Time-travelling home
Personal growth should not be negotiable at the family dinner table
Coming home for the holidays, summer, or even just a reading week can feel like stepping into a time capsule of your adolescence. For those who have moved out for university, it exposes an uncomfortable truth: growth is not always recognized by the people who first defined you.
Returning home after months away can feel like you’re unintentionally method-acting versions of yourself you tried hard to outgrow. Around family, it’s easy to default into the roles we occupied during our most formative years; after all, it’s those roles and relationships that made us who we are today.
This tension is not rare. In 2021, more than one in three Canadians in their 20s and early 30s lived with a parent, according to Statistics Canada. Home, then, is not just where we come from. It is where many of us are still negotiating who we are.
The problem is not that families refuse to see change. It is that family systems are built on memory.
Families rely on stability, on the version of you that existed within that space. Developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett describes the years between 18 and 29 as “emerging adulthood,” a period defined by identity exploration and instability. University accelerates reinvention. It allows young adults to test boundaries, beliefs and identities without constant oversight.
That growth may feel subtle from the inside, but it is transformative. When we return home, we feel the friction between who we were and who we are becoming.
Too often, we resolve that friction by shrinking. We soften new boundaries. We mute opinions. We laugh at jokes we no longer find funny. It feels easier to preserve family harmony than to risk disrupting it with proof of change. But that instinct comes at a cost; if adulthood means anything, it should mean integrating growth into every space we occupy.
Going home should not mean travelling back in time. It should mean evolution in shared space. Instead of retreating into old scripts, young adults owe it to themselves to renegotiate them. Growth does not have to threaten family bonds, but it should not be sacrificed to protect them either.
We owe it to ourselves to take up space, even at the dinner table.
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