A LOT of folks with no kids have this attitude, ignorance is bliss.
Yep. But it wouldn’t be suddenly throwing a 30 year old to the wolves. Even a 22 or 23 year old basement dweller can be given the idea that it’s time to grow up. Sure ,he can eat Doritos- when he has money to buy some. I won’t be buying them for him. I’ll be buying and cooking food that my husband and I like. Basement dweller can eat it if he wants to , but no special requests. Neither working nor going to school - hope you can get by without a cellphone, 'cause I’m not paying for it. Or for new clothes , games, beer , carfare , entertainment, etc. If it didn’t work, he probably wouldn’t end up on the street immediately. I have a large family and he’d probably land with a relative for a while. But they won’t keep him indefinitely either ( at least not most of them)
The deal for my kids is I support them, pay their tuition and give them a limited amount of spending money while they are in school. When my son was about 19, he decided to take a semester off from school. I told him school was up to him, but if he wasn’t in school he would have to give me $50/week toward expenses. At first he though I meant the spending money would be decreased by $50 a week - but I clarified that he wouldn’t be getting any spending money from me - he would have to give me $50 from his own money. He was back in school after one semester.
And I know someone’s going to say I wouldn’t really do it- but I will. Because the OP’s coworker is not doing Kid 2 any favors. I’ve known too many people in a similar situation - they mooched off their parents although they worked. It allowed them to have their low-paying “dream jobs” (which weren’t dream jobs in the sense of being creative in some way - it was more like selling tickets for a favorite sports team) or have decent jobs and take multiple vacations each year, since they weren’t paying for rent or food or utilities for 15 or 20 years. Then the parents got old and sick , and the siblings wouldn’t help out because , after all “they took care of you, now you take care of them”. And then the parents died, and their income died with them. Ticket selling can’t even pay the rent , much less for three or 4 vacations a year. And that college degree doesn’t help much in getting a better job when you’ve been selling tickets for 25 years. Enter the second job. These acquaintances are now in their late forties and early fifties and are absolutely miserable because for the first time in their lives, they have a lower standard of living than the rest of the group.
Let’s be fair. Isn’t that a cheat? You know he won’t be blowing truckers at 30 bucks a piece. That just delays the process. Someone like the OP’s friend might not have such a large family…
I can’t convince myself they came into the world this way. I always tend to see it as true codependency, no matter how it’s dressed up. To my mind, screw the parents, I could care about their concerns, they made their bed, sort of thing. But someone needs to step in and save the kid or they’re a goner, to my mind.
Yeah, they have mental health issues. But I’d put money on their lifestyles, especially the codependence, being a huge contributing factor.
I’d be tempted to sit them down, and explain that someone is trying to enslave them, and if someone doesn’t step in they are going to fall right into it.
If they continue, in their extended teenager hood, they will fall entirely out of sync with the maturity of their peers. Ground it will be next to impossible to make up. It won’t show much at first, but it will still be crippling in the end.
And when the enablers are gone, and one day they will be, they will be truly crippled in facing life’s real challenges.
I think it is one of the saddest things, like drug addiction, they just can’t see what they are really doing to themselves and their futures.
I have a man, next door, in his forties, out of his parents home, but his Mom still saves his ass financially, quite regularly. And every time she does it, she reinforces that he’s a failure as a man. I don’t know which one is sadder. He can see it, she cannot.
Didn’t mean he could move from one to the next- they won’t go for that. I just meant that with so many relatives, he’s bound to find one who’ll take him in for a week or two while he comes to his senses. If my adult offspring chooses to live on the street rather than be a contributing member of a household, I’ll just have to live with it as I will have to live with any of the other choices he makes. Doesn’t mean it will be easy ( and I certainly wouldn’t wait till he was thirty) but you know what? What’s easy for me is not always what’s best for him.
BTW it’s amazing how teenagers and young adults act differently when out of the parental home- even if they move to a friend or relatives home, they will give up some of those basement dwelling habits. Perhaps because they know that only their parents will tolerate it.
There are ‘lazy’ kids out there, who are more or less born that way - you know the type who screams “I didn’t ask to be born!!!” when the parent[s] say anything to them? Their attitude to life is that their parents gave birth to them, then their parents are going to pay for that every day of their life. They won’t do chores around the house, get a job, or do anything productive within their lifetime. As far as they are concerned they shouldn’t have to.
