“Failure to Launch,” by noted child psychologist Mark McConville, landed on my desk last week, and I was immediately reminded of Michael Rotondo, the 30-year-old who grabbed national and international attention two summers ago when he took his parents to court over an eviction notice.
Rotondo, a news story said at the time, had received cash offers and multiple orders to leave his family home, but poor Michael claimed his parents’ notices to leave didn’t provide him enough time to move out, that he wasn’t going to leave without a fight. In court.
Long story short, New York Supreme Court Justice Donald Greenwood didn’t buy that answer and ordered Rotondo to move out of his parents’ home.
Last I heard, the man-child planned to appeal the court’s decision, but who knows what happened next.
I have no personal experience with this, thank God, but what I do know is that the Michael Rotondos of the world are really quite common. That’s particularly true for males and millennials.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 1 in 5 men ages 25-34 lived in their parents’ home in 2019. That compares to 13.1% of women that age living at home.
In all, there are 4.6 million men and 2.9 million women ages 25-34 living with their parents, for a total of 7.5 million still living at home, more than double the number living at home in 1980.
We owe this turn of events, according to the Pew Research Center, to the dramatic drop in the share of young adults who are choosing to settle down, and plummeting wages.
McConville, a clinical psychologist who has taught widely on the subject of child development, points not just to economics but history and culture, particularly the amount of education required to prepare for, as my younger daughter likes to say, adulting.
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“Education needs funding, and funding usually involves parents,” he said. “Also, today’s economy is different from times past. It used to be that a high school education, and certainly a college education, were reliable tickets to a well-paying job. Today, it’s much more difficult to gain a viable toehold in the adult economy, regardless of your level of education. In earlier generations, high school and college graduates were thrust into adult roles — financial self-sufficiency, marriage, child-rearing — much earlier than today.”
When he graduated from college in 1968, McConville said the average age of marriage was 20 for women and 22 for men. Today, it’s 26 for women and 28 for men. Plus, it is not uncommon for people to wait well into their 30s for marriage, he said.
“The net effect of all this is that today’s emerging adults feel much less pressure to grow up quickly,” McConville said. “On the positive side, this allows for much more exploration and experimentation, allowing people to figure out their long-term commitments as they near age 30. The flip side of that coin is that we have more and more 20-somethings who are not growing up and remain in a state of prolonged adolescence well into their 20s.”
If you’re reading this and just started to feel anxious, you’re no more alone than Michael Rotondo. Like I said, this is a pretty common problem to have but oh what pain.
Kids struggling with transitioning to adulthood — a 22-year-old going on 16 — drive you nutty. Right?
McConville knows because in the years he has been in practice, he’s met, well, probably all of them or some reasonable facsimile.
“They perpetuate so many of the patterns we associate with adolescents — relying on adult oversight and management even while complaining about it,” he said, “neglecting the sorts of mundane administrative responsibilities required to keep an adult life on track, failing to take ownership and initiative in preparing for their future.”
These, of course, are all the things that young emerging adults are beginning to tackle and master, but which “struggling transitioners,” as McConville calls them, are inclined to avoid and neglect.
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“These are the kids who drive their parents crazy, because they are too old to parent directly, but still young enough that parents can’t help but feel responsible for their development,” he said.
Credit: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
But here’s the problem in a nutshell: Parents are typically crystal clear about their transitioner’s troublesome behavior but are frequently blind to seeing the various ways that their parenting may contribute to and reinforce the problem.
In “Failure to Launch,” and his practice, McConville offers parents way to help them see and then remove this critical roadblock.
First, they have to understand the unspoken and unacknowledged fears and uncertainties that drive their son’s or daughter’s irresponsible behavior. “If you’re going to ask someone to change deeply entrenched behaviors, you better begin with a deeply empathetic understanding of how they got there in the first place,” he said.
Second, parents must understand the considerable developmental challenges that are involved in becoming an adult in today’s complex world. “It’s much easier said than done,” he said, “but it includes learning how to form deeper and more substantial relationships — with peers, with mentors, and with parents.
And third, parents must take an honest look at themselves, to discover the ways they may be unwitting participants in the problem. “That requires knowing when to provide support, when to draw the line, when to intervene, and when to stand back and let consequences play out.”
You’ll find McConville’s tools for answering these questions and establishing these guidelines in the book, scheduled to be on bookshelves Jan. 7.
There’s more but I have to share this because I know it to be true in my heart of hearts and it’s the clear difference between raising a child and loving them to death.
“Everyone wants to support their children; nobody wants to enable them,” McConville said. “The key is paying careful attention to how your parenting behavior impacts a child. If you provide them support — financial aid, executive secretarial service, advice and guidance — and they take it and run with it, propelling themselves forward toward adulthood, then you have indeed provided support. If you do the same thing, and your kid uses it to avoid the challenges and responsibilities of grinding toward adulthood, then what you are doing is enabling.”
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