Go Forth Young Man: Why Guys Get Stuck Living In Their Parents' Basement

Since the early 1970s, ever-increasing numbers of parents have asked, “What do we need to do to make our young adult child want to emancipate?” 

What an odd thing, this business of adult children living with their parents. It’s difficult for Boomers like me to understand why a young adult of sound mind and body would not desire to be on his own, self-supporting, in his own digs. The kids I grew up with, by the time we were in our early teens were already sharing our thoughts on and even plans for making the transition between being dependent and being free of parental oversight.

An internet search finds various pundits advancing various theories as to why nearly half of all young people ages 18 to 29 still live at home. Before going any further, it’s important to note that a good number of 20-somethings in past generations also lived at home, the difference being they didn’t want to. For one thing, it was a great deal more difficult back then for a young person to obtain a lease on an apartment, much less purchase a house.

Today, most of the young folks who are still found living at home in their mid-to-late twenties are comfortable with the arrangement. They’re not making active plans to leave because they really don’t want to leave. Being completely self-supporting means having a lot less discretionary income, and the young people in question simply don’t want to stop buying a new car every few years along with the latest clothing fashions, and cut drastically back on partying, concerts, and drunken junkets in Cabo.

Then, for males, there’s the video gaming thing. A disproportionate number of 20-something males who are living at home are addicted to video gaming. Many if not most of them don’t have steady jobs or any seeming desire to “move on up” in the world. They’re sluggards. The pundits have theories about them, too—as in, lots of them have ADHD. Cue the laugh track, please!

I have my theory, one I haven’t seen come from anyone else, which means I’m probably right. My theory, confirmed by conversation after conversation with the parents of these homebodies, is that the ubiquity of “failure to launch syndrome” is a symptom of parent-child codependence, which since the 1960s has become the norm.

First, a definition of codependency. Invariably, one of the people in a codependent relationship feels the other person’s pain and is unable to tolerate it. So, that person—call her Person A—enters into a tacit agreement with Person B that reads, “I will do my best to solve all your problems. I will pretend not to like the arrangement, but the truth is, I depend on you to be dependent upon me.”

Person A enables irresponsibility of one sort or another in Person B, and Person B gradually settles into what clinical psychologists call “learned helplessness,” to which Person A responds with even more enabling…and around and around they go. In graduate school, my professors taught that learned helplessness is common to depression and just about every other chronic mental health problem, in which case we have an explanation for the dramatic deterioration of child and teen mental health over the past half-century.

Did you know that God explicitly commands a male to emancipate and then assist in the emancipation of a woman? No, you probably don’t, but here it is: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24, NKJV). In other words, this business of emancipation is no trivial matter. One ignores God at his peril, and when an entire culture ignores God, well, the peril is exponentially more perilous.

So, because I’m about to exceed my self-imposed word limit, I’m going to stop right there and continue these thoughts with my next essay for Clear Truth Media, which should be posted within a week or two, when I will provide a veritable fail-safe formula for getting a child to leave home when he should and come back only for visits that will be mutually enjoyable because whereas he will still be your child, he will no longer be a child.