Actually I met a woman who treated her son like that because she’d given birth to him, so she had an obligation to look after him for the rest of his life - which was spent in his room, smoking and drinking [cigs and booze she’d bought], he never worked, only went to school because it was the law that he be educated, but he did nothing at school, and spent most of his school days truanting. She paid for everything he had (which admittedly wasn’t much!) and doted on him. I’ve no idea what her husband thought of the situation, but I was shocked to the back teeth when I discovered she’d a son my age (when I was in my early 20s).
Then there are the ‘lazy’ kids who’s mother had post natal depression and hid it from everyone else. She later views the child as the bane of her life and does the bare minimum for them, and/or emotionally and verbally abuses said child when no one is looking. They grow up with a sense of worthlessness and become hopeless, lost, “underachievers”.
My wife’s brother is like that. He turned 30 recently, and still lives in the same room he did at age 12, living the life of a twelve-year-old. Mommy cooks and cleans and does the laundry while boy plays videogames, watches TV, goes for bike rides and plays with my kids, is all. He’s 6’2" / 220 lbs, fit, an ex hockey player, which kind of adds to the WTF? feeling.
Army messed him up, he has weird problems with, for instance, wind catching any part of his exposed body, he has depression and anxiety and absolutely no marketable or domestic skills. A huge factor is the enabling his mother has done for the past 30 years (she’s the kind of woman who can’t bear to watch someone doing anything in her house without giving a hand and fussing about it. And when she does everything quicker and better than anyone else, no -one else feels compelled to learn to do anything.) I truly dread the thought of one of my kids ending up like their uncle. It’s not like they didn’t have a living example of the cushiest life imaginable, an enabler grandmother and a mother with similar tendencies.
To expand on the mindset of parents accepting a lazy kid, in my wife’s brother’s case, I know his father, a retired, career-driven engineer, is disgusted by the situation and has said so, hurting his son verbally on numerous occasions. His mother, the enabler, clearly suffers from his son’s dependency and wishes for things to change, but I sincerely doubt she has ever truly realized her part in the equation. In many ways, she is an excellent mother.
Assuming all these basement dwellers have a mental infirmity of some kind, aren’t any of them getting treatment? Therapy? Counseling? Medication? Something that will promote some kind of change? If not, it appears the situation is just dandy with the parents. There’s an old saying: If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. If the “children” don’t *have *to do anything, why would they? I feel sorry for the OP’s friend’s doctor son. I’ll bet he didn’t agree to support Deadbeat Bro when he was going to medical school.
I have some sympathy, though. My 80-yo mom is supporting my two youngest brothers (both in their 40s). The older one has a seasonal part-time job. The younger one takes care of my mom, who has in the past couple of years had health problems. The house is a disaster and they all are constantly broke and living off my mom’s credit cards. The house is mortgaged to the hilt. Both have college degrees but have done nothing with their lives.
I was furious about the situation for years as I saw it as taking advantage of my mom, but if it’s okay with her, it’s none of my business. And now she needs at least one of them there to help her. I have no idea what these guys plan to do when my mom passes but they sure as heck aren’t coming to live off me!
We did set up some counseling for my husband’s son, mentioned upthread. He “forgot” to go to his appointments half the time. The other half of the time, he pretended to go but actually went to get stoned with his friends.
I still think he may be depressed (well, if he isn’t, he ought to be). My husband thinks he’s quite happy with the status quo.
One question for the parents with the basement dwelling kids (and I ask this earnestly): did you ever have discussions with your kids about what would be expected of them when they were adults? Like, specific ones?
My parents, from a very young age, made if abundantly clear to me that when I was 18 and graduated from high school, I had to move out. If I went to college, they’d pay for my school, but I’d otherwise be on my own. This was repeated to me my entire life, so I accepted it as fact and never thought to question it.
You do realize that not everything is fixable, right?
Now, I don’t think all the aging basement-dwellers fall into that category but there’s a certain subset for which we don’t have a fix.
