RPF0382-Remove_Your_Boomerang_Kids_from_Your_Financial_Teat
00:00:00.000 | Whether you're a donor, a doer, or a dedicated to learning more about research for moms,
00:00:04.880 | babies, and their families, from March of Dimes, it's ModCast, where you'll learn
00:00:08.520 | new ideas, find ways to get involved, or just be amazed.
00:00:12.000 | Move this one to the top of your playlist each and every month and join the conversation
00:00:15.460 | with the best and brightest in the field.
00:00:17.840 | Listen to ModCast, March of Dimes research podcast, today.
00:00:21.520 | I believe that as human beings, we all share some things in common.
00:00:26.760 | And one of those things that I think we all share is an appreciation for the beauty of
00:00:33.240 | mothers and their babies.
00:00:36.400 | I've always loved to watch mothers feed their babies.
00:00:39.680 | I just think there's just something really, really beautiful about it.
00:00:42.720 | Now, you can pick your favorite image.
00:00:45.640 | I like to see all kinds of different animals.
00:00:47.800 | The funniest looking ones, I think, are often deer.
00:00:50.240 | If you watch deer feed her baby fawns, because they just are so alert.
00:00:55.600 | They don't settle down and they're not domesticated.
00:00:58.160 | So the head is up and their eyes are looking around and you get the sensation that at any
00:01:02.000 | moment this deer could snap and all of a sudden that baby has got to just race off after mom.
00:01:08.320 | Goats, I think, are some of the funniest, just because the little kids are so awkward
00:01:13.480 | and gangly.
00:01:14.480 | Sheep are really cute.
00:01:17.320 | Cats are beautiful.
00:01:18.320 | Dogs are cool to watch.
00:01:19.920 | I like to watch cows, because little baby cows, they're funny.
00:01:24.640 | And I always feel like the mama cows are at some point in time going to just kick the
00:01:30.240 | baby cow to get them to stop pushing so hard when they get their head underneath and they're
00:01:34.760 | sucking on the mama's udders and they get their head under there and they're just butting
00:01:37.720 | and pushing against it.
00:01:39.360 | And so I could very happily be a rancher and thoroughly enjoy that lifestyle.
00:01:45.760 | But one image that's thoroughly etched in my mind is the image of a mother pig feeding
00:01:53.560 | her piglets.
00:01:56.440 | Just picture in your mind's eye a mother pig feeding her piglets.
00:02:02.520 | Just simply my saying those words will probably bring a relatively common picture to all of
00:02:07.920 | us.
00:02:08.920 | For me, the image that's indelibly printed on my mind comes from a James Herriot story
00:02:14.400 | that I had when I was a kid.
00:02:16.840 | My parents were shopping at Sam's Club one time when I was a kid and I would go along
00:02:20.840 | with my mom and we came across the book rack and I found this collection of James Herriot
00:02:25.460 | stories and just had beautiful pictures and I asked my mom to buy it for me and she bought
00:02:28.680 | it for me.
00:02:29.680 | I went home and devoured it.
00:02:31.240 | James Herriot, for those of you who don't know, was a British veterinarian and he was
00:02:35.960 | born in the early 1900s, died as an old man, but he wrote some really neat stories based
00:02:43.100 | upon his veterinary practice.
00:02:45.520 | And then somebody took his stories and in this case, put together a treasury of stories
00:02:50.340 | and the illustrations were beautiful.
00:02:54.160 | The book opened up with him coming out in his little car to this farm out in rural England
00:03:00.920 | where a mother cow was having a difficult birth and so he was being called out to help
00:03:06.080 | with the birth and delivery of the baby cow.
00:03:09.080 | And he comes out and it's a cold blustery day and he comes into the barn and they wind
00:03:14.820 | up going ahead and they safely deliver the baby calf and then he's looking around the
00:03:19.720 | barn and finally after the hard work is done, he can appreciate the beauty of the bucolic
00:03:25.960 | scene that's all around him.
00:03:27.240 | He's in a nice warm barn, it's clean, it's well kept, the farmer is a good farmer and
00:03:33.400 | he looks into one of the stalls in the barn and there's a mother pig lying on her side
00:03:39.000 | and of course, mother pigs often have very large litters.
00:03:42.960 | So there's eight or 10 little piglets all lined up, right next to each other.
00:03:48.760 | All feasting at their mother's belly and it's just something beautiful about that.
00:03:56.360 | I always just thought that picture is really, really beautiful.
00:04:01.720 | I think it's beautiful to watch mothers feed their babies, human mothers feed their babies.
00:04:06.640 | I love to watch my wife breastfeed our children.
00:04:09.240 | It's just something very, very special.
00:04:11.320 | She tells me it's just a special, it's a very special experience that she really treasures
00:04:17.960 | about being a mother.
00:04:19.360 | She really loves it.
00:04:20.360 | It's a bonding time, it's something that goes very, very deep for her.
00:04:24.440 | And so I just like to see that, it's just something beautiful about that.
00:04:29.360 | But there are times at which that scene, that idea of a baby suckling at its mother's breast
00:04:38.480 | is not so pretty.
00:04:40.520 | Think to that image of the pig and now all of a sudden, let's say that instead of these
00:04:46.920 | cute tiny little pink piglets all lined up, suckling at the teats of their mother, now
00:04:52.320 | all of a sudden they're not little piglets.
00:04:54.320 | Rather it's 150 or 200 pound pig and there are a bunch of them all fighting to get their
00:05:01.520 | snout in there to get some milk.
00:05:05.600 | Something a little disgusting about that, isn't there?
00:05:08.200 | You take this beautiful image and all of a sudden just by changing the age of the babies,
00:05:15.720 | that image can be transformed from something beautiful into something a little bit revolting.
00:05:22.120 | There was a Time Magazine cover a few years ago which featured on its cover a picture
00:05:27.840 | of a mother and her child.
00:05:31.740 | Her child was feeding at her breast.
00:05:35.240 | But instead of the child being a baby, the child was a three-year-old little boy who
00:05:38.760 | was standing on a stool and she was standing upright.
