As graduation nears, students are getting ready to get on with their lives — and some plan on moving back home with mom and dad.

A national poll by collegegrad.com showed that 80 percent of spring 2009 college graduates moved back home, while a study by the Pew Research Center released last week found that 13 percent of United States parents say an adult son or daughter has moved back home in the past year.

That percentage increases to 18 percent for parents between 45 to 54 years of age.

Social scientists refer to these people as “boomerangers” — grown young adults who move back home after living on their own for various reasons.

Ana Muresan, a political science and justice studies senior, is one of the 11.5 million Americans between age 18 and 24 that the Pew study said are moving back in with their families. Since Muresan began attending ASU in 2007 her parents have paid for her to live in a condominium near the Tempe campus.

But with one semester left before graduation, Muresan said she hasn’t found a job and the economic burden the condo has put on her parents leaves her no choice but to move back to their home in Peoria.

After three years of living on her own, moving back home will not be easy, Muresan said.

“I’ve gotten so used to living on my own, and now I have to go back home and do everything that my parents want,” she said. “I’m going to have to tell them where I’m going because I’m back home living under their rules.”

Moving back to her parents’ house after graduation is something Muresan said she did not expect.

“I thought that after high school I was done, and I was never going to move back home,” she said.

One of every 10 young adults surveyed in the Pew study said the recession, which has been particularly tough on young adults seeking jobs, is one of the causes for moving back home. Only 46 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds are currently employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Moving back home because of tough economic times is not uncommon, said Robert Bradley, a social and family dynamics professor at ASU.

“Historically, people move back to their home of origin every time there are limited employment options,” Bradley said. “This has been around for generations — it just happens that we haven’t experienced one quite as significant as the recent one.”

The economic downturn is also causing young adults to consider staying in school longer to improve their job skills, said Bradley, who is also the director of the ASU Family and Human Dynamics Research Institute.

“Because the world of work requires higher and higher levels of skills, it has been constantly delaying the movement out into the workforce,” he said. “Students are now taking longer to start their careers.”

The state of the economy has also been delaying family formation, Bradley said.

The Pew study showed that due to tough economic times, 15 percent of adults younger than 35 said they are postponing marriage and 14 percent said they are not looking to have kids any time soon.

“When times are tight, people delay getting married or having kids and they tend to come together with somebody else to share the wealth that exists,” Bradley said.

For Issael Altero, an electrical engineering senior who moved back home in May, sharing in and contributing to his family’s wealth was his only option after he started working less and could no longer afford to pay for his apartment.

Moving back into his parents’ house after four years of living on his own was not as easy as Altero thought it would be, he said. After Altero’s father lost his job in September, he and his brother had to take over and work to pay rent and family expenses.

But even now, Altero said he prefers to live at home with his parents than on his own.

“My parents don’t expect me to pay for everything, they just ask me for whatever I can contribute,” he said. “That’s different from when I lived on my own and had to pay about $600 a month for rent. So in a way, it’s not as much pressure as if I was living by myself.”

Though it has become difficult for Altero to get used to not having the same freedom he had before, he said he missed his family and never regretted his decision to move back home.

Now, more than ever, the movement of smaller families has caused young adults to feel connected to their parents and see that moving back home doesn’t have a negative connotation, Bradley said.

“Smaller families, in one sense, can lead to a tighter bond between the parent and the child,” he said. “The parent and the kid have become each other’s buddy much more than was the case when parents had a bunch of kids and the kids hung together while the parents did their own work.”

Reach the reporter at griselda.nevarez@asu.edu