RULE 23

Someday you will have to grow up and actually move out of your parents’ house.

Previous generations crossed the frozen Bering Strait, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, discovered the New World, traveled the Oregon Trail, climbed Mount Everest, plunged into the rain forests of South America, explored the Great Barrier Reef, journeyed to the South Pole, and landed on the moon.

So far, though, the great pioneering move of Generation Me is back home to live with Mom.

There are a lot of creative euphemisms for people who fail to launch: emerging adults, theshholders, twixters, and kidults. None of them should be taken as compliments.

They all reflect the fact that a generation that nobody prepared for the real adult world is—not surprisingly—refusing to grow up, sometimes delaying adulthood into their late twenties or even into their thirties. The number of so-called boomerangs—adult children between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four who move back home—is up by 50 percent since 1970.98According to the census, 56 percent of men and 43 percent of “adults” between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four continue to live with one or more parent. Even more continue to rely on their parents’ checkbooks well past the age when grown-ups were once expected to pay their own way.99

But however long you hang out at your parents’ house, sooner or later it will come to an end. Eventually, you’ll have to move your stuff out and make your own bed.

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It used to be that kids couldn’t wait to get out of the house, get their own place, and experience the freedom and pride of self-sufficiency and self-reliance. But that has changed: for several years now, social scientists have tried to figure out why young people are delaying adulthood.

So many young people are lingering in this netherworld between adolescence and independence that demographers have had to change the definition of adulthood itself. Writing in a publication of the American Sociological Association in 2004, a team of social scientists studying the lengthening road to adulthood concluded that “it takes much longer to make the transition to adulthood today than decades ago, and arguably longer than it has at any time in America’s history.”100

Comparing census numbers from 1960 and 2000, the social scientists found a dramatic decline in the percentage of young adults who, by age twenty or thirty, “have completed all of the traditionally-defined major adult transitions (leaving home, finishing school, becoming financially independent, getting married and having a child).” Back in 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had completed all five transitions to adult life by age thirty. By 2000, that figure had dropped to 46 percent of women and less than a third (31 percent) of men.

If researchers looked at a “more contemporary definition of adulthood”—leaving out marriage and kids—the numbers were less dramatic, but still substantial. The percentage of thirty-year-old men who had left home, were financially independent, and had completed their schooling was twelve points lower than the percentage for their counterparts in 1960. The percentage of women who were independent by the time they turned thirty was down by ten points.

The sociologists concluded that “American society will have to revise upward the ‘normal’ age of full adulthood, and develop ways to assist young people through the ever-lengthening transition.”101

That’s obviously one option. The other is to recognize that when grown-ups refuse to grow up something has gone terribly wrong and that maybe we should question the way we prepare our children for the adult world.

Occasionally, observers blame this prolonged adolescence on the economy, because it is supposedly so much tougher these days to get through school and get started in a career. Right. Tell it to the guys who kicked Hitler’s butt and used the GI Bill to get their college degrees. Somehow they managed to grow up. So did their parents, and they not only didn’t have cable television, they were probably lucky to have their own bedroom and indoor plumbing. But they grew up, and if they did live with their parents, they were probably helping to support the oldsters—not the other way around.

So the economic excuse is just that—an excuse, and a pretty lame one too. The kidults aren’t hanging around the house and letting Mom do the laundry because times are so tough; they are there because times are so easy. Home is where nobody makes any demands; and if you’ve been raised in bubble wrap, why would you want to leave it just because you’ve reached the age of majority and they let you vote?

Seriously, given their entitled lifestyles, why should they actually fly the nest? If they ever went out on their own, how could they expect to be able to drive as nice a car as they had in high school? Who would make their breakfasts? Fold their socks? Do their dishes?

One of the role models for the refuse-to-grow-up generation is a twenty-nine-year-old college student named Johnny Lechner, who has parlayed his thirteen-year-long stay in school into a sort of celebrity as King of the Slackers. He’s been written up nationally, appeared on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America, The Late Show with David Letterman, and Inside Edition, and has cut endorsement deals with an energy-drink company and National Lampoon.

“His bedroom wall,” reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “is covered with photos of fraternity parties, Halloween celebrations and spring break romps.”102 Lechner’s endless stay in school inspired the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents to adopt a rule that doubles full-time tuition for students who exceed 165 credits, or amass 30 more credits than their degree requires. By the end of the 2005–2006 school year, Lechner had amassed around 250 credits, so the slacker tax is widely dubbed “the Johnny Lechner Rule” throughout the university.

Lechner not only offers no apologies, he’s actually proud of his status: “I have 18-, 19- and 20-year-old girls throwing themselves at me in bars.” Notes the newspaper: “It’s not just the girls. Grocery store clerks recognize his name. He has a following of older male students on campus who seek to emulate him.”

A celebrity among grocery clerks. Can it get any better than that? Maybe not. Johnny Lechner may have peaked, and that’s the problem.

Many students apparently regard the aging Lechner as a loser, and patience with his schtick is running thin. A twenty-six-year-old slacker can be charming; a thirty-something undergrad who hangs out at parties is borderline creepy. “It’s getting old,” says the editor of the student newspaper. “For the sanity of the rest of the campus, we want him to get out of here.”

On some level Lechner gets this: he has a Web site, lots of publicity every time he fails to graduate, and his God-like status among grocery-store employees. In other words, he knows he has found his niche. Once he graduates, it all ends—he loses his edge and his angle: he’s just another aging loser who hasn’t managed to acquire any special skills and whose only accomplishment is a failure to get on with his life.

At least he has a lot of company. J. T. O’Donnell, a Generation Y career coach, says Lechner’s failure to grow up has become so widespread, she’s given it a name: “On-Set Career Crisis.” This syndrome seems to afflict an awful lot of the spoiled, entitled, privileged kids whose expectations make the transition to being on their own so traumatic.103

“The on-demand, instant-gratification generation has been coaxed into desired behaviors using all sorts of bribes,” she says. “Presents, praise, stickers, grades; you name it, this generation is used to being given an incentive to do what’s expected of them.”

So what’s the incentive to grow up, get a job, and move out, other than having someone kick you in the pants if you don’t?

How about avoiding the disgrace of living in your childhood bedroom at age thirty-five and being regarded as an aging loser and a pathetic momma’s boy? That’s not incentive enough?

In any case, moving home only postpones the inevitable: Adulthood and responsibility are lurking out there, biding their time. You can slack, but you can’t hide forever.