Forty-seven percent of young adults between the ages of 18 and 34 are no longer interested in leaving home. They’d rather stay put and live with mommy and daddy indefinitely.
That’s approximately 26 million grown-up kids failing to launch. So many young adults are suffering with this issue that society has given it a fancy name.
Called ‘Failure to Launch’ Syndrome, the intellectuals among us are hard at work trying to offer reasons and suggestions regarding how to coax your grown kids out the door. Coax? How about shove?
Putting it plainly, when children fail to launch it means that parents have failed to launch them. It all boils down to that.
No sense in mincing words. After all, that’s part of the reason this mess has come about. I can say this because I am the single mom of four adult kids. I was forced to raise them on my own due to the death of their dad when I was 35 years-old. It would have been easy for me not to launch my kids. Many would have said, quite understandable, even.
I feel that I would have failed my kids had I not. Everyone of my kids went to college and never came back. They either went on to attend medical school, found careers, and in one case, began traveling the world.
We are a tight-knit family, and I’ve always been a loving mother. My kids, however, always knew that their time at home would come to an end. That unspoken undertone compelled them to grow up preparing for this day. It was what education was all about in our home and at school.
My kids also understood the importance of work. I made the receipt of their college funds contingent on them choosing paths that would lead them to be able to survive on their own upon graduating college. Preparing them to live their independent lives was the best I could give them as a parent in my way of thinking.
None of this was easy, mind you. Emotionally, it was very tough on me at times. When it would have been easier to save them from difficult situations, I held back. In preparing them to let go, I also had to prepare myself. Many times, I watched them struggle amid the waves and prayed that they wouldn’t drown.
I refrained from rescuing them from life’s lessons. I didn’t remove the barriers that faced them. And I didn’t revert back to babying them.
I waited, observed, and offered them both an ear and advice when asked. They all swam, eventually. If you want your kids to launch, treat them and train them with that intention in mind.
If they still don’t launch, I would suggest giving your adult child an end date to his stay in your home and stick to it. To that same end, I would do what I could to help him find a job while requiring him to partake in household chores up to the date of launch. Then, job or not, I’d launch him on that date.
You will see how fast he learns to swim, imperfect circumstances especially. He may hate you for taking such decisive action. Hopefully, that won’t last a lifetime. Either way, it shouldn’t stop you from launching him. One mistake shouldn’t beget another.
You’ve earned a second chapter. You shouldn’t have to give this up because your adult kid can’t find his first at 34 years-old.
This is one of those few cases when you do need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It’s long overdue.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Tim Welsh on Unsplash