have heard about 3,000 satsangs....but for the life of me, I can't remember a single one of them.... So, I think I'm wasting my time, the preachers and priests are wasting theirs by preaching to us about the Almighty"._
This started a real controversy in the *"Letters to the Editor"* column.
Much to the delight of the editor, it went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher:
*_"I've been married for 30 years now. In that time my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals....but, for the life of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single one of those meals."_*
*_"But I do know this... They all nourished me & gave me the strength I needed to do my work. If my wife had not given me these meals, I would be physically dead today."_*
*_"Likewise, if I had not gone to temple for nourishment, I would be spiritually dead today!.....That is what going to temple and praying to GOD does ... it keeps you spiritually alive!!"_*
*▪︎ When you are DOWN to nothing, God is UP to something!*
*▪︎ Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible and receives the impossible!*
*▪︎ Thank God for our physical and our spiritual nourishment!
The Benefits of Raising Conscientious Kids
Being conscientious will serve kids in the long run. Here are some tips to help them learn that trait
By Jasmine Mote
My preschooler is obsessed with rules—and, more importantly, exploring their loopholes. When I tell him to stop throwing rocks, he will drop a rock dramatically with a loud thud, assuming plausible deniability. He will chase his little sister around our kitchen island, pretending to be a Tyrannosaurus rex, and push her. “Don’t push your sister,” I command, and he will reply, “I didn’t push her! The dinosaur did it.”
Self-control is one’s ability to navigate between multiple competing desires—such as between listening to your mother or shoving your sister. We tend to idolize people who show certain kinds of self-control (like professional athletes) and demonize those we think don’t show enough (like athletes who get caught in doping scandals).
When I think about self-control in children, I think about the famous marshmallow test, where children could either eat a single marshmallow immediately, or, show self-control, refuse that first marshmallow and be rewarded with two marshmallows later. The original studies found that children who waited for that additional marshmallow had more academic success in adolescence compared to those who gave into temptation.
But what if the marshmallow way to think about self-control is wrong? What if it’s not about just avoiding that tempting first marshmallow but the myriad of other things that go along with it: planning for the future, following rules, working hard and trusting that you’ll indeed get that second reward? In other words: being conscientious.
Teaching conscientiousness—a personality trait that’s about more than self-control—may actually be the path for helping our children be the best versions of themselves.
In a recent review, researchers found that changing in-the-moment self-control (e.g., waiting for that second marshmallow one time) does not lead to months- or years-long changes in how consistently we wait for that second marshmallow. Unfortunately, changing our personalities to resist temptation is not so easy. In fact, people who show more consistent self-control don’t necessarily do so all the time. On the contrary, they just avoid temptation in the first place, so that they don’t have to exercise restraint and show less (not more) self-control in their daily lives.
Even the results from the classic marshmallow test are more complicated than first thought. Performance on the test and future academic success are related not just to self-control but to factors like a child’s general cognitive ability or how much education their parent has. Further, it does not seem that one’s ability to wait for that second marshmallow is related to success into adulthood.
Conscientiousness is one of the Big Five personality traits that predict academic success (alongside extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and neuroticism). Conscientious people tend to show self-control, but they also follow rules, show up on time, and work hard.
Conscientiousness is often underappreciated. One study found that new mothers hoped that their babies grew up to be extraverted and agreeable but consistently ranked conscientiousness as less preferred than almost all other traits. If extraversion is the life of the party, and agreeableness is that one friend who laughs at all of our jokes, we may have a tendency to view conscientiousness as a wet blanket, that person who asks to turn the music down or has to leave early to get to bed on time.
Conscientiousness, however, is associated with the same (and arguably more) benefits that we associate with self-control: Conscientious people have better health, are less likely to be depressed, are wealthier and live longer, compared to people who are less conscientious. When compared to extraversion, conscientiousness is more strongly related to academic success, work performance and lower rates of substance use. Conscientious people have grit.
Rather than the dud at the party, think instead of your friend who always remembers your birthday, that co-worker who volunteers for the hardest assignment, or a judge who upholds the law even when it is unpopular. We could use more conscientiousness in our world.
