Pushing someone out of the nest takes as much love as trying to keep them there. It’s easier for a parent who is an authority figure. However, when parent-child relationships have a friendship component, tough love is not an acceptable practice – as is putting a parent in an old age home.

If a child is taking advantage of their parents, it’s an unspoken abuse and an unfortunate existence for all involved. However, it should also be noted that there are valid arguments for parents and adult children to live together – especially when tables turn and aging parents need emotional and sometimes financial support. Parents may own the home, but may also be suffering diminishing income. It may not be safe for them to live alone given their safety and health issues. They may not be able to deal with the lonliness, discrimination and rejection associated with old age. In these cases, an adult child sacrifices a great deal – postponing their own life while optimizing time with the unconditional, doubtless love of a parent. At the same time, their ability to trust in other types of relationships becomes compromised as they observe other types of relationships fail. If it translates into fear, it could result in the very thing they tried to protect their parents from.

Bottome line – life isn’t always that simple.

In the Far Eastern/Oriental mindset, families stick together. Certainly at least until marriage. My brother was 32 before he even looked at moving out – and even then my parents offered to let them (he was married by then) stay. You understand, when the woman marries, she marries into her husband’s family. Which is to say, she becomes the dutiful daughter-in-law whose job it is to take care of the aged folk.

This is why the Biblical injunction to shift your ass out of the parental home once you hitch up is so difficult for us. The only time you see folk leave home are (a) job offer/tertiary education overseas/outstation (b) marriage. And sometimes not even then.

Of course, this is less true now than it was in the past. The eldest son is still expected to inherit the family home, and so he at least might stay with the old folks.

This has little to do with slacker males. Yes, if I stayed on my own I do my laundry, clean house, cook etc. I barely see my folks as it is (breakfast and dinner is about it and maybe weekends). I pull down a regulay income and all too.

All that said, to see this happen in the Western context, where you boot your sprogs out at 18, is mildly disturbing…

The present political climate would not consider the slacker to be an endangered species, so there would be no effort to save him.

Seems like the alpha males would benefit considerably from the slacker’s lifestyle, since they would have a bigger pool of females to choose and sample.

I believe the commenter said that mamas’ expectations differ around the world is dead on. My mother, thoroughly American, wouldn’t dream of doing her child’s mailed-over laundry. She would leave it sitting there, until her grown son comes and gets it done his damn self like she taught him to. American mothers, well mine anyway, teach their children how to look after themselves, so that when they’re older they are prepared to be adults.

Women having more options means they don’t have to put up with a man who refuses to act like a man. Sorry if being a man is such a chore, but women who tolerate childish men are the problem because they encourage more of them. The insight about the path of least resistance is exactly correct. On my job I have seen it happen where a woman marries a man like this: lives in his mother’s basement, plays games all day, and has no job nor is interested in having one. The women assume the men will magically stop being children, but they don’t. They don’t need to. Every need is met by her or their mothers, and they can continue to behave like overgrown boys.

If good women refused to look twice at them they might actually have to get a job and learn to look after themselves so they can interact with their wives on equal footing and not as a child. But instead they get what they need being lazy and childish and expecting to leech off of their wives. If we’re changing the definition of manhood to encompass such mentality and behavior then why even keep the word “man”? Just call ‘em all “boys” from now on. Of course, I don’t see the women hurting-they can always find men from elsewhere. But the men in this scenario will never have families. Unless family has been devalued more than I thought it has been, I fail to see how they’ve “won” here.

I don’t know exactly what Italians have to do to encourage men to embrace manhood over boyhood, but insisting the women lower their standards is probably another example of magical thinking. Not saying there aren’t any who don’t have low/no standards, but apparently there aren’t enough of them in Italy; and their existence is on the line here.

It’s the responsibility of the parents, both, to mold this human being into something productive. Apparently Italian mothers seek the path of least resistance, probably thinking “who wants to argue/have him make a mess of his clothes/face rejection and disappointment, so they coddle their sons. Throwing money at these big babies won’t help either. what will help is parenting classes for Italian parents.