00:05:41.900 | She had one breast exposed and the child was standing there on a stool next to her with
00:05:45.800 | his mouth on her nipple breastfeeding at three years old.
00:05:50.580 | Now the cover was quite provocative.
00:05:52.720 | I don't know that the subject was all that provocative.
00:05:55.480 | The subject of the article was about attachment parenting which is very popular especially
00:06:00.980 | in crunchy parenting circles, attachment parenting for those of you who are unfamiliar with the
00:06:05.280 | ideas.
00:06:06.280 | It's got basically three tenets, all of which are designed to try to build a closer relationship
00:06:11.100 | between mothers and babies.
00:06:12.820 | One is extended breastfeeding, so breastfeeding their baby not weaning your baby at one but
00:06:17.940 | continuing on to two or three or some people longer than that, two or three, four years
00:06:22.300 | old.
00:06:23.360 | Extended breastfeeding, baby wearing is another tenet of attachment parenting where in order
00:06:27.820 | to stimulate more of a connection between the mother and the child, the mother wears
00:06:32.320 | the baby or the father wears the baby in a sling or carrier of some kind.
00:06:37.260 | And the third tenet I believe is co-sleeping which is the idea that the mother and the
00:06:42.780 | child sleep together either physically in the same bed if possible or very, very close
00:06:48.620 | so as to build a deeper bond between the mother and the child.
00:06:52.420 | I'm sure there's more to it than that but that's how I identify attachment parenting
00:06:56.500 | in my mind as far as those three major tenets.
00:06:58.780 | And that was what the Times article was about.
00:07:00.860 | But the picture caused no small controversy because it questioned that normal mother-baby
00:07:10.620 | relationship.
00:07:12.700 | And instead of having a baby at the mother's breast, there was a little boy, a three-year-old
00:07:18.900 | little boy.
00:07:21.340 | Now I have no desire to wade into the attachment parenting question or controversy.
00:07:28.220 | So let me not put the picture as a three-year-old.
00:07:33.140 | Now let's say that instead of a three-year-old son, you have a 20-year-old son doing the
00:07:40.160 | same thing.
00:07:43.820 | I don't think anybody would claim that there's anything appropriate about the idea of a 20-year-old
00:07:49.460 | boy, excuse me, 20-year-old man suckling at his mother's breast.
00:07:58.420 | I want to use these metaphors to paint a picture in your head while I tackle the subject of
00:08:04.620 | boomerang kids.
00:08:07.980 | And my intention with today's show is to help those of you who have boomerang kids in your
00:08:14.240 | house to know how to get them out.
00:08:20.020 | And number two, those of you who have young kids, to know how to keep them from becoming
00:08:26.060 | boomerang kids.
00:08:30.140 | Last week on my phone, I flipped over to the Apple News Feed and the iPhone Apple News
00:08:35.320 | Feed and I saw a story there called "The Boomerang Kids Won't Leave" from the New York Times.
00:08:39.900 | Sorry, it's official.
00:08:40.900 | "The Boomerang Kids Won't Leave" from the New York Times.
00:08:43.420 | So I quickly looked at it because that's the kind of thing that is appropriate for an appropriate
00:08:47.300 | topic for radical personal finance.
00:08:49.540 | And I copied it out.
00:08:50.540 | I thought while I was doing the majority of the show prep that this was a recent article.
00:08:53.940 | Then I realized when looking at the article further and doing my due diligence on its
00:08:58.700 | citation that it's actually from 2014.
00:09:01.300 | So why it showed up in the Apple News Feed, I simply don't know.
00:09:04.380 | But the article is all about the boomerang kids and how many young men and women are
00:09:12.040 | returning home to live with their parents.
00:09:14.060 | Let me just read you a couple of excerpts from this article to set the stage.
00:09:22.820 | Annie Kassinas has two different ways of explaining why at age 27 she still lives with her mom.
00:09:28.300 | In the first version, the optimistic one, she says that she is doing the sensible thing
00:09:32.060 | by living rent free as she plans her next career move.
00:09:35.580 | After graduating from Loyola University Chicago, Kassinas struggled to support herself in the
00:09:40.500 | midst of the recession, working a series of unsatisfying jobs, selling ads at the soon
00:09:45.260 | to be bankrupt Sun Times, bagging groceries at Whole Foods, bartending in order to pay
00:09:49.280 | down her student loans.
00:09:50.900 | But she inevitably grew frustrated with each job and found herself stuck in one financial
00:09:54.620 | mess after another.
00:09:56.400 | Now that she's back in her high school bedroom, perhaps she can finally focus on her long-term
00:10:01.020 | goals.
00:10:02.340 | But in the second version, the bleaker one, Kassinas admits that she fears that her mom's
00:10:07.320 | house in Downers Grove, Illinois, half an hour west of the city, has become a crutch.
00:10:12.080 | She has been living in that old bedroom for four years and is nowhere closer to figuring
00:10:16.940 | out what she's going to do with her career.
00:10:19.540 | "Everyone tells me to just pick something," she says, "but I don't know what to pick."
00:10:25.400 | One in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents.
00:10:36.220 | And 60% of all young adults receive financial support from them.
00:10:47.380 | To emphasize that, one in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with
00:10:52.060 | his or her parents.
00:10:54.280 | And 60% of all young adults receive financial support from them.
00:11:00.020 | That's a significant increase from a generation ago, when only one in 10 young adults moved
00:11:04.760 | back home and few received financial support.
00:11:10.680 | The article goes on and is fairly lengthy.
00:11:13.060 | It's worth reading.
00:11:14.060 | In a previous version of this recording, I read the entire article and I realized that
00:11:18.320 | it just slowed down the pace so much, so I'm only just reading that short excerpt here
00:11:22.400 | in today's show.
00:11:23.700 | But I will link to it in the show notes.
00:11:25.100 | And it's worth reading, because it does go through and talks about some of the benefits
00:11:28.440 | and disadvantages of boomerang kids and of what they're doing and how they're approaching
00:11:35.180 | it.