Conscientiousness appears to be about 40 to 50 percent heritable, so conscientious parents tend to raise conscientious kids. This also suggests that environment and upbringing play a substantial role in whether people become conscientious adults.
Authoritative parenting, characterized by warmth, structure and limit-setting, appears to be related to higher rates of conscientiousness in children. Authoritative parenting is also related to secure attachment between parents and children, which is associated with more conscientiousness.
One way we could practice authoritative parenting and translate some of these ideas into practice could involve explicitly explaining to our children why we make the rules we make. An early sign of conscientiousness may be how readily children follow their parent’s instructions and how positively they embrace family rules. That suggests that parents who expect children to behave in such a manner may help children become more conscientious over time. Rather than simply telling my son he shouldn’t shove people “because I said so,” I could explain that our family believes it’s important not to hurt others and that we don't push others because we could hurt them (even when you’re a dinosaur).
We can also look at what conscientious people do in their daily lives outside of self-control behaviors and try to model those other actions for our kids. If we want to model punctuality and responsibility, we could explain why it’s important for our family to show up for a playdate on time and then (heroically!) do it. We could also describe to our kids all the things we need to do—pack snacks, put gas in the car, feed the dog—before we can get to our friend’s house as a way to model good planning.
Thinking about the research on how adults who show more consistent self-control often exhibit less, not more, self-control moment-to-moment, we might try to provide our children with opportunities to safely test boundaries and allow their impulses some freedom. Sometimes our family has what we call “yes days” where we try to say “yes” to whatever our kids desire (within reason) for an afternoon. Milkshakes for dinner? Sure. Go chase some birds at a park for hours? Go wild.
Cultivating conscientiousness in our children may not only help them thrive but help us manage our own stress. One study found that traits like agreeableness and conscientiousness in French children were related to less burnout in their parents, including parents reporting less emotional exhaustion and more self-efficacy in their parenting.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about how conscientiousness develops. Personality traits are hard to change, as are cognitive skills depending on your child’s abilities. For example, if your child has ADHD or is otherwise neurodiverse, a change in parenting practices alone is likely not enough to help that child become more planful or rule-abiding. It might take longer. Conscientiousness might look different than in other kids. All children, regardless of ability, deserve parents with realistic and flexible expectations around the potential for change as we work towards nurturing conscientiousness in our families.
It’s tiring to explain to my son for the hundredth time why we don’t shove people. The other day, however, my daughter decided to shove her brother, and I heard him explain to her in a tone not unlike my own, “We don't push people in our family!” As he came running to tattle on his sister, all I could do was laugh.
Jasmine Mote is a licensed clinical psychologist and research assistant professor at Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Boston University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She also writes Mental Healthy, a newsletter on mental health science on pregnancy, parenting and everything in between.
Scientists discover Burmese pythons have never-before-seen cells that help them digest entire skeletons
Specialized cells in the intestinal lining of Burmese pythons allows them to completely absorb the skeletons of their prey.
Researchers found that specialized cells in Burmese pythons' (Python bivittatus) intestinal lining process calcium from the bones of their meals. This helps explain how these predators digest whole prey.
The team published its findings June 25 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
Burmese pythons typically dine on birds and small mammals, though they don't need to eat every day. The snakes swallow their prey whole and spend several days digesting their meal before hunting again.
As part of digestion, pythons break down their prey's bones. The bones provide necessary calcium in the snakes' diet — but the pythons can't use all the calcium. "We wanted to identify how they were able to process and limit this huge absorption of calcium through the intestinal wall," study co-author Jehan-Hervé Lignot, a biologist at the University of Montpellier in France, said in a statement.
To examine how the snakes managed their calcium intake, the researchers fed Burmese pythons one of three diets: a regular diet of whole prey; a low-calcium diet with boneless prey; and a diet with boneless prey and a calcium supplement. After several meals, the team studied the effects of each regimen on the snakes' intestines.
