Emptying the Nest: Launching Your Young Adult toward Success and Self-Reliance

INTRODUCTION

PULLING ANCHOR,SETTING SAIL

About ten years ago I began treating a young man named Richie who, despite being bright and engaging, was an abysmal high school student, struggling miserably through sophomore year. Richie had two main interests, video games and electric guitar, and everything else, including academic achievement, took a distant backseat to these two pursuits. How he ultimately graduated I will never know, but somehow he churned out enough credits to march down the aisle with the rest of his senior class one sunny June day and receive a diploma. Based on the number of phone calls and conferences I had been a part of during his high school years, though, I suspect that the school’s administration and faculty were as happy to see Richie finally depart as he was to go.

Not surprisingly, however, even though he had left high school, he had not yet left home, and his first several years following graduation were inconsistent and difficult ones, both for him and his parents. He started a rock band but couldn’t get it off the ground, possibly because the band members were smoking too much pot to get their rehearsal and marketing efforts together and move forward. He then decided to take some computer classes at the local community college, but quickly lost interest and withdrew without actually earning any credits. Then he started up another band, one that fell apart when his drummer (and best friend) was arrested for drug-dealing and sent to rehab. Following this debacle, Richie gamely enrolled in a technical institute to study computer repair, bankrolled by his parents, a nine-month program that he actually did complete. He abruptly quit his first job after three weeks, however, because he found the work intolerably boring.

At this point 20-year-old Richie and his family re-contacted me for family therapy and continued their treatment through this exasperatingly unproductive phase. Partially as a result of being in therapy, none of them ever quite gave up, despite many tense moments and complicated forks in the road. I helped Richie to understand how his behavior was actually eliciting the parental nagging that he so detested, and helped the parents to see that many of their efforts to motivate him, despite being well-intended, were backfiring. We worked on establishing more effective intergenerational communication, and clarifying the extent to which Richie’s parents should be financially supporting him at this stage in his life, and what he should be responsible for at home in return for their support. I assisted him in exploring career possibilities and his parents in broadening their social network and taking up some new interests. All three of them commendably made the adjustments that resulted in a more livable family life.

Nevertheless, when Richie reached the age of 22 without substantial progress toward self-sufficiency, they all agreed that he would take an extended visit to a favorite aunt and uncle on the West Coast, at which point he and I lost touch with each other for a long time.

One day, just a few years ago, I received an email from him, completely out of the blue, which began with an apology for not having stayed in contact. I will never forget the next sentence, which began with the words, I wanted to happily let you know that I am now a millionaire. Astonished, I continued reading and learned that while he was out West he had found friends who shared his passion for both video games and rock music, and they had invited him to collaborate with them on a rock-based video game that they’d been working on. They eventually designed a product that was becoming extremely popular and making all of them a good deal of money. The name of this game? Surely you’ve heard of it... the ubiquitous and inestimable Guitar Hero.

In other words, Richie, who barely graduated from high school and was not even close to a college degree, was now in the position of accruing more income in one year than most of his fellow high school students combined, and was doing so by pursuing something that he actually enjoyed.

The point of this story is not that the ultimate goal of human development is to strike it rich, nor that everyone is destined to be rewarded abundantly for following their passion. My point is simply that it’s unwise to give up on young adults no matter how maddeningly uneven their developmental trajectory may be, and that the more empathy, patience, understanding, and faith we are able to summon on their behalf, the greater the likelihood that they will eventually find ways to forge ahead with their lives in positive ways, and, through so doing, not only pay tribute to their parents, but, more importantly, to themselves.

Back at the turn of the millennium, when I was speaking to audiences after the publication of my book The Good Enough Child: How to Have an Imperfect Family and Be Perfectly Satisfied, I was frequently asked, "This is all well and good, but when are you going to write a book about parenting teens? " Apparently, many readers were preparing their children (and themselves) for the transition into adolescence, or were already in the midst of raising adolescents.

After having encountered this question frequently enough, I decided to follow through and answered it by writing The Good Enough Teen: Raising Adolescents with Love and Acceptance (Despite How Impossible They Can Be) and When No One Understands: Letters to a Teenager on Life, Loss, and the Hard Road to Adulthood.

