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After at least five years of media-hype warning that a tectonic societal shift was slowly taking place, it has hit home. Millions of parents who used to worry vaguely about what they’d do when their kids fled the nest are now fretting about the opposite: how to get them to leave.

An estimated 18 million fledgling adults are now out of college but not out on their own. Parental nests are packed with offspring whose costly college educations so far have not equipped them to assume the traditional markers of adulthood: moving out on their own, finding jobs good enough to support themselves and, down the line, establishing their own families.

Social scientists have blamed this “boomerang” syndrome on a variety of economic factors: a tight job market, low salaries for entry-level jobs, the high cost of rent and large student-loan debts, making it difficult for many to afford independent living soon after graduation. The trouble is, many parents would like independence from their kids. Many have retired or plan to retire, want to scale down, or want to use what funds they have for their own selfish pleasures after years of putting their children first.

The situation has grown so pervasive not just in the U.S. (where 25% of Americans between 18 and 34 now live with parents, according to the 2000 U.S. census, the most recent available), but also in England and Canada, that marketers have begun targeting families who live with these boomerang kids, and social service groups have begun advising on how to handle the situation.

DaimlerChrysler autoworkers, for example, received advice on the subject in the April issue of their union magazine, Life, Work & Family. The advice: Meet in neutral territory to discuss the kids’ return before they come back home. Set up house rules, including a contract that deals with schedules and expectations.

A Florida newspaper columnist has asked in print (perhaps in jest) that the IRS offer a tax credit to parents whose grown kids have come home to mooch, er, live.

Author Gail Sheehy nailed this trend a decade ago in her book “New Passages,” in which she realigned the life stages, adding whole new bonus decades based on changing societal norms and increasing longevity. Adolescence and partial dependence on family now linger until the late 20s, she wrote. True adulthood doesn’t begin until 30.

In her new alignment, 40 is the new 30 and 50 is the start of a whole new life because by then many children have fled the nest, and their parents can begin to explore new options.

But that last part hasn’t exactly worked out the way Sheehy predicted for those whose grown kids have returned. AARP message boards are full of anguished complaints by parents facing heightened utility and food bills, depleted savings accounts, and fears that their golden years are turning to dust.

Harriet Pollon of Malibu has witnessed the transition from her vantage point as long-ago college grad, then mother and teacher. She graduated from Boston University in 1964 and, she says, nothing could have persuaded her to go home afterward. “It just wasn’t done in those days.” It signified failure.

“Our parents looked at college as a sort of upscale vocational training school. You went there to learn something useful.... I, too, believed that the purpose of college was to make my children employable. If you graduated and were still confused, you were expected to live with a group of other kids in the same situation. No one ever moved home. What an embarrassment that would be.”

Pollon has four children, three of whom came home to live with her after their college graduations. One stayed for a year. “I thought, how convenient. He’s an adult who drives, and I still had a daughter in elementary school, so he could help drive her. I also thought it was not unreasonable to ask him to occasionally baby-sit. He was shocked. It was out of the question, he said. It would interfere with his social life. He refused. And I was shocked.”

The bigger problem, though, was the lack of privacy, she says. The house was big, with plenty of room to keep a distance from each other. Even so, “once your kids are out of the house, you establish a schedule for yourself -- eating, sleeping, etc. You have your own household rhythms. When the kids come home after college, they are not interested in your schedules.... They see no problem with coming and going at all hours of the day and night.

“Parents are always aware of when a child is or is not in the house. You worry if they don’t come home, and they’re shocked that you worry.”

She tried, but she simply couldn’t tune them out, she says, because they are, after all, still her children. “It would be impossible to say no, you can’t come home to live because it’s inconvenient for me. You don’t want to be a bad parent, so you get sort of trapped into it.”

Hilary McQuaide, 22, majored in political science at Yale and graduated in May. In April, she started sending out resumes to places in the Bay Area, near where she grew up. Her parents’ home, in the suburb of Burlingame, was not her original choice of residence, but it quickly became clear, she says, that it was her best option: “It saves me a lot of money while I look for work.”

If she gets a job soon, she says, she might still stay at her parents’ home. “It’s really well situated, it’s really familiar, and I have lots of things I missed while away at school. I missed having my cat sleep with me. And having our dog in the backyard. It feels really secure here. So many things change all at once after you graduate, so it’s nice to have this one constant in your life.”

McQuaide, an only child, says she was “kicked out of her childhood room” during her freshman year at college, when her parents converted it to a guestroom. Now she sleeps in what was once the attic -- a large space with its own bath. It suits her just fine.

“My old bedroom was right next to my parents’ room in the back of the house. They’d hear me every time I walked down the hall, when the floorboards squeak. The attic is at the other end of the house; it’s like my own private apartment.”

Ideally, McQuaide says, she’d like to work for a few years and then go to law school at Stanford or Berkeley. “Now, I can save money for that.” She pays no rent, she says, but she’s expected to help around the house. “I do the dishes, feed the animals.” She drives the car that was hers before she went to college.

The drawback, McQuaide says, is that “I’ve had to give up a certain measure of independence, which feels like a step backward. My parents would definitely want to know if I’m going to be out late, because if they go to bed and I’m not home, they’re worried. And we’ll eat dinner as a family sometimes before I go out ... whereas in college if I wasn’t hungry I could eat when I got home.” On the bright side, she says, she doesn’t have to pay all the bills and keep her refrigerator stocked.