If I didn’t know so many people who were former enabled basement dwellers until their parents got fed up and kicked them to the curb, where they usually continue to flounder and fail at life with no cush lifestyle or enablers - often lapsing in and out of homelessness - I’d blame the parents, too.
Some people posting in this thread seem to have a fantasy rolling about in their minds where they imagine the basement dweller / failure to launch person and the enabling parent (ie " the feeder", usually the mom) have never been given a real talking to, and that their get tough attitude would set things straight.
Let me assure you that the chances are nearly 100% that the feeder and the basement dweller have been told point blank numerous times by relatives and others what the dynamic is. They are both very well aware of what others think of them and yet neither one wants to change. This is not a matter of information.
From what I have seen I do not think that most basement dwellers have serious organic mental issues. It is my considered opinion that 90% if the problem is the feeder who is providing a comfortable, non-judgemental bubble existence. Even chronically lazy people will get a move on when food and services are taken off the table. Laziness may be a tendency with some people, but it can most certainly be mitigated or reinforced by the home environment.
The enabler is the core of the vortex in all this.
This seems to be in direct contradiction to the previous post.
In my experience, both things (mental illness and overly-tolerant relatives) work together to create or perpetrate the issue.
There are three adults in my family who live with and/or rely on others for support. In two of the cases, the person in question has a diagnosed mental illness, making it impossible for him or her to hold a job. In one of those cases, the person is also infantilized, coddled, and enabled. In the third instance, the person is much more socially adept and holds a job. However, she is also enabled by her siblings in a way that seems unreasonable to me. It’s not up to me, though.
I’m not arguing so much with the notion that you can *eventually *train someone (especially those inclined that way) to be a chronically helpless failure. My point was more that the training is everything, and if you refuse to let kids be slackers from the beginning you usually wind up with reasonably self sufficient people vs basement dwellers , even if they are not setting the world on fire.
There’s usually the enabling Mommy, taking care of Baby Boy until one of them dies. I do know of two fathers with their at-home adult kids and both pretty much ignore the situation. There’s little communication or doing things together, they live in the house with their sons and pass like ships in the night every so often. The Mommys are buying Sonny new underwear, cooking for him, and generally carrying on as if Sonny was still 10 years old.
This is a very interesting but disturbing thread to read, with the benefit of hindsight.
Why disturbing? Because some if outsider–say a visitor from another planet–read this thread, he would have no clue from the thread that the country was struggling to climb out of the worst economy in 70 years. Of all the dozens of people who posted, NOT ONE of them even hinted at the state of the economy as a possible reason for SOME of the “basement dwellers.”
The US unemployment rate averaged a little over 8% for the year of 2012. And as we know, the unemployment rate doesn’t count those who have tried and tried to get a job, and given up out of discouragement.
I’m 37. Now those of you who are older, and were already well established in good-paying jobs when the recession hit, may not realize this, but the recession did massive damage to my generation, and the younger one. I personally have not yet fully recovered, and I’m far from the only one.
Younger workers were pushed out by older workers, who gobbled up most of the entry-level jobs because that’s all they could find. For me personally, it took about 180 applications (I kept count) before I found even a part-time job. The hiring manager at one company that I applied to told me that she received 150 applications for 4 openings.
Try to imagine going through that for months on end. Try to imagine knowing that, even though your resume is good, and even though you interview well (as more than one hiring manager told me), the odds are heavily stacked against you. And then see if you are willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.
My brother recently faced this problem with his oldest son. The child came home from college at winter break and refused to go back. When asked what he planned to do, he replies “My parents have money. I don’t have to do anything.”
My brother freaked out at that thought. He told the kid that he could either do something or leave his house. Despite having parents with money, the son got a part-time job and went to a local community college part-time. My brother insisted he spend at least 35 hours a week doing something.
Son went back to a different college away from home a year later, and is set to finish college and get married next year.
ETA: My own experience as a 60 year old female with a disabled hand: I spent two years looking for a job. I finally took a part-time temporary job as a store cashier almost three years ago. The store manager fought to keep me on, and I now have permanent full time work.
Both of these experiences relate to my family’s utter hatred of what we call “the fucking helpless of the world.” Our mother was their queen, and I would kill myself before I’d accept sitting home and doing nothing. My brother and sister feel the same way about their children.