As to Jim Rockford’s idea that one day the tides will have to be turned back on womens advancements toward autonomy, and thrust us back into the stone age? That, sir, ain’t gonna happen. That time has long gone. I really don’t think it has anything to do with the feminization of men as much as it has to do with men not wanting to play anymore.

Jim Rockford’s Alpha Male theory is right but there’s other variables at work here. The feminization of society is giving women power and choices and taking them away from men, in fact breeding them out of men. Tradionally, a man looks for a woman like his mother — maternal, good cook, good homemaker. Women are by and large no longer interested in these and certainly not in relation to “taking care of” a man. Mama looks awfully good by comparison with the totally self-absorbed, ambitious, male-disparaging women of today.

And due to the feminization of our culture, many men have lost any incentive to contribute to society through hard work, competition, entrepreneurship, and childbearing. Ultimately, they are weeding their own less-than-Alpha Male genes out of the gene pool.

We’ve been going through a social revolution for well over a generation now and it’s becoming a genetic revolution now as well. A few generations down the road it’s possible there will be a new dynamic of strong, ambitious women and men, both, who stand on a far more equal footing with each other. The fallout on the way to that may be exactly what we are experiencing now with the boomer generation and its progeny.

OTOH I see “Brave New World” down the road, too, with genetic engineering, and pregnancy and childbirth no longer associated with the female body. I can see virtually all women of means refusing to have children the traditional way (I decided at 14 never to have children, when I was part of the early feminist movement). Men refusing to grow up and have families will hasten this change. What this bodes for the human race, one can only imagine.

I lived in Italy for a couple of years and spend time there every year. Property prices and rents are very hig in relation to one of the lowest average incomes in Europe.

Many guys I know don’t have an option but stay at home.

A tax break of less than a month’s rent for people who don’t eran much anyway is just a misguided idiocy.

Simple. World wide, many men have figured out that marriage and family is not going to happen.

When women have their own income, security, and better economic positions, they are no longer constrained in choices with regard to men. No longer required to choose reliability, dependability, loyalty as critical attributes of men.

Instead, women who have economic security can choose what they really desire: the most high-status, socially dominant, Alpha male. Usually though not always also the richest.

These mama’s boys understand: in the new competition for women, they won’t ever succeed. They won’t have a family of their own, as women are choosing “good genes” i.e. socially dominant Alpha Males as fathers for their children and don’t need or expect the fathers to marry them.

Among inner-city Black women, the illegitimacy rate is 90%. It is 70% among Black Women nationwide. You see the same dynamic among Black men. They understand a few men will be fathering the children of most of the women. Who often might have three children each with different fathers. To a lesser extent (Blacks are America’s “canary in the coal mine” socially) the same effect is seen in the White community, with greater frequency among poor whites and less among wealthy/educated whites.

Yeah I’m not surprised by this mama’s boy epidemic. It doesn’t help that the average man in his thirties has less income (where it matters) than his father in 1970. Who could buy a house where he cannot. But even if home ownership were in reach of most men in their late twenties and early thirties (it’s not, merely apartment living) it would not change the fundamental driver of mama’s boys.

Women’s choices. Women unconstrained by economic insecurity will choose socially dominant Alpha males and are willing to share them. Women are uninterested in the main in marriage, certainly to non-dominant men. Look at what many of these men are saying. They are staying with their parents because it’s the only AFFECTION they get.

What happens when their parents die as they will?

You’ll have a bunch of men in their forties or fifties, unconstrained by any human affection, with IMHO highly negative views of women, and no prospect of ever changing.

I would bet highly on the prospect of restrictions on women’s lives in all sorts of ways in the next ten years in Italy and elsewhere (including the US). What’s the comeback for men living alone (when their parents inevitably die)? What women will continue to not sleep with them?

[That so many men are forgoing even the hope of a live-in girlfriend with sex/intimacy on a daily basis says volumes on the absolute certainty with which these men have assessed their chances with women. Which must be considered zero. Such is the wages of de-facto polygamy.]