The Milestones of Family Life
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September 5, 2024Last month, in the Johnson household, I experienced the joy and the sorrow of taking our fourth and youngest child, Trinity, to college. It is, as I was warned by older and wiser parents, a bittersweet experience.
It’s certainly a source of pride and joy to see our once helpless infants grow-up and become their own people, taking the necessary steps toward independence. College, gives emerging adults the opportunity to briefly delay adult responsibilities while they get an education and learn a profession. This can also be an important period for them to take ownership of their faith and become closer to God. At least that’s what I pray for.
College is not the only way to prepare young people for the milestone of independence in the real world. One woman I knew about 12 years ago shared what she was doing at the time to help her daughter after high school. Since the young lady didn’t want to go to college, this mom was helping her daughter polish-up her resume, find a job, and an affordable place to live. Clearly, this mom had a strong aversion to video-playing, refrigerator raiding, couch potatoes. Encouraging apprenticeships in the trades or military service have been other ways families we’ve known, have helped their young people become financially independent.
Becoming financially self-sufficient is something both young adults and their parents want, but it’s something that is proving to be more difficult to achieve. Some people describe young adult’s rejection of or inability to be self-sufficient as “failure to launch”. For years it has been seen as mostly an issue plaguing young men, but it appears that by default, it’s affecting a large percentage of young women now too.
According to the US Census Bureau- Current Population Survey, in 2023, 58.2% of men (18-24) were living with their parents. The number for women in the same age bracket is 54.6%. In 1960, 52.4 % of men and 34.9% of women between these ages still lived with their parents.
Perhaps the more eyebrow raising numbers can be found in the 25-34 year olds demographic. In 2023, nearly 20% of men were still living with their parents, compared to 12.3% of women. In 1960, when the marriage rate for people over 18 was 72%, only 10.9% of men and 7.4% of women still lived at home. Clearly, the majority of the 18+ crowd were on their own and forming their own families and didn’t need to live with their parents.
Psychologists have developed for themselves an impressive list of possible causes for this failure to launch “syndrome”, from depression and social anxiety, to coddling from parents. Economists blame unfavorable economic conditions. While these factors surely have a role to play, they seem more like symptoms than an actual cause. From a Catholic perspective, your 30-year-old parked on the couch “gaming” with Cheetos-dust on his beard is probably having an identity crisis. An identity crisis rooted in a spiritual crisis.
Writer John Clark, of the Magis Center, shined a light on the topic in his article “The Reluctance of Males to Become Men (magiscenter.com). In it, Clark points to the hopelessness and nihilism that abounds in our popular culture and the detrimental effects this is having on young people.
“Man’s ultimate purpose is the attainment of Heaven through faith, grace, and virtue, but society increasingly denies and mocks this notion...Nihilism is what society is offering its youth,” Clark writes.
For decades now, young men have been barraged by awful and degrading and yes, diabolical messages that have slowly robbed them of their inherent masculine identity as beloved sons of God. Everywhere you turn, male bashing is unrelenting. The beauty and dignity of man comes from being uniquely molded by the hand of our Creator, claimed for God by Holy Baptism, and redeemed by Jesus salvific work on the cross. Men have Jesus himself to look to for strength.
Women have been slowly robbed of their inherent feminine identity as beloved daughters of God too. The message to women from our hypersexualized culture is that women are only objects to be used for sexual pleasure. The diabolical messages women hear is that men are worthless, and marriage and motherhood is bondage. Women are beautifully and uniquely created by God, are claimed for God by Holy Baptism, and redeemed by Jesus’ sacrificial gift on the Cross.
It's my observation that "failure to launch" is primarily a spiritual malady and only spiritual remedies will cure it. Helping our young adults, men and women, hold on to or reclaim their faith is imperative is we are going to rebuild men's identity and give confidence to women that men are good and necessary for God's plan for marriage and family. As young adults they can do this by embracing their Baptism, making prayers of deliverance, the Holy Rosary, and blessings a part of their day. Frequent Confession, Mass, Holy Communion, and sacramentals are the most powerful medicines needed to address this problem.
So far, our older daughters are finding their way, and we hope our youngest will likewise do well after her college years. Upon returning from the aforementioned college drop off trip, my husband commented how strange it felt to not have to do the usual back to school things. A milestone for us… after 25 years of K-12 school, no filling out back to school forms, and no more school fundraisers. There is a God.
Sources:
Historical Living Arrangements of Adults (census.gov)
The Reluctance Of Males To Become Men: Failure to Launch (magiscenter.com)
Barely Half of U.S. Adults Are Married – A Record Low | Pew Research Center
