Failure to Launch: Written Living Agreements when an Adult Child Moves Back Home

“And the thing is, Mom and Dad, I’ve lived upstairs since I was three, and it’s been great.” —TRIPP, AGE THIRT Y-FIVE “What we have here is a failure to launch.” —A L, TRIPP’S DAD Have you ever seen the comedy Failure to Launch? Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker star in this movie about thirty-five-year-old Tripp, who still enjoys living with his parents. His parents, however, want him out. In his dad’s words, “He’s thirty-five years old. He still lives in the house. This is not normal!” Tripp, played by McConaughey, says to his friends, “It would take a stick of dynamite to get me out of my parents’ home.” Even his friends think it’s a bit weird that he hasn’t moved out. “Do you sleep well at night?” one of them asks. “Yes,” Tripp says with a smile. His best friend adds, “But you sleep on a twin bed with Superman sheets that you have had since you were six years old.” His parents end up hiring Paula, a motivator-interventionist played by Sarah Jessica Parker, in the hope of graduating Tripp out of the house, and that’s when all the fun begins. Not since the 1940s have so many adult children lived at home. And today, it is much more normal for adult children to move back home after having left. This, of course, is not always a bad thing. There are several reasons kids move home or are out of the house but still get financial help from their parents. One of our daughters had been living on her own when her roommate moved, and she decided to go to graduate school to get a degree in clinical psychology. She asked to move home so she could save money for grad school. Although Cathy and I had to quickly make some mental and emotional adjustments, we felt it was a good idea, and we loved having her back. She moved back to the same house she’d grown up in, but we now had a different family structure. She’d left home for college as a kid but was returning as an adult. Everyone needed to adjust. At first, Cathy and I found ourselves reverting to the parental patterns and behaviors we’d followed when she was a teenager. We had to adjust our expectation of when she came home at night and stop asking her whether she’d finished her school work. She was an adult and was paying for her own graduate degree. Cathy and I had to say, “That was then, and this is now.” Our daughter also had to step up to adulthood and take on some new responsibilities, such as helping with work around the house and communicating whether she was coming home for dinner, that would have seemed foreign to her before she left for college.

Kids who move back home or stay on their parents’ bankroll are called “boomerang kids.” Whereas young adults in previous generations might have considered moving back home a last resort, young adults today tend to see it as simply a part of their path toward independence. Some boomerangers view their stay as temporary, and others are late bloomers or are so comfortable in the family home that they don’t really have much of an exit plan. Whatever their reasons for returning or staying, incorporating an adult child into a family living situation is often complicated. My friends Bill and Kristen found out just how complicated it could be when they were only a few years into their new marriage and Kristen’s young-adult daughter from a previous marriage moved in with them. Bill had not raised his stepdaughter, and he was already used to the empty nest. Having Kristen’s daughter in their home didn’t go well. It almost cost Bill and Kristen their marriage. Both parents and their adult children tell me that a child’s moving back home often creates a muddled mix of issues. For example, parents often talk about the panic they feel late at night when their adult child is not yet home. Of course, when their child was away at college or out on their own, they no longer had a curfew, and they don’t see the need to go back to having one. The parents panic and get angry, while the adult child just can’t understand why they “freak out” over something as trivial as later hours. Young adults complain that their parents treat them as children, and parents complain that their kids act like children. Parents are often frustrated that their adult child isn’t moving toward independence, but kids sometimes don’t see why they should when they can enjoy the comforts of a big screen TV, a fully stocked refrigerator, home-cooked meals, and laundry facilities, all at no charge. Old habits die hard. When kids move back home, many parents rediscover their “need” for control, especially if their parenting style is what some describe as “helicopter parenting.”

The term helicopter parent was coined in 1969 by Dr. Haim Ginot in his book Between Parent and Teenager. It refers to a parent who hovers or “helicopters” over their child and is overprotective or overinvested in the life of that child. It starts when the kids are young but sometimes continues into young adulthood. For example, helicopter parents might call their college-age child to remind her to get up in time for class or to see whether she’s completed her homework. If that sounds farfetched, consider this. A friend of mine who is a college president told me about a conversation he had with a parent who called him to complain that her son had gotten a D on a paper in a business class. She wanted to have the grade changed. My friend later followed up with the professor who’d given the grade. The professor remembered the paper and said, “Actually, it was closer to an F than a D.” When the college president called the mother back and reported what the professor said, she became angry. “I totally disagree,” she said. “I have an MBA from Stanford University and I wrote that paper for my son!” I think she missed both the point and the irony of her statement. And helicopter parents wonder why their kids feel entitled and aren’t launching? It’s time to land the helicopter! A hovering parent is not good for an adult child, and hovering is not good for the parent either. It’s important to distinguish between caring for them and taking care of them. Caring for them means you are showering them with healthy nurture and love while allowing them to become independent of you. But taking care of them means you are reverting to the first two decades of your child’s life, when they were more dependent on you and your responsibility was to protect them. One recovering helicopter parent said, “I had to stop pushing my kids on issues they don’t seem to get. If it’s important, life will teach them that lesson.” Caring for an adult child is a good thing; taking care of them is not. Overly protective parents often refuse to let go not because their kids have needs but because they have needs. Specifically, they need to be needed. This leads them to encourage dependency. We exercised power and control when we raised our toddlers, and rightly so, but parental power and control are the last things our adult children need from us. Such helicoptering holds them back from being all they were meant to be. Parents who continue to take care of their adult sons and daughters out of their own need to be needed do so at the expense of their adult children’s maturity. They often also end up sacrificing their own well-being, their financial security, or the health of their marriage. Helicopter parenting is a lose-lose scenario.

To land the helicopter safely requires parents to hold fast to healthy boundaries and to refrain from coddling and taking care of their adult children. The Optimum Performance Institute specializes in working with young adults and their parents who experience what they call the “failure to launch syndrome.” Here are their guidelines for landing the helicopter: • Do not cook, clean, or do laundry for them on a regular basis. • When they’re struggling to find the solution to a problem, sit back and let them find it. • Do not let them live with you if they are not contributing to the household. • Require your unemployed child to seek work or further education in order to stay in the family home. • Do not pay their way; adult children should be required to pay for their own gas, food, and clothing.[^18] When I present these guidelines to parents, I receive mixed reactions. Although most parents understand that following them will help launch their children toward responsible adulthood, others offer up some lame excuses: • “But my son never learned to cook. He’ll starve or waste his money on junk food.” • “She does her laundry wrong, and if I let her do it, she will ruin her clothes.” • “We want her in a safe car, so we pay for it, along with insurance and gas. It’s really just a safety issue.” I get it. Life is complicated. Nevertheless, we can’t help our kids launch in a healthy manner if we continue to do it all for them. One helicopter parent asked me, “How can I miss my son if he won’t go away?” My response was, “Why would he want to go away? He is getting a great deal at home with your doing it all for him.” Author C. S. Lewis once said, “Change always involves a sense of loss.” Cathy and I have conflicting feelings about our girls growing up. We know we are no longer in the forefront of their minds as they are in ours, and that’s how it should be. We know that for them to thrive, they need to move away from us emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Even so, it’s not easy. When each of our girls started talking about moving out of state, we realized we had to grieve this potential loss to our lives and mourn some of our dreams. Maturity often requires making adjustments to our hopes, dreams, and lifestyles. On the one hand, we wanted our kids to become fully functioning adults, but on the other hand, we still thought of them as children who needed and depended on us. As our kids transitioned into young adulthood, we often needed to be reminded of the developmental process psychologists call “individuation.”