This summer, I have been to five “sports days” run by friends in their thirties. We’ve had all the races – egg and spoon, three-legged, sack and relay. I have, however, been to just one wedding. This is faintly ludicrous. I am 32. My generation is supposed to be settling down. Sports days are for little school children.
But this is just one example of how people my age are acting like kids because we’re unable to grow up. The prohibitive cost of buying a home and starting a family means we are forced to rebel against the milestones we’d otherwise be hitting at this age, and find alternative fulfilment.
Take Camp Wildfire – the “Summer Camp for Adults” in Kent which puts on activities like tree climbing and hide and seek, and has grown from 350 attendees to 4,000 over the course of a decade. I’ve been a couple of times in recent years. We were sorted into houses called things like Badgers and Foxes and shot Nerf guns at each other and built rafts. I loved it because it gave me a rare chance to drop the self-consciousness I clutch as an adult, and just play like I did as a kid. It feels freeing to stop caring what other people think.
Then last weekend, I went to “Water Wipeout” on the outskirts of London. Me and my 30-something friends all attempted to scale this inflatable obstacle course on a man-made lake but ended up falling over and sliding unceremoniously into the water. It was great.And every time we meet up for a special occasion like New Year or a big birthday, my group of friends put on a “Beer Olympics” – where we compete in childish challenges like collecting as much hair as possible or re-enacting scenes of Harry Potter. But it’s not just me and my friends – nearly a third of total toy sales in the UK are now to adults, according to marketing intelligence company Circana. Over the last few years, Lego has even started to sell toys under the banner “adults welcome”.
Pravina (left) racing at a ‘sports day’Boomers, I’m sure, will laugh at this juvenility. At my age they were dealing with mortgage repayments and trying to secure nursery places. But, they had it so much easier than we do. Growing up currently feels impossible.
Everything from Tony Blair’s rhetoric to the feel-good glow of “Cool Britannia” in the media and films we grew up with suggested the world was our oyster. If you worked hard and saved, you would be able to not only have kids by 30, but provide them with a comfortable upbringing and the occasional holiday. Adulthood would arrive more or less automatically if you did the “right” things. I certainly thought that in my thirties I’d be able to afford a place with a garden and childcare should I need it.
In 2011, half of young people in England and Wales had left their parents’ home by the time they were 21. At the last census in 2021, it took until the age of 24 for this to happen, and it’s presumably even higher today given that 29 per cent of British 20 to 34-year-olds live with their parents. The trajectory is the same for starting a family too – back in 1970, the average age of a first-time mother was 23. Today it’s about 29.
So, why is this? Why aren’t young people renting places of their own or better still, buying them? Why aren’t we having babies? Because, you see, boomers’ advantages eroded the economic foundations we need to do so.
The most obvious example of this is in terms of housing. Boomers came of age during an expansion of housebuilding and Right to Buy. They benefited from the subsequent house-price boom – even in real terms, UK house prices have tripled or quadrupled since the early 1970s. As existing homeowners became richer, the cost of buying was pushed further away from the wages of the generation behind them. In the mid-1990s, the average house cost four times annual earnings; by 2010 it was around eight times. About a quarter of those born from 1991 to 1995 owned a home by age 30, compared to almost half of those born in the early 1960s. It’s not that my generation don’t want to be serious – it’s that we can’t afford to be.
Pravina weighing up her ‘Water Wipeout’ optionsBoomers have enjoyed advantages in broader economic terms, too. Since 2011, pensioners have benefited from the triple lock, whereby state pensions increase by the highest of earnings growth, inflation or 2.5 per cent. Those of working age, meanwhile, have seen their benefits cut under austerity. Boomers generally went to university when tuition was free and maintenance grants were available too. Millennials on the other hand entered a system of tuition fees – when I started university in 2012, I was in the first cohort to pay up to £9,000 a year. Many of my peers are still paying their loans back, 14 years on.And that’s before you get to the costs associated with actually having children. A part-time nursery place for a child under two rose from £55 a week in 2001 to around £160 in 2024. A 2025 Ipsos poll found that almost half of British adults were put off having children – and that three of their four most common reasons were around costs: 39 per cent cited the cost of raising kids, 36 per cent the wider cost of living, and 29 per cent the cost of childcare specifically.
To give a sense of the scale of how much better boomers have it than us, the Resolution Foundation calculated that the average wealth gap between someone in their early sixties has over someone in their early thirties reached £310,000 a few years ago, more than double what it was 15 years prior.
Of course, my generation’s prolonged adolescence can’t be pinned entirely on boomers – there are cultural shifts too such as women’s equality in the workplace, longer lifespans, and a decline in societal expectations. But “growing up” feels out of reach for so many of my generation.
We lean into nostalgia partly to escape the impossibility of contemporary adulthood. So next time you see a fully-grown adult, legs flailing in the air as their friend propels them across the park in a wheelbarrow race, have a little empathy.
My generation is chasing the only win we can get – recreating the freedoms of the childhood we remember, because we’re denied access to the liberties of the adulthood we were promised. And boomers are the ones who have already finished first.
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