The team found that narrow, specialized cells in the pythons' intestinal lining played a role in digesting bones. In the snakes that ate whole prey or boneless prey with a calcium supplement, these cells held particles made up of calcium, iron and phosphorus. But these particles weren't present in snakes that only ate boneless prey.
Related: 'An up-tempo version of Darwinian evolution': How a mega freeze in Florida may have caused Burmese pythons to evolve at a blindingly fast speed
The cells may be involved in dispelling calcium that the snakes couldn't absorb. It's possible that the cells could concentrate the extra calcium into the particles, then release the particles alongside other undigested components into the snakes' feces, the researchers wrote in the study.
Since discovering the narrow intestinal cells in Burmese pythons, the scientists have also found them in the intestines of other pythons and boas, as well as in Gila monsters (Heloderma suspectum) — all of which eat their prey whole. But there's no evidence yet that other animals that swallow their entire prey, such as dolphins or fish-eating birds, produce these calcium particles.
Further studies could reveal just how widespread these bone-digesting cells are in the animal kingdom, the researchers wrote.
"Marine predators that eat bony fish or aquatic mammals must face the same problem" of digesting bones and ridding themselves of excess calcium, Lignot said in the statement. "Birds that eat mostly bones, such as the bearded vulture [Gypaetus barbatus], would be fascinating candidates too."
Why Gen Z Will Never Leave Home
Thanks to soaring housing costs, a generation of twentysomethings are still in their childhood bedrooms. A portrait of family life with no empty nest.
By Claire Gagne
At age 21, Liam Tully was living on his own in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a house. He loved being on his own—working, paying rent, buying groceries, doing laundry, watering plants, blasting music with his friends every night. He had the kind of financial independence most people his age could only dream of. The catch: he was living on a tiny island off the coast of Honduras called Utila, paying just US$500 a month in rent. Tully went down to Honduras during COVID to get his scuba certification. But it was always meant to be temporary. In 2022, when he returned to Toronto to start a career, he moved right back into his childhood home. Soon after, the family sold the house. Tully, who was working for a real estate agency, harboured no illusions that he could afford to rent an apartment in the city on his salary of $3,000 a month; the average rent in Toronto at the time was $1,685. So Tully, his younger brother, his mom and the dogs all moved together. Their new space, a condo in Toronto’s Canary District, has a bedroom for each of them and two bathrooms.
Liza Finlay, Tully’s mom, was happy to make room for her boys when she downsized. “It’s hard to launch these days,” she says. “Young adults who live at home aren’t taking advantage of their parents. They don’t have much choice.” Tully is now working for a tech startup, making $65,000 a year. His contributions to the household have grown over time: first he covered some of the grocery bills, then took on a small amount of the rent. He gives his mom $700 a month—a significant contribution, but much less than he’d pay on his own.
In years past, Tully would be called a boomerang kid: someone who moved out with a plan for an independent life but wound up back under mom and dad’s roof. In the old days, this trajectory might suggest that the kids—or the parents—were screwups. Incapable. Incompetent. The proper course of action, the one instilled in me, my friends and many of the parents I interviewed for this story, was this: you graduate high school. You get some education. And you get out.
That idea has flown out the childhood bedroom window. Canada’s astronomical housing costs and stagnant wages make real-world finances daunting for a newbie. Modern intensive parenting doesn’t stop once a child hits 18—parents are often there with a safety net. And there’s a growing appreciation for multigenerational living, which has caught on in part due to the influx of immigrants from places where these arrangements are built into the fabric of family life. Suddenly, we have a new picture of young adulthood in Canada. StatsCan data shows that, in 2021, 46 per cent of all twentysomethings lived with a parent. That’s up significantly from 30 years ago, when only a third of people in their twenties were still under their parents’ roofs. Kids are staying in the nest well into their adulthood, too. Close to a third of people aged 25 to 29 are still living at home compared to 11 per cent in 1981. And these numbers were gathered before the post-pandemic inflation of housing and living costs. Kids who started university at the beginning of COVID have graduated into an environment where a starting salary will barely pay for a front foyer in many parts of Canada. Parents have the one thing their kids need: shelter.