00:11:36.180 | And by the way, if you hear banging in the background, my mic probably won't pick it
00:11:39.300 | up.
00:11:40.300 | But if you do hear banging in the background, it's due to South Florida shutting down and
00:11:43.980 | all my neighbors are putting up their hurricane shutters and boarding up their houses and
00:11:47.080 | whatnot in preparation for Hurricane Matthew.
00:11:49.500 | And I'm recording this show in hopes of publishing it and getting everything out before we potentially
00:11:54.600 | lose power.
00:11:55.780 | So that's the banging in the background for today's show.
00:12:00.020 | The reason I started with that image though is I think that it's a good way for us to
00:12:07.300 | picture children and how we should work with children.
00:12:14.220 | Now I want to start with my presupposition.
00:12:17.780 | I define the presence of a boomerang kid in the way that it's pictured here, where 60%
00:12:26.540 | of young adults, and they did not cite their sources.
00:12:29.900 | I have not reviewed the data to understand how that data was collected, what that's measuring,
00:12:37.540 | any of the background.
00:12:38.540 | So I'm just simply going based upon that.
00:12:40.440 | So my data here is very thin.
00:12:42.540 | Just reading this New York Times article and assuming that it's well sourced.
00:12:45.780 | But again, I don't know the definition.
00:12:47.280 | But I don't think it's direction all that wrong.
00:12:49.500 | But one in five young adults, 20s and 30s living at home with their parents and then
00:12:53.460 | 60% of young adults receiving financial support.
00:12:57.980 | So if I define a boomerang kid as a child who has returned home because of their own
00:13:04.740 | financial instability, I define that as an ugly thing.
00:13:12.100 | And I'm not saying that there's not a place for generations to work together.
00:13:17.680 | What I am saying is in the same way that the picture of a mother pig with her children
00:13:25.240 | is beautiful when those children are small and they're receiving the breast milk when
00:13:29.720 | they're small, but it's very ugly if those pigs were big.
00:13:36.520 | It's the same corollary in humans that is beautiful when we as mothers and fathers support
00:13:44.520 | our children when they are young.
00:13:46.040 | That's what we should do.
00:13:47.560 | But if our children are not independent and able to stand on their own, then it turns
00:13:51.680 | into something that's not quite so beautiful.
00:13:55.520 | However, even though I hold that opinion, I do not believe that it's in any way problematic
00:14:03.700 | or disadvantageous or something not to be desired for adult children to live in a home
00:14:10.520 | with their parents.
00:14:12.980 | And I want to give you a different metaphor to pull this out, sticking with the metaphor
00:14:18.280 | of animals.
00:14:19.960 | So in the first metaphor, you have a mother nursing her young babies.
00:14:26.840 | And if those young babies grow up, grow up, grow up, grow up and continue to be nursing
00:14:30.540 | at their mother's breast, that's ugly.
00:14:33.340 | But if those babies grow up and become active members, useful members of the herd, even
00:14:40.840 | though the mother and the babies might live within the same tribe or within the same herd,
00:14:45.040 | depending on what type of animal we're talking about here, that can be something really beautiful.
00:14:51.900 | That can be something really useful.
00:14:54.480 | I love to see elephants on nature films, nature documentaries.
00:14:58.420 | I think elephants are cool.
00:15:00.000 | I think they're cool because they're smart, but they're nearsighted and I share those
00:15:04.480 | characteristics with an elephant.
00:15:06.480 | I'm practically blind without glasses, but I like to think I at least can understand
00:15:11.180 | a few things about life.
00:15:12.480 | Although, the older I get, the more I question that sometimes.
00:15:15.460 | But elephants, as my understanding, work very well in a herd.
00:15:18.480 | The babies grow up and then they are brought into the herd.
00:15:22.200 | And if you've ever seen those pictures of the baby elephant crossing the river in Africa
00:15:26.280 | and the muddy bank that it can't get up and the big elephant reaching down its trunk and
00:15:30.200 | pushing up from the back or pulling the elephant up, that's the image of a herd working together.
00:15:38.400 | It's not the relationship of a parasite.
00:15:43.320 | It's the relationship of a community.
00:15:48.600 | Parasitic relationships are ugly.
00:15:51.420 | Community relationships are beautiful.
00:15:53.680 | Now, I think community relationships can look different for different people depending on
00:15:57.840 | the nature and makeup of a particular community, obviously.
00:16:02.680 | So I have no intention of prescribing a particular way that you and your relationship with your
00:16:08.920 | children should or should not look.
00:16:13.880 | But I think it should look like a community and not like a parasite relationship.
00:16:18.920 | Now sticking with the baby metaphor, it's important to note that there are transitions
00:16:22.560 | and there are stages of parenting.
00:16:27.040 | And it's beautiful to support a small baby.
00:16:35.240 | Babies need the support of their parents.
00:16:39.620 | Babies and young children need the support of their parents.
00:16:43.160 | Perhaps one of those things that just strikes us the hardest is when we come across baby
00:16:46.960 | animals in the wild who've been either abandoned or rejected by their parents, whether that's
00:16:52.520 | a bird that fell out of its nest or whether that's – I used to raise rabbits and sometimes
00:16:57.840 | you'd find the little rabbits, little kits that have been pushed out of their nest and
00:17:02.760 | their mother rejected them for some reason.
00:17:05.320 | So it's so heartbreaking when people interact with animals in the wild and then they – because
00:17:11.080 | the baby animal is tainted with human scent and it goes back to its mother and its mother
00:17:15.360 | rejects that animal.
00:17:16.880 | There's something really heartbreaking about that.
00:17:20.620 | And we know instinctively and intuitively that babies – baby humans deserve our protection
00:17:26.680 | just like baby animals do.
00:17:30.680 | A normal healthy parent will always prioritize the well-being and the good of their child
00:17:38.720 | above and beyond their own well-being.
00:17:41.220 | We know that there's something incredibly ugly about a parent who tramples upon their
00:17:46.280 | child so that they can get ahead.
00:17:50.520 | So we know that babies need care.
