If Your Child’s Failure to Launch Becomes a Money Problem for You
A psychologist specializing in emerging adults offers advice for parents By Richard Eisenberg, Next Avenue
In his new book, Failure To Launch: Why Your Twentysomething Hasn’t Grown Up…and What to Do About It, clinical psychologist Mark McConville writes mostly about problems some young adults have, well, becoming adults. But I was especially interested in his money chapter: “Breaking the Enabling Trap: Supporting (Not Coddling) Your Struggling Transitioner.” After all, as a recent AARP study found, half of midlife adults with children age 25 or older have provided financial support to them in the past year. And 51% of the parents providing the support say it’s a financial strain on them. So I rang up McConville, who is based in Cleveland, to hear his advice for parents with sons and daughters in their 20s dealing with a “failure to launch” — the young adults he calls “transitioners.” Highlights from our conversation: Next Avenue: Why did you decide to write this book about “failure to launch” now? Mark McConville: It wasn’t an issue thirty or forty years ago. It’s an issue that’s accelerating. I’m hearing from people all over the country more and more. Kids are more anxious and not as sure of themselves. On college campuses, mental health services are flooded. When I was in college, nobody knew where the mental health services were. And what about the money side of failure to launch? Kids today necessarily remain dependent on their parents longer. It takes longer to be self-reliant. I think what’s really different from when my kids grew up, and certainly when I did, is that we’re more invested in our
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April 2020
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children than we used to be. The flipside is we also find that kids become overly dependent on adult support. What exactly do you mean by “failure to launch?” Is it just about having trouble finding work? Launching means making the transition out of adult supervision into a world — from high school into college or into the workforce — with no adults nipping at your heels. By twenty-five, you’re expected to be making reasonably adult decisions. The kids I’m talking about, we psychologists joke, are twenty-two going on sixteen. Sometimes, their behavior patterns and thought patterns are more typical of teenagers. And what is the effect on their parents? They feel helpless and frustrated. How do you influence a twenty-two-year-old who is acting like a sixteen-year-old? If he’s sixteen, you can ground him and take the car keys. You have tools in your toolbox. But when your kid is in his twenties, what are you going to do? Throw him out?
That seems extreme. It’s about parents trying to make the relationship more adult and setting up a new set of ground rules: If you treat your child more like an adult, there’s a reasonable likelihood your child will step up to the plate. You write about what you call “the enabling trap.” What’s that? I’ll tell you a story. One time, I saw a woman in my office. Her son was about twenty. I didn’t hear from her for six months or a year until I got a panicky email one Saturday morning. She told me her son had a terrible driving record and had gotten three speeding tickets which he completely ignored. He got a summons to appear in court and he was refusing to get out of bed to go and was cursing a blue streak. The mom said: ‘What should I do?’ I said: ‘Don’t do anything.’ She said: ‘But if I do that, they’ll take away his license and he won’t be able to get to work or continue taking college classes. I can’t let that happen.’ I should have said: ‘They’ll give him The River Region’s 50+ Lifestage Magazine