As a result, youthful independence—the kind that Tully tasted in Honduras and that many parents remember fondly from their own twenties—starts later, delaying a lifetime of milestones like marriage and parenthood. For parents, it means those heart-tugging memes of “only having 18 summers with your kids” are a load of crap. They’re emotionally and financially supporting their kids for much longer than expected, forcing them to reimagine their retirement years. Instead of an empty nest, they now have a roommate who keeps forgetting to empty the dishwasher.
The late launch into adulthood has been decades in the making. Before 1960, few Canadians attended college or university. Instead, they found work, got married and had kids in quick succession. As the economy transitioned from manufacturing and agriculture to one based on knowledge and technology, universities began filling up. By the early 1980s, some 20 per cent of Canadians between 18 and 24 attended post-secondary school. Now it’s nearly half. Even after graduation, a few more years typically pass as people find their footing in careers and relationships. They push off marriage and parenthood until a job and a steady paycheque are in hand. Jeffrey Arnett is an American psychologist who studies the transition from adolescence to adulthood. In 2000, he proposed that people in this life stage weren’t even full adults. Instead, they were “emerging adults,” finding their place in a world that no longer held just one or two possible paths. When he first coined the term, he set the age range at 18 to 25; he now considers this life stage to last until about age 29. “People are taking longer to find a stable place in the adult world,” he says. He’s experienced this firsthand: one of his 25-year-old twins moved home last year.
For Canadians coming of age in 2025, economic independence is a pipe dream. Two of the country’s biggest cities—Toronto and Vancouver—are among the most unaffordable in the world. Across the country, the benchmark price of a home has ballooned from around $163,000 to $700,000 over the last 25 years. Meanwhile, the median household income in that time period has increased by just $15,000, from $65,100 in 1999 to $80,500 in 2022. According to a 2024 report by RBC, to own an average home, a household with the median income would spend about 63 per cent of their earnings on home ownership costs, including mortgage payments, utilities and property taxes. Renting is also largely off the table: as of 2023, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Canada was about $1,700, a 35 per cent increase from five years ago. “Even my friends with high-paying corporate jobs are living at home because 90 per cent of their money would be going to survival,” says Liam Tully.
Kylie Brown is one young Canadian feeling the financial pressure. Brown graduated with a psychology degree from McGill in 2023. She wanted to take some time off before grad school, so she moved back to Toronto, her hometown. She found a job in her field, working full-time at a reading clinic helping kids with learning disabilities, ADHD and autism. It’s a great fit, as she’s interested in studying school psychology for her master’s. But she only makes $24 an hour; if she rented, nearly half of her earnings would go to a landlord. Instead, she moved back into her childhood bedroom.
Today’s young adults are also the unfortunate casualties of lagging productivity, or the inability of the economy to get as much value out of its resources as it did in the past. When that happens, the accumulation of family wealth, rather than earned income, becomes a more important determinant of someone’s success. For Francesco Amodio, an economics professor at McGill University in Montreal and a member of the university’s Centre on Population Dynamics, the situation in Canada is reminiscent of an economic decline that began in his home country of Italy in the 1970s. “Now in Italy, and in other countries in southern Europe, you have this ingrained idea of building wealth for your kids,” says Amodio. He thought his children, aged five and three, would come of age in a different economic reality, but he’s already looking out the window of his condo in Montreal wondering where they’ll live when they’re grown.
There are countless pop-psychology names for contemporary parenting: helicopter, snowplow, lighthouse, to name a few. No matter what you call it, parenting now is a different beast than it was just a few decades ago. It’s not enough anymore to get your kid dressed, feed them and send them off to school. Raising a child is a 24/7 preoccupation. A kid’s success in life, the new thinking goes, relies on a series of carefully orchestrated opportunities provided by parents who believe a child’s future prosperity rides on the right choice of Mommy and Me class. The supercharged involvement continues throughout childhood. Parents spend all their waking hours crafting emails to teachers about how their kids learn best, hopping from one activity to the next, hoping to discover their child’s “thing” and diving into rabbit holes of internet research about the right way to get their kid to eat their vegetables.