00:17:52.680 | And the same thing when we look to the financial lives of our children, our children need care.
00:18:00.120 | But again, that care can't continue for too long.
00:18:04.960 | So how do you make a transition to where if you have a boomerang child, how do you help
00:18:11.420 | that child to leave?
00:18:15.720 | First and foremost, I believe that begins with recognizing that what you are doing to
00:18:20.400 | enable your child is a very ugly thing.
00:18:26.940 | If you are a father, picture your wife doing this.
00:18:30.240 | If you're a mother, picture your 25-year-old son or daughter, 30-year-old son or daughter
00:18:38.280 | walking up to you, lifting your shirt up and asking to breastfeed as an adult.
00:18:45.840 | It's a revolting concept.
00:18:50.520 | And yet that's often what we do as parents by financially supporting lazy, shiftless,
00:18:59.960 | undisciplined leeches we call our children.
00:19:06.240 | If you are financially supporting bad habits of your child, you are not helping them.
00:19:17.200 | The animals have this figured out.
00:19:18.360 | I understand, I guess it's in the eagles.
00:19:20.120 | I've read stories.
00:19:21.120 | You never know whether to believe the inspirational stories that you read.
00:19:25.640 | But I've read stories where the eagle, what, at some point starts pulling out feathers
00:19:29.680 | from the nest and tries to make the nest uncomfortable.
00:19:33.120 | If the eagle can do that, if that's true, how much more you as a parent?
00:19:41.820 | Your job as a parent is to raise your child to maturity, to where they can be an independent,
00:19:49.680 | self-sustaining, autonomous human being, aka an adult.
00:19:55.860 | And one of the most difficult things about our society is that we have taken this concept
00:20:00.720 | of childhood and we've extended it far beyond any reasonable, normal understanding of childhood.
00:20:09.160 | I was interested to see that this was even talked about in the New York Times article.
00:20:12.960 | I'll read you a paragraph on it here from about the fifth paragraph, a little lower
00:20:18.520 | down than that.
00:20:19.720 | Reading from the New York Times article, "Childhood is a fairly recent economic innovation.
00:20:23.920 | For most of recorded history, a vast majority of people began working by age four, typically
00:20:29.400 | on a farm, and were full-time by 10.
00:20:32.840 | According to James Martin, a historian at Marquette University and the editor of the
00:20:36.320 | Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, it wasn't until the 1830s, as the US economy
00:20:41.680 | began to shift from subsistence agriculture to industry and markets, that life began to
00:20:46.480 | change slowly for little kids.
00:20:48.820 | Parents were getting richer, family sizes fell, and by the 1850s, school attendance
00:20:52.800 | started to become mandatory.
00:20:54.720 | By the end of the Civil War, much of American culture had accepted the notion that children
00:20:59.000 | under 13 should be protected from economic life, and child labor laws started emerging
00:21:03.600 | around the turn of the century.
00:21:05.520 | As the country grew wealthier over the ensuing decades, childhood expanded along with it.
00:21:10.360 | Eventually, teenagers were no longer considered younger, less competent adults, but rather
00:21:15.560 | older children who should be nurtured and encouraged to explore."
00:21:20.720 | End of the quote that I'm reading.
00:21:22.040 | Now, I'm not opposed to childhood.
00:21:25.320 | Childhood is fantastic.
00:21:26.600 | Childhood is beautiful.
00:21:27.600 | And I think that when possible, we should work with our children to help them to use
00:21:32.480 | childhood to their advantage.
00:21:35.200 | Childhood should, if you read the educational experts, one thing that many of them agree
00:21:41.280 | on is that childhood should have a large amount of uninterrupted freedom to be able to explore
00:21:49.280 | and to process things and to develop unique characteristics.
00:21:54.380 | So childhood is great.
00:21:56.520 | But adults who act like children are not great.
00:22:03.080 | So here's the question.
00:22:06.520 | Is your adult child who's living with you a parasite on your life?
00:22:14.240 | Or are they a valuable member of your home making contributions to your household economy?
00:22:24.080 | The point is not where they live.
00:22:26.940 | The point is what's the nature of the relationship.
00:22:29.960 | Let's talk about option one, your child is a parasite.
00:22:35.640 | If your child, no matter the age, is a parasite on your family life, you need to work on a
00:22:41.240 | plan where you can systematically and in an appropriate way help them to mature.
00:22:50.700 | The way that you help somebody to mature is you progressively put more responsibility
00:22:55.840 | onto them as they are able and capable of bearing it.
00:23:00.800 | That means that you don't go from years and years and years of bearing with somebody and
00:23:07.700 | doing everything for them and then all of a sudden just toss them out on their ear unless
00:23:12.760 | they're violating the moral rules of your household or they are violating the authority
00:23:17.300 | in your household.
00:23:18.300 | In that case, toss them out on their ear.
00:23:20.100 | If they're going to live in your home, they need to respect the rules of your home, especially
00:23:24.940 | if they're an adult.
00:23:28.300 | But generally, that's probably not the best course of action.
00:23:31.100 | But if you recognize that your child is a parasite in your life, you need to help them
00:23:38.180 | to not be a parasite.
00:23:40.780 | You may have weaned them 25 years ago from your breast, but now you need to wean them
00:23:46.100 | from your checkbook.
00:23:48.740 | So I recommend that you start that process because the sooner you start the process,
00:23:55.020 | the better it will be for your child and for their self-confidence.
00:24:02.900 | You have a unique opportunity to hear from somebody who is right smack dab in the middle
00:24:07.020 | of this generation.
00:24:08.020 | I'm 31 years old and I have many friends who are living in the reality that this article
00:24:13.820 | talks about, the economic instability, blah, blah, blah, all the challenges and all the
00:24:17.300 | problems.
00:24:18.860 | I will tell you this, from speaking firsthand with many of my friends who are boomerang
00:24:24.460 | kids or who have been boomerang kids, your economic outpatient care is destroying their
00:24:32.860 | self-confidence and it's delaying the maturing process unnecessarily.
