If you haven’t seen “Failure to Launch”, you must see it.
Now, it’s not likely to win any Academy Awards – but then – who really wants those anyway? An Academy Award is given to folks so that they don’t feel like real losers even though their movie was a snoozer at the box office. I mean, when did a popular movie win ‘Best picture’? Hey, they’re bundling “Brokeback Mountain” with more popular movies at Best Buy hoping to move the crap.
Sorry, I digressed, back to “Failure to Launch”. This movie is about a young man (age 35) who is still living at home! Obviously, his folks want him to go and grow up … so they go through all kinds of stuff to get him move out. This is hilarious. They end up hiring a ‘professional interventionist’ to try to woo him out of the parent’s home, but it doesn’t work. As he says,” it’ll take a stick of dynamite to move me out of my parent’s home!”
I won’t give it all away, but for many parents this is way too close to home. We know folks who sold their big home and moved into a small one-bedroom apartment to escape the upcoming challenge! Some parents have even threatened to move without a forwarding address. And there are a few adult age children who even marry and have kids but never move away… but I think they are hanging around for the ‘old folks’ to ‘kick it’ as they also say in the movie. Also included — if you buy the DVD — are some minor ‘documentaries’ on the subject. The adult children — they interviewed — seem… troubled.
percentage of men (blue) and women (red) aged 18-22
who live at home (including those who live at college)
The statistics are somewhat surprising. The real trend is not how many guys are living at home, but the big increase in gals staying or coming back home. It seems somewhat obvious to me that a far fewer percentage of women are leaving home to get married as was probably true in the 1960’s and this accounts for the increase in adult female children at home at the comparable ages.
As for me, I never wanted my children to move away… nor did I want them to stay. I just wanted them to grab life and live it as best they can. It’s a beautiful world out there, but there are far too many adult children who are really afraid to leave the nest, explore and build a life of their own. A parent’s job is to prepare them for this stage of adulthood.
When I was running for politics, I was trying to make a plea for economic growth by saying,” I have a dream… that my children will not live with me forever!” I was trying to make the point that if we do not encourage and create top jobs in our community, our children will have little to choose. In that case, it is likely that they will have to live at home. This is happening in small communities all across the nation as anti-growth groups stifle economic development. Unfortunately, if the adult children want a chance to duplicate their parents lifestyle, they have to move where the jobs are!
As parents, it is important to encourage and support your children to reach for the gold ring, to be all they can be. In this way, if they end up living at home, it is both your choice and theirs and that makes all the difference…. it’ll also keep you from wanting to tie them up and leave them with a note on somebody else’s door step!
Roger Freberg