Other modern parental stressors like youth mental health and social media addiction require a hands-on approach, just at a time when our own parents were taking the foot off the gas and letting us pursue our teenage independence. The result is that parents and kids are now fused together in a way that isn’t easily disentangled when the age of majority hits. Even after they’re legal adults, kids continue to see their parents as a vital source of support. And parents, who have invested so much in their children, are happy to keep them around for a few more years. Many of the families I talked to admitted that, if necessary, their child could move out. Parents proudly recounted their own scrappy young adulthoods—getting out right after school, living in dodgy apartments, scrimping and saving. But now, they figure, there’s no point in their kid spending the money on overpriced rent when there’s a childhood bedroom with a comfortable mattress, and everyone enjoys each other’s company. “It’s great having my kids around,” says Finlay. “They can stay here as long as they want.”
The Western fixation on moving out at a young age and becoming economically independent doesn’t exist in many parts of the world. Rather, families live together in a variety of configurations, with interdependent economic, domestic and emotional support—grandparents take care of babies, grown children take care of their aging parents, all working members contribute financially and money is saved for future collective prosperity. Many newcomers to Canada live in multigenerational households, and they’re partly responsible for the rising number of adult children living with their parents.
The benefits of this lifestyle go well beyond economics. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a global public-health concern, with mortality effects equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Having built-in housemates can fill that void. Two years ago, Tatjana, a 57-year-old single mother of two in Toronto, became an empty-nester when her son, Maxim, moved out to attend university in Montreal. But it wasn’t long before her 33-year-old daughter, Maša, lost her job and moved back home. Just a few months after that, Tatjana herself was laid off. “It’s good for my mental well-being that my daughter is with me, and it’s good for her that she’s not going through this financial burden alone,” says Tatjana. She buys the groceries, and Maša cooks the meals. Maša likes to keep the house warm, so she covers the household utilities. “The only thing we don’t agree on is her reality shows,” says Tatjana. She sometimes feels guilty about how much she enjoys having Maša home. “I want her to be independent and spread her wings,” she says. “But I’m from Europe, where it’s normal for kids to stay at home longer.” The house is set to get even fuller: Maxim plans to move back to Toronto in March. If Maša is still there, she’ll take over the basement suite Tatjana normally rents to a student. Once Maxim finds a job, she expects him to pay some rent.
Many of the parents I spoke to liked having their adult kids around. Helen and her husband, both retirees, live with their 36-year-old son, James (we’ve used a pseudonym to protect his privacy). He stayed at home in Dundas, Ontario, while attending university and getting a degree in economics. It took him a few years to find a job in his field. He’s now working full-time, but there hasn’t been any real reason for him to move out. Rent is high in Dundas, and he’s got a nice room at home. James is single, quiet and fits into the household just fine. He helps prepare meals, does his own laundry and vacuums the house. Some days, Helen and James have a glass of wine together. Thinking back to her own young adulthood, she would never have wanted to live with her parents. But things are different now. “Several of my friends have kids living with them. Some are smoking pot with their kids and partying. So I guess we’re enabling it, in some ways.”
Emerging adulthood is a time to find yourself, make friends, maybe meet a life partner. I lived at home during my undergrad at the University of Manitoba, then moved to Toronto to pursue more education at age 22. I rented an apartment with a friend. Learned how to take the subway. Got a part-time job in retail to pay the bills. Drank in too many pubs. Travelled to Europe. In short, I lived a lifetime in a couple of years by taking chances on myself that I never would have taken under the watchful eye of my loving parents. It can be hard to hit those milestones when your Gen X or boomer parents are your roommates.
The social adjustment hit Kylie Brown hard when she moved back into her childhood bedroom in Toronto after four years in Montreal studying at McGill. Many of Brown’s friends in Toronto also have jobs and live with their parents, and she doesn’t see them often. “The hardest thing I’ve experienced is not being able to talk to people my own age,” she says. “Obviously, I’m not going to discuss the same things with my parents as I would with my university roommates.” She finds herself slipping into her old childhood roles. “I feel like I haven’t been helping out enough,” she says. She and her parents talk about her making dinner more often, but the last few months she’s applied to nine grad schools while working full-time, so her parents have picked up the slack.