00:24:39.540 | It's destroying their self-confidence because they haven't figured out how to be an adult.
00:24:44.920 | They don't have the autonomy that they desire to have because they feel like they're a leech.
00:24:51.140 | None of us like to be a leech on another person.
00:24:55.420 | And so for their own good, start the process of helping them to be a leech.
00:25:00.360 | First and foremost, put household responsibility on them.
00:25:03.340 | That should probably include rent, but if the child is not yet capable of rent, they
00:25:07.500 | can work their rent off.
00:25:10.020 | So begin with some simple things.
00:25:12.140 | They can do their own laundry.
00:25:13.540 | They can do their own cooking.
00:25:15.020 | They can do the housework.
00:25:16.020 | They can do the yard work.
00:25:17.300 | Figure out what an appropriate rent is.
00:25:19.380 | Most areas of the United States, probably about $500 a month to rent a bedroom, somewhere
00:25:23.400 | in that range, and figure out $500 a month worth of activities and duties and work that
00:25:28.180 | they can do for you that will help them to be able to feel like they're actually earning
00:25:32.300 | their keep and start assigning them those tasks.
00:25:36.300 | If they don't want to do it, let them go, aka usher them out, because it's far better
00:25:43.980 | for them to face contact with the world where they can learn to make it as an independent,
00:25:49.660 | autonomous, self-sustaining human being, aka an adult, than for you to continue to have
00:25:56.780 | them suckle at your teat until they're old and wrinkled.
00:26:05.000 | So a good way to do that is start giving them responsibilities and helping them create a
00:26:09.400 | plan.
00:26:10.400 | It's also wise to put some financial pressure on them.
00:26:14.320 | Many people find that when there is financial pressure on their bank account balance, they
00:26:20.080 | can magically come up with better jobs, better work.
00:26:24.040 | There is not really a shortage of employment out there for those who are willing to work,
00:26:28.520 | but there's a tremendous shortage of employment out there right now in our economy currently
00:26:33.000 | today for those who are unwilling to work or who are unwilling to work hard.
00:26:38.680 | Hard work is good for their soul.
00:26:41.240 | And so if your child is a parasite, help them have motivation to enter into the world of
00:26:47.600 | hard work.
00:26:50.540 | You will be doing them a favor.
00:26:53.240 | Good way to do that, if you're already doing chores and things like that, a good way to
00:26:56.560 | do it is to go ahead and start charging rent.
00:26:58.480 | Give them a warning.
00:27:01.320 | Meaning one month from today or two months from today, you owe me rent of this amount.
00:27:07.320 | If your child is not at least paying you rent or a token rent, they're sucking off of your
00:27:15.920 | bank account and they feel bad about it and you feel bad about it.
00:27:20.760 | The whole idea of the boomerang generation is a very ugly idea.
00:27:25.800 | Excuse me.
00:27:28.560 | I had to pause my recording here.
00:27:30.240 | A neighbor came needing some help with the hurricane shutter.
00:27:32.600 | So and I apologize, I didn't make a note.
00:27:34.880 | So I can't continue the perfectly the train of thought here.
00:27:38.240 | So forgive the interruption.
00:27:39.240 | At least I'm getting some work done in the middle of the hurricane or in the middle of
00:27:44.200 | the preparation for the hurricane.
00:27:45.840 | So the summary here on this section of the show is this.
00:27:49.440 | If your child is not contributing to your household, you're not serving them.
00:27:56.360 | You're not helping them and you need to help them by placing responsibility onto them.
00:28:03.560 | I think you should be wise in how you do this.
00:28:06.360 | It's very easy to all of a sudden feel like, "Well, I'm just all of a sudden going to flip
00:28:11.480 | out and put a ton of responsibility on them all of a sudden."
00:28:16.360 | Well, if you haven't trained a child for responsibility, I think that would be very unwise.
00:28:20.440 | It could even be traumatic.
00:28:22.960 | Many people have all of a sudden had to face significant responsibility in their lives
00:28:27.440 | and usually it seems like they come up with a way to deal with it.
00:28:31.320 | But that experience is not always without trauma and you have no desire to inflict trauma
00:28:39.480 | on your child.
00:28:41.020 | But begin the process now of steadily moving with a vision to put responsibility onto them.
00:28:47.120 | Have a vision of perhaps a year, perhaps two, something like that where systematically,
00:28:51.760 | steadily, in a sensible way, you're going to put the appropriate amount of pressure
00:28:56.200 | on them until they are a contributing member of your household.
00:29:00.960 | If you have failed in the past at putting responsibility on them and training them to
00:29:04.440 | be responsible, you may have to start with baby steps.
00:29:07.160 | But start where you are and begin that process.
00:29:12.040 | Believe me, your child will thank you.
00:29:16.280 | Now, we need to expand the discussion just a little bit because just because your child
00:29:21.960 | is living at home does not mean that they're a leech.
00:29:27.000 | And I always see these discussions confused in articles and it was even confused in this
00:29:32.960 | article.
00:29:33.960 | For example, this article from the New York Times goes on and talks about how a lot of
00:29:38.520 | these children have high amounts of debt.
00:29:41.240 | It talks about how they're making less money, blah, blah, blah.
00:29:44.040 | It talks about how they're doing all these things.
00:29:46.440 | But then at the end, it comes in and talks about how living at home with your parents
00:29:49.640 | might help them to do a startup and start a new business.
00:29:54.880 | I think it's perfectly reasonable and even laudable as a parent that you have a desire
00:30:01.680 | to help your child.
00:30:04.400 | And I think it's perfectly reasonable and laudable that you may even help them financially.
00:30:09.260 | And helping a child financially, probably one of the healthiest ways to do that is to
00:30:14.120 | help by defraying – help them to defray some of their expenses.
00:30:17.840 | If you start giving money, that comes with its own set of baggage.
00:30:21.920 | If you start just simply giving things, that brings its own set of baggage.
