Failure-To-Launch Demands Tough Love

Many of us know children who grow up and fail to launch into life as functional adults. They’re in their twenties or thirties and perpetually stagnant, never truly establishing themselves in the unforgiving world that is adult life. They cling to comforts in a child-like way, refusing to let go like a toddler who can’t live without their binky.

I’m 41 years old and have been working since I was 15 years old. That degree of consistent employment would sound like a nightmare scenario for the failure-to-launch type. Motivation is a mental muscle they rarely exercise.

Recently, I was with some people who were discussing one of these failure-to-launch adults—someone going nowhere fast in life. They live at home, are unemployed, and aren’t interested in changing their circumstances.

These people wanted to help. I could see the wheels spinning, plotting ways to get their loved-one into employment.

The average independent, full-time working adult typically thinks of persistent unemployment as a job selection issue, but that leads them to give the wrong solutions for someone this stuck in their ways.

Parents will rack their brains trying to come up with low-income, entry-level retail opportunities to get their child’s foot in the door, discussing who in their circle might be willing to “hook them up” with a job that their child doesn’t really deserve.

Although this thought process is well intentioned, it will always fail. The problem isn’t discovering the appropriate job to get their foot in the door—it’s that they have no interest in crossing that threshold in the first place.

And sometimes these well-intentioned people don’t want to admit that the real problem is simply a lack of motivation and, dare I say, laziness. Parents in this predicament don’t want to call their kid a loser, but if it were someone else’s kid, that word would fly out of their mouths in an instant. It sounds unproductive and mean to use that type of label, especially for the people you care about most, but refusing to acknowledge the obvious only leads to mismatched attempts at solutions and in the end, disappointment.

With this type of person, the solution isn’t about what you can do for them, but instead what you shouldn’t do for them. It feels counterintuitive that removing support will help a stagnant young adult, but love can blind a parent into enabling failure.

I once spoke with a father and mother who had a son in his mid-twenties, constantly “borrowing” money from them, squandering it on short-term pleasures—including drugs—and chasing dreams that led him nowhere. I didn’t know this couple very long, but with their permission, I told them the truth: “You’re enabling his failure.”

I implored them to cut him off and let him become a man instead of keeping him in the position of a child, unable to survive without his mommy and daddy bailing him out. In short, he needed to fail on his own so he could earn his life’s success.

My solution was to give him six months to get his stuff together and after that, he’d no longer receive financial support. Of course, explain to him that you love him, but also that this family dynamic is no longer healthy or productive on either side.

It’s easier said than done. I get that. However, never-ending support will only hurt a child in the long run.

And if we are to be honest, the only reason parents do things like this is to temporarily suppress their own guilt. Enabling only benefits the enabler, not the enabled.

No loving parent wants to risk turning their child against them, but sometimes a hard push is required for them to have any chance at success.

The pattern I see again and again is that parents, who are good and loving people, never let their children experience discomfort or independence in their formative years. They raise lazy and fearful children who lack the motivation to face a scary world on their own. These parents know this deep down, and so guilt motivates them to finance their children without an expiration date as some sort of compensation.

If my son were one of those lazy adult children, I would also need to acknowledge that his lack of motivation was in part my fault as a father. But I’d rather my son hate me today and mature into a successful man in the future than continually handicap him to feel better when I lay my head down to rest.