The "Failure to Launch"
Epidemic

In pursuit of parenting perfection, are adults emotionally stunting children?

One of the most significant developments in America today is the failure of millions of young people—even those fully employed—to fully launch into adult life. November, for example, brought a report that 45 percent of young adults in New Jersey between the ages 18 and 34 now live with their parents—even though they are employed. Failure-to-launch is the collective name for the difficulties so many young people today are having in assuming the self-sufficiency and responsibilities of adulthood, and it is a rapidly growing problem.

Sometimes anthropology is the best lens for looking at the complexities of contemporary American youth. David Lancy, professor emeritus at Utah State University, is the author of The Anthropology of Childhood, a book The New York Times has cited as the best parenting book one could read, even though it is not remotely like the standard book of advice for new parents, which invariably catalogues everything they need to be worrying about.

One thing Lancy is worried about is failure-to-launch. The symptoms, he insists, first appear in infancy and grow more virulent over childhood. Here is the edited transcript of a recent conversation we had on the topic.

HEM: You are perhaps the world’s leading expert on how children become competent adults. Do you feel like a visitor from Mars or a salmon swimming upstream?

DL: Well, yes. The first epiphany I had was when I was doing my doctoral research in a remote village in Liberia and noticed that kids are treated with what I came to call benign neglect. They're pretty much free to roam, and when they reach a certain age, they do chores, generally willingly, in fact eagerly. There is a seamless transition from make-believe play, when you're pretending to cook or bring water or firewood, to actually doing it. It’s on a small scale and nobody expects too much of you, and gradually you work your way into that regular job every morning. That’s so different from what the world thinks childhood is all about. I coined the term neontocracy to capture the profound differences: In our society kids are on top and in the societies that I studied they're on the bottom. It turns out that in most of the world, kids are on the bottom. Somewhere along the way, kids' needs and desires took precedence here, and I think things have gone downhill from there.

HEM: What do you mean by downhill?

DL: Putting children and their needs first is dysfunctional and irrational. Adults are the breadwinners; they’re creating and running the homes, gathering the food or the money to buy the food. They're far more important to the overall well being of the family than the children are. To put children first is bound to cause stress. You're doing everything to make your children happy and fulfill their needs and encourage them, but you still feel guilty because you really don't like playing with your children, and they sense that. In fact, the children won't be harmed if you don't play with them. But the parent is placed in the difficult situation of making a choice in favor of the child but which may be a bad choice that raises the parent's stress level, which in turns raises the stress level for the whole family, which is not good for kids. You get into a vicious circle.

HEM: Is putting kids first also a recipe for narcissism?

DL: It’s a recipe for failure-to-launch. There are threads that you can trace from infancy to early childhood that lead to poor outcomes. As you have reported, even the kids who are academic or athletic stars are so screwed up psychologically that their futures are impaired anyway. To me that stems from the same basic misunderstanding, willful misunderstanding, of how children would develop without all the attention.

HEM: Willful misunderstanding?

DL: Parents say, “well I really know better, I shouldn't do this with my kids but all the other parents are doing it.” It’s making what you know is probably not a very good decision on behalf of your child. Food and diet issues; acquiescing; giving in to peer pressure. We're allowing children to be influenced by peer pressure at younger and younger ages. In the 1950s, peer pressure wasn’t a significant issue until children were in their mid to late teens; now we've got to talk about it in kindergarten.

HEM: One of the things that got me onto the topic of contemporary parenting, and specifically the counterproductive effects of overparenting, was noticing the dramatic decline in the mental health of college students in 2002. My kids had recently graduated college and their cohort didn't even know where the campus mental health center was. Suddenly, a few years later, everyone is flocking there. I also began noticing a huge judgmentalism on the part of parents. Where did this come from?

DL: One argument you might make is that worshipping your children is a new religion. Somebody ratting on a mother who leaves a perfectly competent child unattended in a playground for a few minutes is analogous to condemning the sinner, looking for transgressions against the creed. It's the equivalent of saying “you're not worthy to belong to our congregation.” The mommy wars for years have been about that. If you're a true believer you've got to homeschool your kids; you’ve got to be 24/7. In the 1970s Benjamin Spock was saying, lighten up, take it easy. At some point we took a 180-degree turn.

HEM: Why?

DL: I am not entirely satisfied with the argument that the critical change is much smaller families later in life.

One of the most significant developments in America today is the failure of millions of young people—even those fully employed—to fully launch into adult life. November, for example, brought a report that 45 percent of young adults in New Jersey between the ages 18 and 34 now live with their parents—even though they are employed. Failure-to-launch is the collective name for the difficulties so many young people today are having in assuming the self-sufficiency and responsibilities of adulthood, and it is a rapidly growing problem.

