17. Does that sound like sheer, impractical, visionary idealism? It isn't. It is just horse sense. It is a good way for you and me to find the happiness we long for. I know. I have seen it happen right in my own family. My own mother and father gave for the joy of helping others. We were poor—always overwhelmed by debts. Yet, poor as we were, my father and mother always managed to send money every year to an orphans' home—the Christian Home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Mother and Father never visited that home. Probably no one thanked them for their gifts—except by letter—but they were richly repaid, for they had the joy of helping little children— without wishing for or expecting any gratitude in return.

34. Her oldest,David Jr. , 26 ,did land a good job.Graduating from Middlebury College in 2006,he joined a Boston insurance company,specializing in reinsurance ,nearlythree years ago,before the recession.

33. "No one on either side of the family has ever gone through this," Mrs. Nicholson said, "and I guess I'm impatient. I know he is educated and has a great work ethic and wants to start contributing, and I don't know what to do. "

32. The Nicholsons, whose combined annual income is worth of $ 175, 000 , have lavished attention on their three sons. Currently that attention is directed mainly at sustaining the self-confidence of their middle son.

31. That millennials as a group are optimistic is partly because many are, as Mr. Kohut put it, the children of doting baby boomers —among .them David Nicholson and his wife, Susan, 56 , an executive at a company that owns movie theaters.

30. "As frustrated as I get now, and I never intended to live at home, I'm in a good situation in a lot of ways, " Scott said. "I have very little overhead and no debt , and it is because I have no debt that I have any sort of flexibility to look for work. Otherwise, I would have to have a job, some kind of full-time job. "

29. The jobs are catch as catch can. He and a friend recently put up a white wooden fence for a neighbor, em bedding the posts in cement, a day's work that brought Scott $ 125. He mows lawns and gardens for half a dozen clients in Grafton, some of them family friends. And he is an active volunteer firefighter.

28. Like most of his classmates, Scott tries to get by on a shoestring and manages to earn enough in odd jobs to pay some expenses.

27. "Going it alone," "earning enough to be self-supporting" - these are awkward concepts for Scott Nicholson and his friends. Of the 20 college classmates with whom he keeps up, 12 are working, but only half are in jobs they "really like . " Three are entering law school this fall after frustrating experiences in the work force, "and five are looking for work just as I am, " he said.

26. In 2008, the first year of the recession, the percentage of the population living in households in which at least two generations were present rose nearly a percentage point, to 106 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. The high point , 24 . 7 percent, came in 1940, as the Depression ended, and the low point, 12 percent, in 1980. Striving for Independence

25. Many hard-pressed millennials are falling back on their parents, as Scott Nicholson has. While he has no college debt (his grandparents paid all his tuition and board) many others do, and that helps force them back home.