Interestingly enough, as I have been speaking to audiences after the publication of The Good Enough Teen and When No One Understands, I have frequently been asked, This is all well and good, but when are you going to write a book about finally getting our kids to leave home and become independent, particularly when they don’t appear to want to or be able to, or when the economy doesn’t seem able to accommodate them? Apparently many readers were struggling with young adults who were having difficulty leaving the nest and embracing the job of psychological liberation and financial self-sufficiency.

Around the same time, I began receiving requests from numerous schools and school systems to help them address the challenges of keeping students engaged and focused during their final year of high school. Educators nationwide seemed to be in agreement that many of their seniors had pulled the plug and begun running out the clock early in the year, particularly once college applications had been completed and sent in. The educators were concerned that the students’ premature disengagement yielded months of bored and restless underachievement and resulted in academic, emotional, and behavioral problems as these students vacantly trudged their way toward graduation.

I also began to notice that in my practice I was working with many young adults who, although competent and talented, had been unable to successfully make the transition to independent life, and who, after having taken their first, tentative steps toward separation, by way of college, work, or the armed services, had quickly or eventually chosen to fold their cards and, with very mixed feelings (few of them positive ones), returned home.

Related to this, in my ongoing consultations with deans of student services and with student health clinic staff at various colleges and universities, I was hearing more and more about increasing numbers of freshmen and sophomores who seemed unable or unwilling to create an independent life and whose parents often remained surprisingly involved in their lives, even when they were hundreds or thousands of miles apart.

And of course, we cannot ignore the reality that since about 2007 and 2008 there has been a historic economic downturn that has completely transformed the prospects for independence and prosperity for legions of young adults. As of this writing, the American unemployment rate is 10.0 percent, which is a 35-year high. Our economic forecast remains bleak, predicting a very long, slow, and jobless recovery—in other words, unemployment will remain high for the foreseeable future.

This has already ratcheted up the surface tension in countless families as young adults desperately try to find ways to achieve financial solvency and sovereignty in the midst of what many writers are calling the Great Recession. Meanwhile their parents, feeling like their own backs are to the wall because of lost jobs, diminished income, or severely shrunken retirement and savings accounts, are being forced to wrestle with the excruciating dilemma of exactly how much fiscal and emotional underwriting they can afford to provide for their young adult children, and worrying about how long they will be effectively and productively able to do so. At the same time, many mothers and fathers are worrying about how they can afford to help pay for their own parents’ elder care.

Finally, over the past several years, my eldest son graduated from college, my middle son commenced college, and my daughter is preparing to finish up high school and depart for college. In addition, my wife and I have recently become grandparents, providing us with the unique opportunity to empty one family nest while wondrously watching another one begin to fill. So, as with my previous books, I have been provided with the opportunity to explore a topic in the field of family psychology not only from a clinical perspective, but also from a personal point of view, which always produces a more practical and realistic approach.

With all of this in mind, a book that specifically addressed the needs and concerns of parents of children who are attempting to complete adolescence, but having difficulty doing so, gradually began to take shape. After all, the ultimate signpost of successful child-rearing is that the child eventually becomes an independent, functional young adult, able to take care of him- or herself, and others as well. No matter how much love and support was offered, no matter how many extracurricular activities were excelled in, no matter how high their GPAs or SATs or ACTs—or even their postgraduate GREs or LSATs or MCATs—no matter where they went to college or how they left home, one’s tenure as a parent has not been fulfilled unless and until one’s children can stand on their own feet.

Now, of course, when I talk about fulfilling your tenure as a parent, I do not mean no longer worrying about how your children are doing or being available to help and support them—after all, caring parents will always love their children and want the best for them. But it does mean no longer having to feel so responsible for young adult children— psychologically or financially—and trusting that they can manage life’s inevitable ups and downs on their own, without permanently giving up or giving in.

Emptying the Nest, then, is a guide for parents who want to finish the job right, who want to launch their beloved young adults into their own uniquely successful orbit, rather than one that remains wobbly or stunted or too vulnerable to their family’s gravitational field. It will describe the challenges and address the concerns of families whose young adult children appear not to be laying the groundwork for a healthy and successful departure from home, or who left home temporarily but returned for an indeterminate period of time because of their inability to function independently.

This book will provide you with practical guidance that will assist not only in emancipating your young adult, but in liberating you, the parent, as well, so that both generations can successfully evolve to the next stage of their development. At the same time, it will help you to build, rebuild, or maintain the family connections that sustain us all as we each discover and follow the pathways of our lives, together and as unique individuals.