00:30:25.960 | But if you give something that for you is a little bit costly but not too costly such
00:30:31.000 | as subsidized or free housing, that can be really beneficial because it can help them
00:30:36.400 | to address their budget and lower their budget in order to do something like start a business,
00:30:41.040 | in order to do something like go to college.
00:30:42.840 | That can be really beneficial and it can be really healthy.
00:30:45.560 | But what you're looking for is a sense of responsibility and an industriousness and
00:30:52.640 | a productivity on behalf of your child.
00:30:56.400 | If those things are present, then the economic aid is probably not hurtful to them.
00:31:02.880 | It's probably simply helpful.
00:31:06.960 | So look to see what is your child actually doing.
00:31:11.280 | In my own experience, I can attest to this from my own personal entrepreneurial endeavors.
00:31:17.560 | I grew up in my parents' household of course and I lived at home with my parents until
00:31:23.600 | I turned 18.
00:31:24.600 | I spent the first year of my college life living on campus.
00:31:28.760 | The university is about 20 miles away from my parents' house.
00:31:32.600 | The second year of my college life, I didn't have the money to live on campus and so I
00:31:37.520 | moved home.
00:31:38.520 | The deal that my dad made for me was that his way of helping me with college would be
00:31:43.440 | that he would subsidize my rent if I lived at home during college.
00:31:50.520 | So I don't think I paid any rent during that sophomore year.
00:31:53.800 | Went back to – in my junior year, I studied abroad the first semester, dropped out for
00:31:57.920 | the second semester.
00:32:00.000 | During that time, I moved back home with my parents.
00:32:02.440 | I was working full time plus.
00:32:04.440 | I was working about 60 hours – somewhere between 50 and 60 hours a week in the agricultural
00:32:10.240 | industry.
00:32:11.880 | At that point in time, I was paying rent I think.
00:32:14.560 | I don't remember for sure but I'm pretty sure I was paying rent at that time.
00:32:19.120 | Then my senior year of school, I went back, lived on campus and I moved back home after
00:32:23.600 | living on campus.
00:32:25.320 | When I moved back home, I again took up paying rent, reasonable, $500 a month but it's
00:32:30.480 | helpful to my parents and helpful to me.
00:32:32.960 | So I picked up paying rent.
00:32:34.240 | Then fast forward a year and a half when I began my business with Northwestern Mutual,
00:32:39.560 | I knew that going into that, the cost was going to be very, very – the pay was going
00:32:44.680 | to be relatively low.
00:32:46.560 | So I paid rent for as long as I could but then I ran out of money and I was still struggling
00:32:51.100 | to get the business going.
00:32:53.480 | So I went several months without paying rent, four or five months, something like that,
00:32:58.040 | without paying rent until I was stable again, had my business working and then at that point
00:33:01.880 | in time, I was able to pick up paying rent.
00:33:03.760 | I paid rent from then on until I married and I moved out of my parents' house when I
00:33:07.280 | married.
00:33:08.280 | So the point is not that you have to be a tyrant but you do have to see and make sure
00:33:17.680 | that your child is actually doing something that is productive, that they're actually
00:33:23.920 | building character.
00:33:27.320 | If all those things are there, then it's perfectly reasonable to make choices if you're
00:33:34.560 | going to help them start a business and that's perfectly reasonable not to spend the rent
00:33:37.360 | money.
00:33:38.820 | But if you don't prepare them, they're at home by paying rent, etc., paying their
00:33:43.440 | bills, they're not going to be ready to move out.
00:33:48.440 | Now what if you don't need the money?
00:33:49.600 | If you don't need the money, you should still do it.
00:33:52.960 | I don't care if you put all the rent money aside into a separate account and then give
00:33:58.520 | it to your kid as a wedding present or whatever when they're gone and out of your house.
00:34:04.100 | But the point is that the benefit is of paying those bills.
00:34:08.720 | I struggle to share some of my own personal experiences because I don't want to seem
00:34:12.600 | like I'm tending towards arrogance or trying to think that I have it all together.
00:34:17.080 | So hear me clearly, I don't.
00:34:19.480 | But I do see very clearly that the level of character and discipline that I have is very
00:34:25.840 | different than many of my peers.
00:34:28.320 | And I see some of these things, these formative experiences as being involved in that.
00:34:36.800 | When I began driving, my dad's rule is you can start driving but you're going to pay
00:34:42.440 | for your insurance.
00:34:43.720 | I've never not paid for my own car insurance.
00:34:46.120 | I've never not paid for my own car.
00:34:48.800 | I could borrow one of my parents.
00:34:50.360 | I was expected to contribute some towards the fuel of that, although I must say that
00:34:54.360 | during some of my broker years, my dad was very generous to make sure that I had fuel
00:34:59.520 | in the car on occasion.
00:35:01.720 | And when it became time that I needed a car, that was on me.
00:35:06.480 | I paid for all of that.
00:35:07.480 | But I've also done my own laundry since I was very young.
00:35:11.400 | So there are other ways of expressing responsibility that don't involve rent.
00:35:15.920 | The point is that these things were helpful to me.
00:35:19.000 | These things helped me and they gave me a much higher degree of confidence.
00:35:23.920 | When I compare that to some of my friends whose parents have enabled them, have supported
00:35:28.760 | them and who have artificially extended their childhood up through the age of 30, and then
00:35:36.240 | I talk to them and I pick up and see the challenges of confidence that they're facing.
00:35:43.440 | Confidence is not a pretty thing.
00:35:46.600 | So as parents, our job is to work with our children and help them.
00:35:50.640 | And helping them involves placing responsibility on them.
00:35:56.320 | Now you're the only one who can assess your own parenting.
00:35:59.300 | You're the only one who can assess the details of the situation.
00:36:02.820 | And there is an appropriate balance between complete permissiveness and complete authoritarianism.
00:36:10.240 | Either of those leads to problems.
00:36:13.400 | Autopsyism can lead to hurt and bitterness.
00:36:18.920 | If your kids think that you're just after their money and you're using them to get rich
00:36:23.520 | and build your retirement account at their expense, that can lead to a lot of problems.