She says she’s always felt free to bring friends to her parents’ home. But what about an overnight? “If it were a boyfriend, I think that would be different. Since I don’t have a boyfriend right now, I don’t feel like opening that can of worms yet.”

McQuaide’s father, John, senses a certain ambivalence to the situation for all of them. “We’re glad to have her and we get along well, but we don’t have a tremendously large house and we tend to stumble over each other,” he says. “But when I became a parent, it was for life. You can’t turn it off. Does she get enough sleep, eat enough fruit, read the right books?

“I think she’ll want to step out in the world on her own -- and I think she should. My role as a father is not to push her out, but to leave the door open so she can leave -- and if she ever needs to come back, she’s welcome.”

McQuaide says she feels no stigma over living with her parents. “I went to school 3,000 miles away and took total care of myself. This is something I looked forward to all those four years of college. I’ve missed it.”

She is not typical. According to research done by Elina Furman for her recent book, “Boomerang Nation,” stigma is the biggest negative affecting parents and their grown children who return to the nest.

“A lot of kids I interviewed who moved home feel they’re not as successful as others their age. A lot were down on themselves,” Furman says. “When they go out, it’s still an embarrassment when they have to talk about where they live. Even if it’s a decision that’s financially responsible.”

Furman says “a lot has been written calling this a spoiled generation. And some do fit that stereotype. But the majority are working or looking hard for work, and they contribute as much as they can to the household.”

Parents feel the stigma too, Furman says. “They seem to feel somehow that they have not raised the kids right, haven’t raised them to be independent. They’ve failed in their role as parents. I found a lot of parents who were dissatisfied with having their kids at home, worried about what friends and neighbors would think.” But Furman says parents have to accept that, nowadays, this is normal. “It’s a whole new economic landscape.”

The second-biggest issue is privacy, she says, with money following close behind. “Parents whose kids don’t help out in the house and don’t contribute money tend to get more frustrated with their kids.” Some adult children act as if their parents’ home is a hotel, but that is not the majority, she found.

Furman, 32, now lives with a boyfriend in New York after living with her mother and sister for nine years after college. From her interviews with twentysomethings, she says she saw a “serious class difference” in how people reacted to moving home.

“A lot of kids moving into big houses had a sense that ‘this is so much better than I could ever get anywhere else.’ Some had hot tubs, cars, a lot of privacy.” In a small house or apartment, she says, the grown children may share TV time and almost everything else with their parents, a source of tension.

In either case, stigma is still the main problem that shows up in any review of twentysomething message boards. At the website quarterlifecrisis.com, which focuses on this age group, posted messages reveal angst but also sweetness, sincerity and poignancy. Someone named Melly writes that she is a Boston University graduate about to turn 25 who has moved back home after getting dumped by her live-in boyfriend. Without two incomes, she had to give up the apartment they shared and the car. She got a “drastic haircut” and moved back into her parents’ house in New York.

She writes that she felt like “a complete failure in front of the entire extended family.” She found a job after two months and things are looking up, but “the fact that I live with my parents is so humiliating to me that I barely have a speck of self-esteem.”

A posting from Michelle says she’s 25, still lives with her parents and doesn’t find anything terrible about that. “I’m close with my parents and we get along.... I know several twentysomethings who’ve returned home to save money.”

Someone calling himself or herself Unregistered writes, “[It is] so hard to be out on your own only to turn right around and end up living with your parents again. I agree it is extremely practical to live at home, but what your brain thinks and what your heart feels are not always the same. Yes, I am grateful that I even had the option ... but it still feels like moving backward. I can’t help feel I let myself and my parents down. They worked too hard to help pay for most of my college education.”

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a professor at the University of Maryland in College Park and author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties,” says his studies of the generation have shown that they are “not spoiled and self-indulgent. Typically, kids who return home are working very hard. They’re not lying around waiting for their parents to order pizza. They’re often looking for jobs or employed in jobs that don’t pay very well, so they can’t live on their own. Many are going to school as well. I definitely don’t subscribe to the theory that they’re coddled adults.”

But they do, he says, have very high expectations for work. “They don’t want just a job. Even if it’s a job that pays reasonably well. They want something more like a calling, that expresses their identities. This, Arnett allows, can make them seem spoiled to their parents, who often don’t find their own jobs fulfilling and don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation.

Otherwise, Arnett says, it is surprising how well these two generations get along, even in close quarters. “These emerging adults are kind of nice to have around. I’d much rather have a 25-year-old in the house than a 15-year-old.”

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The ground rules

With an estimated 25% of American young adults living with their parents, many families are encountering issues they were unprepared for. To help smooth the process, the April issue of the United Auto Workers newsletter Life, Work & Family distributed to DaimlerChrysler autoworkers offered some advice:

* Meet in neutral territory to discuss the child’s return before he or she returns home.

* Set up house rules, including a contract that deals with schedules and expectations. Discuss kitchen duties, household chores, alcohol use, smoking, who will use the bathroom first in the mornings, and visits by boyfriends or girlfriends.

* Discuss financial aspects of the arrangement, such as the purchase of food and paying rent. The newsletter suggests an adult child should pay rent and that the amount should be agreed upon beforehand.

* The reason for the child’s return should be delineated. Is it to save money, find a job, recover from an emotional disaster? Ascertaining this will help make it clear that the situation is not open-ended and not something that’s going to happen over and over again.

* Set a time limit for the stay.

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-- Bettijane Levine