Keeping Millennials Home with Parents Is a Bad Plan
- Details
- Category: Nancy Levant
- Published on Sunday, 14 December 2014 20:06
When my youngest child moved into an apartment with another young adult, I was worried she would not be able to afford to do so. Both she and her roommate work two part-time jobs and both are students. After nearly six months, they are getting by, barely, but getting by much as I eke out a living also having been cut to part-time employment. The worst timesare when car insurance is due and when cars need sudden repairs. It’s nightmarish and scary, but so far no one has gone on welfare. However, we, like most others, are at the end of the financial line, and certainly no one can afford a monthly healthcare tax on part-time wages.
That being said, I still believe it is right to require young adults to get out there and experience reality, because they need to experience what is wrong in the nation first hand. They need to start fighting for the recovery of the country. Staying home, playing video games, texting, watching TV, and having services performed and bills paid by mom and dad do not help 20-somethings embrace reality. It does, however, child-ify and shield them from the truth of the nation’s condition and how they must participate and work to restore a sane nation. Let’s face it: Texting, TV and gaming is BS, especially with meals provided and mommy and daddy still paying for everything while calling the shots.
Any twenty-year-old who is not actively participating in adulthood is being dumbed down and held back. My father (born in 1908) and his five male siblings were required to have jobs beginning in the eighth grade. His two sisters were cooking meals, doing laundry, were talented seamstresses, gardeners, canners, and housekeepers by age 12, and all were driving the family automobiles and were married and living independently by age 19.
My mother, born in 1912, did all driving and cooking by the time she was 10-years-old. Her parents didn’t like to drive, and her mother was an artist who rarely cooked. My siblings and I all left home at 18 and never went back. Today, however, young adults in their twenties commonly live like spoiled little kids using electronic entertainments to play. Making the break from parents has to happen in order to become adults even when times are tough, even when wages are low.
Times were very tough for my parents who as young adults grew into the Great Depression era, yet they married and moved out of their parents’ houses. They had nothing, but they made it because they were expected to live as adults, tough times or not. They had to figure it out and did.
I keep reading articles about adult Millennials living with parents because they work part-time or because they are in school or in student loan debt. Well, welcome to the reality of tough times. Rumor has it that it’s not going to get better any time soon, but does that mean we advise young adults to remain as children and dependent on mom and dad? That is the greatest mistake this nation can make, because it continues and encourages further dumbing down, technology addictions, the very typical social ineptness of those parent-dominated into adulthood, and the peculiarity of adult children who allow parents to control them.
The world is huge, complex, full of problems, but also full of possibilities. To be in one’s twenties and hunker down into the lives and worlds of parents is psychologically, socially, and psyche-damaging and necessarily based on a foundation of embarrassment. Last century, people were adults by age 16 to 18. Prior to last century, people were adults at 15 to 16, and even today in many other nations, people are adults between 12 and 14. There is a reason why young adults are embarrassed beneath the authority of parents. Reason being, they should be embarrassed.
Considering all people begin to age in their early to mid-twenties, it is unreasonable and damaging to allow this age group to remain as children submitting to parental authority and rules. After the age of 18 or 19, young adults must get out into the reality of the world. They must learn how to survive no matter the conditions. The world is theirs to shape and change, and this they must do.
We cannot further damage and degrade the next generations by shielding them from reality. Competent adults are necessary because, like it or not, the baton passes to our children, and they must be encouraged to pick up the baton by becoming independent adults. They must learn to stand and fall on their own and to figure out how adult life works. They do not need parents telling them how it works; they need experience apart from their parents.
Parents must release their millennial adult children. Millennials must become independent of their parents by becoming independent adults. Without excuses on either end, embracing adulthood is necessary for social and individual normalcy. Elsewise, only attempted justifications and embarrassement remains for young dependent adults and their parents.