There’s no handbook for rooming with someone whose butt you used to wipe. Liza Finlay, Liam Tully’s mom, is a psychotherapist who sees many teens and young adults, as well as parents of adult children. She says the biggest concern for parents having grown kids at home is confusion over appropriate expectations. Do they still have a curfew or can they come and go as they please? Who does their laundry? Kids, on the other hand, especially those who have already lived away, wonder why their parents care where they’re going on a Saturday night.
Janet and her husband, Brian, live in Kelowna, British Columbia. They didn’t imagine they’d still be supporting their daughter, Evie, when she was 27. (We’ve changed the family’s names to protect their privacy.) Janet is 62 and semi-retired, while 72-year-old Brian is fully retired. During Evie’s childhood, they saved money for her education and paid for her first three years of undergrad studies in Kelowna (Evie paid for her fourth year). She got accepted to Western for her master’s, but it was the middle of the pandemic, and she didn’t see the point in paying for residence while taking classes online. So she stayed at home and did her master’s in Kelowna. Evie quickly got a job in her field, supporting youth with mental health challenges and making about $70,000. But the average rent for a one-bedroom condo or townhome in Kelowna is in the $2,100 range, and she and her parents decided she would live at home for a few years to build some savings.
Evie’s parents don’t charge her for rent or groceries, but she bought her own car, covers her own gas, pays her car insurance and phone bill and shells out for her own clothes and makeup. Janet likes to eat healthier food than the others so she cooks for herself, while Brian and Evie take care of their own meals. Brian vacuums and handles the dinner cleanup, and, in typical mom fashion, Janet picks up the rest of the housework. “Why would I move out when I have it so good here?” Evie has joked. Their dynamic feels more like what you’d expect from a parent-teenager combo. Janet hates clutter, and Evie often leaves her stuff all over the kitchen table, which gets on Janet’s nerves. Evie can sometimes get a bit surly with her mom, and Janet tries to let it roll off her. When Janet has her friends over, Evie camps out in her room, which makes Janet feel guilty about how long her friends are staying. And a few times, Janet and Brian have gone out so Evie could host her own friends. These are minor adjustments, really. Still, Janet says she’s ready for Evie to get out. “No offense to her. We get along great. But you know, it’s time.”
For many parents, having twentysomething kids stay with them requires a reconfiguration of what their late middle age and retirement will look like. Even the emerging adulthood guru himself, Jeffrey Arnett, had to adjust when his daughter moved back home last year. “It can be a nice time for a marriage when kids move out,” he says. “But then you throw an adult child into that mix, and it’s an adjustment.”
For one thing, having a grown child live at home puts new pressure on a parent’s finances. A two-parent, two-kid family with a combined income of more than $135,000, for example, will spend $403,910 raising a child to age 17. That number is almost halved for parents making less than $83,000. Across the board, the amount goes up by about 30 per cent when a kid stays at home until age 22. And these costs can have long-term ramifications. Parents in their thirties and forties often have difficulty saving for retirement when they’re in the thick of child-rearing. Once the kids move out, their cash flow frees up and they can start funnelling money into those RRSPs. But if the kids are still in the house, the window for saving shrinks.
Eshun Mott and her husband raised their three adult children in an east-end Toronto home. When their eldest son, Max, left for university, they thought he was gone for good. “It felt the same as when my husband and I went off to school, which is: you’re moving out, you’re starting on your path, you’re moving forward and not looking back,” recalls Mott. Max recently graduated with a double major in business and computer science from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, and although he found a job in his field that interests him, the starting salary isn’t enough to sustain him in Toronto. So he moved back in with his parents, sharing a room with his 21-year-old brother, Rory, who works in film production. Their 18-year-old sister, Moira, who is pursuing a college program in theatre, is in the third bedroom.
