Camp for "Failure to Launch" Guys: What is your opinion?

In My Humble Opinion
1

http://news.yahoo.com/retreat-aims-young-mens-failure-launch-183924168.html

[quote=]
“Get out of bed, don’t get out of bed,” they’re told. “But if you don’t, you don’t progress. It’s up to you.”

In fact, by 8:30 a.m. breakfast, most of these young men’s beds are made, sort of, and they’ve either been to a yoga session, or for a walk around the lake in this remote mountain retreat.

The aim here starts out that simple: Get up. Clean your room. Hold meaningful conversations. Resolve your differences.

Eventually, it moves on to setting some goals: Staying in school, getting a job, or both. Moving out of their parents’ homes when they leave this place is a hope for many.

They are the most basic of goals, a rite of passage for any young adult. But experts say more young people today — especially young men like the ones who come here — lack the will, or perhaps even the know-how, to achieve them.

They are the modern-day lost boys, who suffer from “failure to launch,” a term made popular by a movie of the same name. While at least one critic deemed that film “completely unbelievable” at the time, five years later real life is imitating fiction.
[/quote]

My first thought: “This is better than doing nothing.” If it’s obvious your life is not unfurling right, maybe a time-out is exactly what you need. A place to take a step back, come to your senses, get advice, talk it all out (whatever “it” is), and make a solid plan.

My second thought: “WTH!” Most people don’t need a “retreat” to learn life’s lessons. They learn by living and facing the consequences of their actions. Helicopter parenting is implicated as a cause of these young men not thriving in adulthood, but this camp seems like an extension of helicopter parenting. Yet another way to coddle and over-protect.

But I guess if I were a desperate and exasperated parent and I had the financial means, I would consider a place like this–damn how pitiful it may look to outsiders.

What say you?

2

It’s at least partially the parents fault for enabling such behavior. Kick them the hell out already. I really don’t get anyone who lives at home past about 20 barring extreme circumstances.

3

Usually it is because they owe about $90,000 in student loan debts, found out there were no jobs and bankruptcy wouldn’t save them, and are biding time while they figure out how to flee the country and/or get a new identity.

4

I don’t see how a camp could possibly help. Either they are at home because they really have no other options which means that they are ready to leave at any time and the camp is useless to them or they are at home because they don’t want to leave and getting to go to summer camp with a bunch of other guys in the same boat isn’t going to make them want to cook their own dinner any more than they already do. Is this seriously a camp that teaches adult men to make their beds and look for jobs? I think perhaps a camp for their parents that teaches you not to treat your children like pets might be a better choice.

5

French Foreign Legion.

6

From the snippet monstro posted, this sounds a tad ridiculous. But once you read the whole thing, the camp is really designed to help kids who are obviously suffering from some form of mild depression. I can understand that a lot better than a “failure to launch” camp.

Looking at the program’s website makes this even clearer. The homepage (http://insightintensive.com) and the program overview page mention the “failure to launch epidemic” in the first line of each, then they go into several paragraphs discussing the depression angle.

Most people don’t graduate college until 22. In which case, I find it really hard to label anyone younger than 24 a basement-dwelling loser for not moving out.

7

Jebus! I feel so lucky. My oldest is 17 and just got his own apartment.

8

It sounds like this camp is mainly for the kids of rich people who never learned how to discipline their kids properly. If you’re a rich person who is enabling your kid to live like a slacker and can’t say no to them, I guess this camp is a good idea, but any parent with common sense shouldn’t need to use something like this.

9

I think it kind of acknowledges the problem maybe isn’t the kid, but the environment.

They’ve created an environment where no one’s really to blame, it’s not a bad kid, or bad parenting, it’s depression over bad times manifesting. I could see this as a good thing. The problem with ‘tough love’ solutions, ‘why aren’t they doing the obvious, kick them to the curb’, is that people who have contributed to a child in this circumstance, just don’t have that in them. If they did, they wouldn’t be in this spot.

The truth is the kids don’t really like it either, I think, on some level they recognize they are missing one of life’s important thresholds. Yeah, times are tough, student debt is high, apartments are expensive, landlords want people with jobs, people are depressed to be sure. All true.

I’m inclined to see this is a positive light. Parents and child know things need to change, but cannot see how to get there. This seems a step forward, with out blaming either side.

Making beds, rising early, seem simply, juvenile and basic, it’s easy to poke fun. But, often kids living like this get depressed, sleep all day, lose motivation. Their lives lose all structure. Reintroducing any form of structure seems all positive to me, and the first step to exercising and eating better. These things are drug free, therapy free, treatments for depression, to my mind.

I vote thumbs up!

10

With the economy so bad a lot of young people are going to wind up living with mom and dad for a while after college, but skimming the linked story I see there was at least one camp participant who was living alone…“in an apartment that his dad paid for. He’d dropped out of university and didn’t make it at community college, either.” Well, no wonder he didn’t “launch”.