Sometimes anthropology is the best lens for looking at the complexities of contemporary American youth. David Lancy, professor emeritus at Utah State University, is the author of The Anthropology of Childhood, a book The New York Times has cited as the best parenting book one could read, even though it is not remotely like the standard book of advice for new parents, which invariably catalogues everything they need to be worrying about.

One thing Lancy is worried about is failure-to-launch. The symptoms, he insists, first appear in infancy and grow more virulent over childhood. Here is the edited transcript of a recent conversation we had on the topic.

HEM: You are perhaps the world’s leading expert on how children become competent adults. Do you feel like a visitor from Mars or a salmon swimming upstream?

DL: Well, yes. The first epiphany I had was when I was doing my doctoral research in a remote village in Liberia and noticed that kids are treated with what I came to call benign neglect. They're pretty much free to roam, and when they reach a certain age, they do chores, generally willingly, in fact eagerly. There is a seamless transition from make-believe play, when you're pretending to cook or bring water or firewood, to actually doing it. It’s on a small scale and nobody expects too much of you, and gradually you work your way into that regular job every morning. That’s so different from what the world thinks childhood is all about. I coined the term neontocracy to capture the profound differences: In our society kids are on top and in the societies that I studied they're on the bottom. It turns out that in most of the world, kids are on the bottom. Somewhere along the way, kids' needs and desires took precedence here, and I think things have gone downhill from there.

HEM: What do you mean by downhill?

DL: Putting children and their needs first is dysfunctional and irrational. Adults are the breadwinners; they’re creating and running the homes, gathering the food or the money to buy the food. They're far more important to the overall well being of the family than the children are. To put children first is bound to cause stress. You're doing everything to make your children happy and fulfill their needs and encourage them, but you still feel guilty because you really don't like playing with your children, and they sense that. In fact, the children won't be harmed if you don't play with them. But the parent is placed in the difficult situation of making a choice in favor of the child but which may be a bad choice that raises the parent's stress level, which in turns raises the stress level for the whole family, which is not good for kids. You get into a vicious circle.

HEM: Is putting kids first also a recipe for narcissism?

DL: It’s a recipe for failure-to-launch. There are threads that you can trace from infancy to early childhood that lead to poor outcomes. As you have reported, even the kids who are academic or athletic stars are so screwed up psychologically that their futures are impaired anyway. To me that stems from the same basic misunderstanding, willful misunderstanding, of how children would develop without all the attention.

HEM: Willful misunderstanding?

DL: Parents say, “well I really know better, I shouldn't do this with my kids but all the other parents are doing it.” It’s making what you know is probably not a very good decision on behalf of your child. Food and diet issues; acquiescing; giving in to peer pressure. We're allowing children to be influenced by peer pressure at younger and younger ages. In the 1950s, peer pressure wasn’t a significant issue until children were in their mid to late teens; now we've got to talk about it in kindergarten.

HEM: One of the things that got me onto the topic of contemporary parenting, and specifically the counterproductive effects of overparenting, was noticing the dramatic decline in the mental health of college students in 2002. My kids had recently graduated college and their cohort didn't even know where the campus mental health center was. Suddenly, a few years later, everyone is flocking there. I also began noticing a huge judgmentalism on the part of parents. Where did this come from?

DL: One argument you might make is that worshipping your children is a new religion. Somebody ratting on a mother who leaves a perfectly competent child unattended in a playground for a few minutes is analogous to condemning the sinner, looking for transgressions against the creed. It's the equivalent of saying “you're not worthy to belong to our congregation.” The mommy wars for years have been about that. If you're a true believer you've got to homeschool your kids; you’ve got to be 24/7. In the 1970s Benjamin Spock was saying, lighten up, take it easy. At some point we took a 180-degree turn.

HEM: Why?

DL: I am not entirely satisfied with the argument that the critical change is much smaller families later in life.

HEM: Neither am I. I believe that parents also began noticing that the world is changing, became anxious about the success of their children in the new globalized economy, and have been responding in ways that are counterproductive even if they feel intuitively right—they began pushing their children to succeed, typically by hovering over them and taking all the play out of childhood, and they began directly transmitting their anxieties to their kids.

DL: Children are no longer a biological phenomenon. There's a total disconnect between sex and pregnancy, having a child. Money comes into it. Can we afford a child? Having fewer children and having them much later means the investment will be much greater. They have to be perfect. You don’t have any more chances. It's got to fulfill every wish and need you ever had as a parent and as your legacy to the future. It makes people desperate to know what the right way is of doing things and to seek social comfort. Mommy blogging is all about finding your sect, a group of like-minded people so that you can feel comfortable about the way you do things. I feel sorry for parents today. They're worrying too much about their kids and not having enough fun.

HEM: What are the consequences besides failure-to-launch?