Mott recently started an online business selling spices, sauces and baking products that can be hard to find in traditional stores. Her plan was to run it from home, taking over the two bedrooms that would free up when her kids moved out and using them for storage and an office. “I have neither of those rooms, so I’ve rented a storage space and I’m stashing products in various corners of the house,” she says. “It’s the least efficient way to run a business, running up and down the stairs.” But she’s happy to give her kids a safe space where they can build up their savings before taking on the responsibility of a lease or mortgage—even if it means doing a few extra loads of laundry and still having to nudge them to start dinner. “I moved out with $20 in my savings account and have been scrambling ever since. I don’t want that for them.”
For Mott and her husband, the unexpected full house affected their plans for retirement. “We met with a financial adviser years ago, panicking about the fact that we were focusing on putting money in RESPs rather than RRSPs. She said, ‘Come back once the kids have moved out, because your finances will have shifted by then.’ ” They’re one-third of the way there: Rory moved into his own apartment this month.
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Many families are unprepared for the financial obligations of parenting adult children: more than half of the respondents in a TD survey last fall said they expect to financially support their children after they become adults, but two-thirds of them don’t feel well-equipped to do so. Many people don’t have enough for retirement, even without the added burden of grown kids. According to a survey commissioned by the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, 64 per cent of Canadians aged 55 to 64 are concerned about having enough money for retirement, and 44 per cent of them who are not retired have less than $5,000 in savings. Three-quarters have less than $100,000—nowhere near enough to sustain themselves through the golden years. For those who have ridden the rise of the housing market with a plan to downsize to help fund their retirement—well, that plan is bust until the last bird has flown away.
My eldest child turns 18 this year. As she plans for university, my mind can’t help but wander to what comes after that. We’ve made it clear to her that she’s welcome to stay at home as long as she needs, to find her footing. Still, her goal—just as mine was all those years ago—is to have a place of her own. One where she can make her own rules, like keeping Christmas decorations up all January long. One where she’ll be forced to learn how to cook more meals and do homework. None of the families I spoke to for this story expect the situation to be permanent. Despite the growing acceptance of intergenerational living, many people still prefer a space of their own. Even Helen, with her 36-year-old son at home, drives through Dundas, wondering if the buildings she passes could be affordable options for him. “Maybe next year,” she says.
Some of the grad schools Kylie Brown applied to are out west—which means freedom may beckon again. But if she winds up at the University of Toronto, she’ll have a choice to make: pay rent, or settle in for a few more years with Mom and Dad. Long-term though, despite the high cost of living, she wants to stay in Toronto. It’s where she grew up, she’s always lived in a big city and it’s home. Tully and his girlfriend recently travelled to visit her dad in Kelowna, and fell in love with B.C. For a moment, they thought perhaps they had found a place they could settle, but quickly realized that prices there are almost as expensive as Toronto. He thinks maybe they could make a financial go of Calgary or Edmonton, but the idea of a prairie winter scares him. Now, he’s got one eye on Portugal, where his dad has moved.
For many young people like Brown and Tully, the question of where they will eventually settle looms large. How does a person who has grown up in a city decide when it’s time to cut their losses and leave? Does a person stay where they grew up, live in a small apartment, pay through the nose in rent? Or do they start fresh, close their eyes and spin the globe to see where they land? According to a poll of B.C. residents, almost half of 18-to-34-year-olds have considered leaving the province, largely due to cost-of-living concerns. Their Ontario counterparts are similarly disillusioned: in a survey of Ontarians between the ages 20 to 32 with a university degree, 49 per cent said they were considering leaving the province for somewhere more affordable, while another 13 per cent were unsure whether they’d stay or go.
Some stay-at-homers are starting to see a future beyond their parents’ walls, however. After two years of working full-time in Kelowna, Evie’s been able to save a $40,000 nest egg and, this spring, she hopes to get a place in a new apartment building that’s opening up, where she’ll be paying about $2,300 in rent. Her parents have talked to her about keeping money on hand for emergencies (“I’ve got friends whose kids are always asking them for money,” Janet says), and Evie knows she’ll have to cut down on some extras, like travelling and takeout, to pay her rent. But for all intents and purposes, she’s ready to launch.
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