True maturity is achieved when we take on the weight of our own decision-making and live with the consequences. We know that we do not suddenly become mature on a given date simply because we have reached a chronological milestone. We either mature step by step, with each passing day, or we do not. Our maturity is ultimately the result of our having encountered, with increasing independence, innumerable predicaments, dilemmas, and decisions throughout our development.

There are universal challenges to the process of launching young adults toward maturity that families of every generation, and in every culture, have faced. But there are also some vexing challenges that contemporary families are confronted with that appear to be accounting for the recent upsurge in young adults who don’t seem to be making regular progress on their passage from reliance to self-reliance, from immaturity to maturity.

Just to provide one example, Stephanie Coontz, an expert on contemporary families, notes that in 1960, two-thirds of all men and more than three-quarters of all women had already attained fiscal self-reliance and residential independence by age 30, whether by earning a living wage through employment or, for many of the females, by marrying a man who had secured such employment. Today, however, fewer than one-half of all women and less than one-third of men have achieved the marks of independence by age 30.

So, what are some of these challenges?

One is that present day mothers and fathers have been so closely involved with their children’s lives in so many concrete ways from before birth and throughout childhood and adolescence—fostering the optimal prenatal environment; creating the most enriching intellectual climate at home; volunteering in classrooms; coaching teams; attending innumerable practices, performances, recitals, and contests; attempting to provide just the right mix of tutors, coaches, mentors, diagnosticians, and clinicians—that family connectedness can border on engulfment, making it more difficult to break free than in previous eras. Helicopter parents, hothouse or teacup children—our terminology suggests our uncertainty and ambivalence when it comes to striking the optimal balance between support and enabling, between care and overprotectiveness.

The fact that the size of the average American family continues to decrease, meaning that parents often have all their genetic eggs in just one or two baskets, can also make it more difficult for the young adult to find the right escape hatch, or the right time and way to leave. Raising fewer children more easily creates the possibility of focusing too intently on those children, which in turn makes their eventual emancipation more involved and emotionally fraught for everyone involved.

Modern technology is certainly a contributing factor as well—the proliferation of cell phones, wireless laptops, and assorted smartphones and PDAs enables parents and young adults to text, call, or Skype each other, often numerous times of day despite great distances and at a negligible cost, if any. (Many of us still can quaintly reminisce about the very brief long-distance, collect calls that we hurriedly made from dormitory rooms or hallways when we were in college, trying desperately to keep the time short and the cost down.)

Worried caregivers can now easily and inexpensively install global positioning systems in their children’s cars or cell phones, allowing caregivers to track their children’s movements 24 hours a day, or utilize cyber monitoring devices that provide them with access to all of their children’s instant messages, text messages, and emails. Or they can, with the click of a mouse, visit school-sponsored websites that provide up-todate information on all tests, homework, and class work that may or may not have been completed. Many colleges have even set up computer stations where students can engage in a quick, webcam-based Hi, Mom, hi, Dad check-in. These perpetual electronic umbilical cords can work against the process of separation, however, particularly when the young adult is feeling insecure about his capacity to strike out on his own.

In addition, our unstable economy is leaving many young adults uncomfortably straddling dependence and independence, and remaining morosely mired in the former longer than they would like. It also requires many parents to provide various stipends to sustain their young adult’s autonomy, which of course may simultaneously undercut the foundation and endurance of that autonomy and dramatically erode the parents’ own standard of living.

Paying for college and other postsecondary education, providing financial subsidies, offering coresidence, taking over loan payments and credit card debt, cosigning leases, purchasing a car, helping with property taxes, extending health insurance coverage—any or all of these may at times be necessary if young adults are to have the flexibility to pursue the more extensive education and training required to survive in a frigid economic climate. But this means that the era of hardworking caregivers being easily able to boost their children to a higher standard of living than they themselves experienced, all while anticipating or savoring their retirement, is long gone. More and more often, emptying the nest sometimes seems to require saying good-bye to a hard earned nest egg.

For example, I currently see a skyrocketing number of students who are choosing to matriculate at community colleges not because they can’t get into or survive a four-year college, but because four-year colleges are financially out of reach. While attending community college makes sense on many levels, it still often means living at home rather than in a dormitory, thus temporarily delaying the young adult’s leave-taking, and keeping the original family constellation intact for at least one or two years longer than it might have