00:36:29.600 | So you have problems both ways and you need wisdom in your particular situation.
00:36:33.720 | But work with the idea that you're going to build maturity.
00:36:38.480 | Maturity comes from bearing responsibility.
00:36:44.560 | The second question I want to answer is how to keep your kids from becoming boomerang
00:36:48.400 | kids because many of you listening don't have adult children.
00:36:52.880 | You don't have children in this circumstance.
00:36:55.640 | Well, the way you keep your child from becoming a boomerang kid is a couple of things.
00:37:00.880 | Number one, you put this responsibility on them and you do it from an early age.
00:37:09.000 | I personally am convinced with my own children, time will tell, but some of the ideas that
00:37:13.400 | I have is a fewfold.
00:37:16.200 | One, my goal is starting at about the – by about the age of 12, I want them to be fully
00:37:23.600 | trained to handle all of their own financial transactions.
00:37:27.280 | What that means is I owe them a duty of parental care and support.
00:37:31.520 | That duty would involve things like clothing, food, et cetera.
00:37:34.960 | Now food is provided here at the household.
00:37:37.200 | Clothing is a little bit different.
00:37:39.400 | But my vision is that by about 12, they will be fully responsible for their own clothing.
00:37:46.400 | Instead of me going and buying it for them, I'll decide the appropriate budgeted amount
00:37:50.840 | and I'll give that to them and they're responsible for providing their own clothing.
00:37:54.960 | One of the things that I think we as parents can and should be doing is giving our children
00:37:59.400 | the opportunity to make economic choices and spending decisions before they've been able
00:38:04.320 | to earn all the money themselves.
00:38:06.400 | So as much as possible, I want to take all of the money that I would be spending on them
00:38:13.120 | and transfer it over to them, put it under their stewardship.
00:38:18.720 | The things that I'm responsible to provide for them as far as their care as a parent,
00:38:22.240 | I want them to be responsible for actually doing the transactions.
00:38:27.840 | That helps them to be able to learn while it's simple and easy and the stakes of the
00:38:32.280 | consequences of failing are small.
00:38:35.000 | Any bill that I can think of that's appropriate and probably the simplest one would be something
00:38:39.520 | like a cell phone.
00:38:40.520 | I know many parents view cell phones as mandatory equipment for all four-year-olds, but I don't
00:38:46.120 | personally hold to that, especially in my circumstances in life.
00:38:49.160 | If you feel differently, that's fine.
00:38:51.160 | But something like a cell phone, I think an appropriate time to get a cell phone is when
00:38:54.480 | you can pay the bill.
00:38:55.480 | If it's cars, if they're not all using Uber and self-driving cars completely when my kids
00:39:01.800 | are older, it'll be things like cars, car insurance.
00:39:05.120 | Those are all responsibilities that need to be borne.
00:39:09.880 | Now you'll have to assess as a parent, just like I will have to assess as a parent, the
00:39:13.360 | changing nature of the world.
00:39:15.660 | Is a cell phone for a requirement?
00:39:19.320 | Is it a safety need?
00:39:20.720 | Well, if so, then I'm probably going to provide it.
00:39:22.800 | I'm not going to expect my four-year-old to pay the iPhone bill.
00:39:27.160 | But perhaps that is appropriate for the 13-year-old.
00:39:34.440 | So the earlier you start placing responsibility and the more you work at placing responsibility
00:39:38.560 | on the children, that'll keep them from becoming boomerang kids.
00:39:43.400 | That'll keep them from coming back to you as an adult child and expecting your financial
00:39:50.080 | support.
00:39:51.640 | Again, I define a boomerang kid as an ugly thing, but I don't believe that adult kids
00:39:59.640 | who live at home is an ugly thing.
00:40:04.460 | So think about what your vision of a herd looks like, because I really like that metaphor,
00:40:14.760 | the metaphor of a herd.
00:40:16.120 | That's what I think about when I think of my children, meaning that each person in the
00:40:19.560 | herd is an independent, autonomous person.
00:40:25.520 | But my goal, my vision with parenting is that the herd is moving in a direction together.
00:40:33.280 | And I invite my children to move in that direction with me.
00:40:39.520 | Any member of a herd can choose to leave the herd.
00:40:43.400 | I'm not being strictly faithful to this metaphor to try to say that it's all about living at
00:40:48.760 | home and you're out of the herd if you're out of the house.
00:40:50.560 | The point is I want to be moving together.
00:40:52.760 | I want to be building collaborative relationships.
00:40:55.560 | I want there to be synergy in our family.
00:40:58.760 | In my family, I don't want there to be my life and your life.
00:41:01.320 | I want there to be our lives, not to cross the barriers of personhood.
00:41:06.560 | It's important to respect those barriers.
00:41:08.280 | It's important to give autonomy, but that we don't have to be enemies when we grow up.
00:41:14.240 | I'm convinced there's no need whatsoever for children to pass through the stage of being
00:41:20.000 | enemies with their parents.
00:41:22.480 | There are some consistent reasons why that seems to happen and those, many of those can
00:41:26.040 | be avoided.
00:41:27.040 | Not all, but many of them can be avoided.
00:41:29.640 | So one of the reasons that you wind up with boomerang kids, however, is because the children
00:41:33.880 | don't have something to aspire to.
00:41:35.720 | They don't have something to grow up into.
00:41:38.880 | So as a parent, the first place that we should be looking is at our own lives and considering
00:41:44.560 | our own example, considering our own testimony.
00:41:50.000 | If I as a parent teach my children that the purpose of life is my own happiness and that
00:41:58.600 | happiness is defined as self-indulgence, then is it any surprise that if given the opportunity
00:42:05.520 | they can come and live in my basement, rent free and play video games all day long and
00:42:10.560 | have work 10 hours a week just to have a little bit of spending money?
00:42:13.120 | Is that any surprise or is that an expression of the vision that I've given to them because
00:42:17.520 | they've seen me model that?
00:42:20.160 | If I'm living a life of maximum self-indulgence, why would I ever expect my child to do anything
00:42:24.840 | other than to live the life like mine?
