A comment my uncle made

No. Your uncle repeated "on your."

No I wouldn't agree with that. Being an adult has nothing to do with being on your own.

Is your uncle also your father?

Yes.

Is your cousin also you?

until you've paid some 'big people' bills for awhile, you aren't one (a grownup).

its a club, but you have to pay some dues to get in.

sponging off of other people is, imo, wormy.

now, if one is paying reasonable rent, or going to school, etc., that's a different story.

As a person who has grown up in the country (US South), I disagree.

In rural, agrarian communal lifestyles where it's common for families to live together, if not be their neighbors, it's tradition and expected for family members to live with their relatives until they can find someone to marry them and live with separately from their own kin.

This is also common practice in much of the Spanish speaking world.

People forget, when talking about the United States, before World War II many Americans were not as individualistic, thinking they could make their own way.

Instead, when the economy was not as good people in the US were very collectivist when it came to family planning as opportunities were scarce and big families stayed together in order to survive.

The idea we have of the American dream is less than 100 years old. While the concept of that has been around longer than that length of time, what it meant to have it changed.

Watch any movie about Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer. There's a reason why Mark Twain, the author of these two characters which are loosely based on him, wanted to get away from his changeless country life by traveling to all kinds of places using a steam boat.

~~/o/

I would say yes and no Jonesy. I think you can be a fully-formed and functioning adult while living with your parents, but there are definitely life skills that living on your own forces you to develop. Simple things like paying bills, keeping a clean house on your own, making sure you can budget properly so you can make the rent; I found all those things made me "grow up" pretty quickly when I left home at 18.