How to raise two “failure to launch” adult children?
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Anonymous
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My childhood friend has her two adult children living at home with her I can only imagine indefinitely and it’s her doing.
Her oldest is 34 and the same age as my daughter. They attended High School together and he was incredibly high achieving and graduated salutatorian and went to a distinguished 4 year university. Graduated, moved back home and has never left or worked again. He has some mental health issues but his parents refuse to set any boundaries or expectations and they just allowed him to spiral. My friend babies him and he just sits in the attic on his computer 24/7 gaining weight and getting more and more depressed. My friend does everything for him from laundry to cooking. A vicious cycle of his self esteem plummeting. My similar aged daughter struggled with mental health in college too. She ended up dropping out and moving back home. We put her in therapy and told her she needed to find a job but we’d support her with getting to and from therapy and work. About 6 months of therapy and a minimum wage paying job and she was ready to go back to school. Stayed with us while finishing up and graduated a year late but is now doing great. Good career, married with kids. My friend complains constantly about not having grandkids but how does she expect it when she keeps her kids perpetually children? I think the root is her @$$h*le husband. He’s emotionally unavailable so she keeps her kids close so she doesn’t feel useless or lonely. |
Anonymous
| The beauty is these are HER problems not yours. |
Anonymous
| Oh my..not all mental health issues are easily treatable. But, yea for you. |
Anonymous
+1. OP, you don't know what you don't know. |
Anonymous
| Get a life |
Anonymous
| You're really online talking $#it about a woman taking care of her son with mental health issues the best she can? You have no idea about their darkest moments. You are a POS, OP. |
Anonymous
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I honestly would think you are talking about my relative except he is 36. Even went to University of Michigan and now sits at home, fat, never dates and unhappy. However, he does do yard work and home maintenance.
The mother is not going to do tough love with him because she is terrified he would commit suicide. She would rather have a failure-to-launch son to baby at home than a dead son. The father has always been "head in the clouds"/Aspie so he will never, ever have a man-to-man talk with his son about making a life for himself. Too emotional. |
Anonymous
| In my extended family there are a few failure to launch and boomerang types and the common factor in each case is enabling behavior by the parents where they coddle them and let the adult kids basically do whatever they want while being continuously supported and bailed out. I never see any pressure from the parents to make their kids become self sufficient adults. I think the parents do it because they’re afraid of losing their relationship with their children if they’re too harsh, but the children take advantage of this fear to use their parents as a bank account and/or free lodging. |
Anonymous
Seriously. OP is a terrible person, if not a troll. |
Anonymous
| Wow, therapy and requiring a job is all it takes! If only people knew!! |
Anonymous
NP here. Is it at all possible that op is right? That they’ve handicapped their son by enabling him for years? That’s a definite possibility too, as much as the possibility that he has such intense mental health issues that he truly is disabled. The thing is that I don’t know, and you don’t actually know any more details, so you don’t know if the op is a POS or not. You’re quick to get really angry. |
Anonymous
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I'll repost something I commented on the other failure to launch thread:
I am a therapist who specializes in "failure to launch" young adults. Most of the clients on my caseload have a Cluster B personality disorder (either BPD or NPD), or become very close to meeting diagnostic criteria for one of them. One of the key components to raising a failure to launch young adult is that they have very little sense of self and self-direction because their own desires, emotions, and wants have been railroaded by their parents during their childhood and adolescence. A very common scenario in my therapy practice (in an UMC neighborhood not unsimilar to, say, Mclean or Bethesda in the DMV) is that the parents pushed their (temperamentally sensitive) kid to elite private schools or public schools in competitive, wealthy school districts so that their kid attends a T20 college. The innately sensitive kid is then pushed to a high-paying career path such as tech, medicine, or finance, and when they can't hack it, they move back home as a 22 year old (or a 26, or sometimes 30 year old), and the failure to launch spiral begins. The parents usually alternate between intense pride and shame for their kid (this is called "splitting" by clinicians, and I see a lot of this black-and-white thinking on DCUM). On one hand, they are filled with intense pride that their kid is an elite college grad and feel as if it reflects on them as parents. OTOH, the parents have intense shame for their kid because he/she failed to live up to the high expectations that they placed on their kid. But wait, you might be wondering, why weren't these parents able to pick up on the fact that their kids are characterologically more sensitive and thus not well-suited for a path of Harvard and then McKinsey? These parents are unable to notice their kid's sensitive nature because they lack emotional attunement (which, to be fair, many first-gen UMC people who had to "pull themselves by their bootstraps" are deficient in). One of the first things I do as a therapist is to ask my clients to describe themselves, and ask my client's parents to describe their kid. Oftentimes I'll notice that both the failure to launch young adult and the parents are unable to provide an accurate, fully-fleshed out description of their kid to me because all parties lack the ability to "mentalize" -- in other words, be attuned to the emotional states of themselves and others. It's actually quite sad when I ask parents to describe their adult child to me, and they'll say some version of "Oh, you know, she's smart and hard working." I'll ask if there are any other traits, and they'll just give me a blank stare. The parents are unable to mentalize any other personality traits besides "smart and conscientious." And I really feel for these parents. It's difficult being in this situation. But I think even the most loyal and well-adjusted of children would admit that they would rather be understood than be loved but misunderstood. |
Anonymous
| What’s the story on the other loser kid? |
Anonymous
Come on. Even if everything you say is true, it is low behavior to do this to a childhood friend. |
Anonymous
Sure, but sometimes it’s frustrating to watch someone literally create a problem and then whine about it. Op is venting online and not to her friend. I’m in a similar situation with someone in my family. Completely enabling and yes I know the whole story. They act like so much is out of their control, but it’s just not true. It hurts to see the person who deserves a better set of parents to guide them truly neglect them in a backwards way. I could never vent to these people, but I might do it online. |