00:42:29.440 | If I struggle to work on a plan and to gain the benefits of a job, even though it may
00:42:34.960 | not be perfectly suited to where I want to be forever, but all I do is complain about
00:42:38.880 | it, then why would I expect my child to do anything else about it?
00:42:42.360 | If it's good enough for dad and mom, it's good enough for me.
00:42:47.860 | So therefore, it's fine if they stay unemployed or underemployed because they just haven't
00:42:52.440 | found the right thing to do yet.
00:42:54.480 | In many ways, one of the most humbling things about parenting is the recognition that for
00:43:00.220 | good or for bad, we can usually expect our children to turn out just about like us.
00:43:08.640 | And so change, dealing with boomerang children, probably doesn't necessarily need to start
00:43:13.720 | with them.
00:43:14.720 | It probably needs to start with us, we who are parents.
00:43:19.740 | And if we desire to avoid having boomerang children, we probably don't start necessarily
00:43:26.960 | with learning some new parenting technique or learning for some new thing to do.
00:43:33.320 | It probably starts with assessing what type of leadership are we giving?
00:43:41.040 | Am I living for fun?
00:43:42.880 | If so, my child is going to live for fun.
00:43:47.480 | Or am I living for purpose?
00:43:49.320 | If so, my child might live for purpose.
00:43:54.000 | Am I living for self-indulgence?
00:43:55.000 | If so, I could probably expect my child to model my example.
00:44:01.400 | Or am I living for others?
00:44:03.760 | If so, I can probably expect my child to live for others.
00:44:09.720 | So as we close the show today, consider your life.
00:44:16.400 | Consider the outcome of your life.
00:44:19.240 | Are you living a life of maturity?
00:44:23.200 | Are you giving your child something to come up to?
00:44:26.920 | Something to aspire to?
00:44:30.640 | One of the major trends I've noticed in my life is it seems like adults have somehow
00:44:34.640 | decided they want to be more like kids than give kids something to be something...
00:44:38.960 | Let me try again.
00:44:41.280 | It seems like adults have decided that they want to be more like kids than that they want
00:44:48.640 | to give their kids an example of what an adult is to be like.
00:44:54.000 | A few months ago, I went to a special event that was held at a big mega church here in
00:45:00.920 | West Palm Beach.
00:45:04.720 | It was a special event and I went to this big mega church building and the pastor came
00:45:10.040 | on stage.
00:45:11.040 | And this pastor's in his late 40s.
00:45:13.520 | He came on stage and he bounced up on stage wearing skinny jeans, tennis shoes, sneakers,
00:45:23.720 | whatever, fashionable athletic footwear, and one of these little shirts with a hoodie built
00:45:30.080 | in.
00:45:31.080 | I looked at him and I said, "Are you trying to look like a 22?
00:45:35.320 | If a 22-year-old wants to dress that way, fine."
00:45:38.080 | But I had to work very hard to maintain my respect for him just simply based upon the
00:45:42.840 | way he was dressed.
00:45:45.480 | And it seemed to me, "You're trying way too hard.
00:45:47.280 | Why don't you give the people here an opportunity to aspire to be like you?"
00:45:55.520 | Here where I live in West Palm Beach, it seems like the mothers want to dress more like their
00:45:58.680 | 16-year-old than that they want to give their 16-year-old a way to dress.
00:46:06.160 | I'm sharing this simply because that's something I was convicted on recently and I thought
00:46:11.000 | to myself, "Am I giving my children an example of the way an adult dresses and the way an
00:46:17.120 | adult behaves?"
00:46:20.040 | So consider the example that you're setting for your children and recognize that if you
00:46:26.480 | want to get your boomerang kid out of the house, it's going to be as simple as you systematically
00:46:33.940 | starting to put the pressure and the responsibility on them.
00:46:37.920 | And you'll either be able to get them out of the house in the way that they say, "Hey,
00:46:42.000 | this is too much and I'm going to leave," or my preferred way, you get them out of the
00:46:47.040 | house in the sense that they're no longer a leech but now they're a valuable part of
00:46:51.320 | your community.
00:46:53.680 | Bring them into your herd, the herd that is going somewhere.
00:46:57.640 | Help them to become an active contributing member of the community.
00:47:01.480 | Now they'll matriculate out at a different time.
00:47:03.400 | When they marry, they'll matriculate out and they'll begin a new household.
00:47:07.000 | That's the appropriate order.
00:47:08.320 | That's the appropriate model.
00:47:10.360 | The Bible teaches in Genesis 2, it says, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and
00:47:18.120 | be joined to his wife."
00:47:20.320 | There's got to be a leaving.
00:47:21.320 | It should be an establishment of a new household.
00:47:24.080 | Just because your adult child is living at home doesn't mean they have to be a leech.
00:47:27.160 | Thank you for listening to the show today.
00:47:28.400 | Hope these thoughts and these ideas are useful to you.
00:47:31.400 | I just want to encourage you that if you are a parent of a boomerang child, it's not hopeless.
00:47:36.600 | The world is different than it was when you were in your child's situation, but it's not
00:47:41.640 | harder or easier, this New York Times article notwithstanding.
00:47:45.960 | It's different.
00:47:46.960 | The point is that there's a different value system and it's your responsibility as the
00:47:51.320 | parent to be the parent.
00:47:57.920 | That means starting with your own example and then actually behaving and acting like
00:48:01.640 | a parent.
00:48:02.640 | And if you are a parent of younger children, work to build your children up, to help them
00:48:07.320 | to be responsible members of your household and to develop a common vision for your family
00:48:13.180 | so that you don't have this angst that so many have.
00:48:17.880 | Thank you for listening.
00:48:20.320 | Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance.
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00:48:57.120 | In addition to your voluntarily paying for the content you've just heard, as a supporting
00:49:01.840 | patron you will receive a number of member only benefits, including a private Facebook
00:49:06.240 | group, access to our weekly Q&A calls and discounts on future products and services.
00:49:11.440 | Details can be found at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.
00:49:13.840 | Again, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.