This camp “involves a stay of three to four months at a cost of $350 a day”, so anyone there has parents with ~$31,500-$42,000 to spare. The article says the camp doesn’t take anyone with serious psychiatric problems, a history of abusing hard drugs or prescription pills, or with a criminal record, so these likely aren’t parents who came up with the money out of desperation because their sons were posing a serious threat to themselves or others. I suspect that for many of these young men the root of the problem is that their parents have too much money and not enough sense. It’s unfortunate that their parents spoiled them their whole lives and never taught them to be responsible or take care of themselves.

11

I like the idea of a place like this, where people can assess what they are doing wrong, get non-parental advice about how to fix it, and learn skills that they should know but for some reason don’t. If it works, then it can’t be that bad.

But that price tag? For kids who aren’t formally diagnosed with anything? And there are no consequences for non-compliance? And for guys are barely out of high school anyway? I dunno. It just sounds like the perfect place for your special baby boy to go so he can learn how to be a grown-up without facing any of the harsh consequences of his mistakes, and you–the parent–don’t have to look like a mean ogre.

12

If it was honestly established to help young people cope with the worldwide economic downturn, I’d be all in favour of it. At that price tag, though, I don’t think it is. It sounds more like a way to extract $2,500 per week from the parents of depressed young adults.

13

What is its success rate when compared against similar men who do not enter the facility?

14

I can kind of see the appeal. My brother got out of college just as the economy tanked, and as a result has alternated between living with my folks and moving out doing stints at various temporary jobs. He’s not lazy or spoiled, when he’s working he’s quite good at his jobs and he’s quite capable of taking care of himself. But through a combination of bad luck and not having a ton of marketable skills, he ends up unemployed, sometimes for appreciable lengths of time.

Anyhoo, when he ends up unemployed, he’s usually pretty active in trying to find a new job, but if it goes on for a few months he understandably gets pretty depressed and kind of shuts down. He’s miserable, it makes my folks pretty miserable and the whole thing gets to be a rather bad scene. Happily these periods so far have ended eventually when he finds a new gig, but if someone was in a similar situation for a longer period of time, I can kind of see where it might be appealing.

I’m not sure I’d actually recommend the camp (as others have said it seems kind of skammy), but I can understand why it might appeal, and I don’t think the people that would be interested are necessarily all spoiled layabouts.

15

Such incredibly wishy washy results.

[QUOTE=Some Loser]
The 22-year-old wants to get a job, maybe at a coffee house — and to teach guitar lessons. He’s going to try to go back to school.
[/QUOTE]

After $31,500 - $42,000 of motivation, and the kid aspires to maybe think about becoming loser. :rolleyes: Their parents should bribe a tradesman to take the kid on as shop-bitch. They’d come out of that with opinions stronger than “maybe” or “try”.

The article reminds me a problem Japan is having with young men shutting themselves in. This being Japan, they’ve decided to solve the problem by hiring Big Sisters for their launch failures.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html?pagewanted=all

16

This is a disturbing scenario on a number of levels.

Who in their right mind would rack up that kind of debt at that age. What parent would support this endeavor? What institution would bankroll this? We’re not talking about a medical degree where there’s a shortage of high paying jobs begging for more people. This is a fairly common event involving less-than-useful degrees.

My parents have passed on so I can’t ask them but I’m fairly confident of their response. They would NOT have supported my efforts at getting a generic degree to the tune of $90,000 of debt. I was told at a very young age, repeatedly, what was expected of me after HS and the level of support they would give toward that goal. I was also taught how to manage money and plan financially. I can’t imagine starting out with that kind of debt load.

17

At 22 my husband - after several bouts of unemployment - worked in a coffee shop and spent a lot of time playing games. He went on to several more bouts of unemployment and didn’t really start to “find” himself until his 30s.

He is now very highly paid, speaks at conferences, consults with Google. We are a pretty successful couple, financially and professionally - he more than me because I “mommy tracked.”

Like kids graduating now, he and I both graduated into a recession. I was lucky and disciplined enough to get and keep jobs - even move up the ladder - he didn’t have either luck or discipline. He also had the high student loan debt - 1980s style so less of it, but just as much when you account for inflation.

Like the kids in this story, he had divorced parents.

It takes a while for some people to “find themselves.” That doesn’t mean they’ll be losers forever.

18

The kids described in the story don’t look like they fit that scenario. They haven’t finished school, or don’t want to. They spend their time paying WOW and getting high and have to be taught how to apply for a job.

Maybe some of them are trying, but that doesn’t come across in the article.

19

It seems to me that, with each new generation, the age of maturity increases. My parent’s generation was fully functional at 18. They were adults from the perspective that they were expected to pull their weight and be capable of taking care of themselves. 30 is the new 18.

20

Not coincidentally, the wealth gap between young and old is exploding.

"The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday.

The 47-to-1 gap in net worth between old and young is believed by demographers to be the highest ever, even predating government records."
Anyone read Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said? Are we heading towards “students” being treated like they are there?