Whether you're a donor, a doer, or a dedicated to learning more about research for moms, babies, and their families, from March of Dimes, it's ModCast, where you'll learn new ideas, find ways to get involved, or just be amazed. Move this one to the top of your playlist each and every month and join the conversation with the best and brightest in the field.

Listen to ModCast, March of Dimes research podcast, today. I believe that as human beings, we all share some things in common. And one of those things that I think we all share is an appreciation for the beauty of mothers and their babies. I've always loved to watch mothers feed their babies.

I just think there's just something really, really beautiful about it. Now, you can pick your favorite image. I like to see all kinds of different animals. The funniest looking ones, I think, are often deer. If you watch deer feed her baby fawns, because they just are so alert. They don't settle down and they're not domesticated.

So the head is up and their eyes are looking around and you get the sensation that at any moment this deer could snap and all of a sudden that baby has got to just race off after mom. Goats, I think, are some of the funniest, just because the little kids are so awkward and gangly.

Sheep are really cute. Cats are beautiful. Dogs are cool to watch. I like to watch cows, because little baby cows, they're funny. And I always feel like the mama cows are at some point in time going to just kick the baby cow to get them to stop pushing so hard when they get their head underneath and they're sucking on the mama's udders and they get their head under there and they're just butting and pushing against it.

And so I could very happily be a rancher and thoroughly enjoy that lifestyle. But one image that's thoroughly etched in my mind is the image of a mother pig feeding her piglets. Just picture in your mind's eye a mother pig feeding her piglets. Just simply my saying those words will probably bring a relatively common picture to all of us.

For me, the image that's indelibly printed on my mind comes from a James Herriot story that I had when I was a kid. My parents were shopping at Sam's Club one time when I was a kid and I would go along with my mom and we came across the book rack and I found this collection of James Herriot stories and just had beautiful pictures and I asked my mom to buy it for me and she bought it for me.

I went home and devoured it. James Herriot, for those of you who don't know, was a British veterinarian and he was born in the early 1900s, died as an old man, but he wrote some really neat stories based upon his veterinary practice. And then somebody took his stories and in this case, put together a treasury of stories and the illustrations were beautiful.

The book opened up with him coming out in his little car to this farm out in rural England where a mother cow was having a difficult birth and so he was being called out to help with the birth and delivery of the baby cow. And he comes out and it's a cold blustery day and he comes into the barn and they wind up going ahead and they safely deliver the baby calf and then he's looking around the barn and finally after the hard work is done, he can appreciate the beauty of the bucolic scene that's all around him.

He's in a nice warm barn, it's clean, it's well kept, the farmer is a good farmer and he looks into one of the stalls in the barn and there's a mother pig lying on her side and of course, mother pigs often have very large litters. So there's eight or 10 little piglets all lined up, right next to each other.

All feasting at their mother's belly and it's just something beautiful about that. I always just thought that picture is really, really beautiful. I think it's beautiful to watch mothers feed their babies, human mothers feed their babies. I love to watch my wife breastfeed our children. It's just something very, very special.

She tells me it's just a special, it's a very special experience that she really treasures about being a mother. She really loves it. It's a bonding time, it's something that goes very, very deep for her. And so I just like to see that, it's just something beautiful about that.

But there are times at which that scene, that idea of a baby suckling at its mother's breast is not so pretty. Think to that image of the pig and now all of a sudden, let's say that instead of these cute tiny little pink piglets all lined up, suckling at the teats of their mother, now all of a sudden they're not little piglets.

Rather it's 150 or 200 pound pig and there are a bunch of them all fighting to get their snout in there to get some milk. Something a little disgusting about that, isn't there? You take this beautiful image and all of a sudden just by changing the age of the babies, that image can be transformed from something beautiful into something a little bit revolting.

There was a Time Magazine cover a few years ago which featured on its cover a picture of a mother and her child. Her child was feeding at her breast. But instead of the child being a baby, the child was a three-year-old little boy who was standing on a stool and she was standing upright.

She had one breast exposed and the child was standing there on a stool next to her with his mouth on her nipple breastfeeding at three years old. Now the cover was quite provocative. I don't know that the subject was all that provocative. The subject of the article was about attachment parenting which is very popular especially in crunchy parenting circles, attachment parenting for those of you who are unfamiliar with the ideas.

It's got basically three tenets, all of which are designed to try to build a closer relationship between mothers and babies. One is extended breastfeeding, so breastfeeding their baby not weaning your baby at one but continuing on to two or three or some people longer than that, two or three, four years old.

Extended breastfeeding, baby wearing is another tenet of attachment parenting where in order to stimulate more of a connection between the mother and the child, the mother wears the baby or the father wears the baby in a sling or carrier of some kind. And the third tenet I believe is co-sleeping which is the idea that the mother and the child sleep together either physically in the same bed if possible or very, very close so as to build a deeper bond between the mother and the child.

I'm sure there's more to it than that but that's how I identify attachment parenting in my mind as far as those three major tenets. And that was what the Times article was about. But the picture caused no small controversy because it questioned that normal mother-baby relationship. And instead of having a baby at the mother's breast, there was a little boy, a three-year-old little boy.

Now I have no desire to wade into the attachment parenting question or controversy. So let me not put the picture as a three-year-old. Now let's say that instead of a three-year-old son, you have a 20-year-old son doing the same thing. I don't think anybody would claim that there's anything appropriate about the idea of a 20-year-old boy, excuse me, 20-year-old man suckling at his mother's breast.

I want to use these metaphors to paint a picture in your head while I tackle the subject of boomerang kids. And my intention with today's show is to help those of you who have boomerang kids in your house to know how to get them out. And number two, those of you who have young kids, to know how to keep them from becoming boomerang kids.

Last week on my phone, I flipped over to the Apple News Feed and the iPhone Apple News Feed and I saw a story there called "The Boomerang Kids Won't Leave" from the New York Times. Sorry, it's official. "The Boomerang Kids Won't Leave" from the New York Times. So I quickly looked at it because that's the kind of thing that is appropriate for an appropriate topic for radical personal finance.

And I copied it out. I thought while I was doing the majority of the show prep that this was a recent article. Then I realized when looking at the article further and doing my due diligence on its citation that it's actually from 2014. So why it showed up in the Apple News Feed, I simply don't know.

But the article is all about the boomerang kids and how many young men and women are returning home to live with their parents. Let me just read you a couple of excerpts from this article to set the stage. Annie Kassinas has two different ways of explaining why at age 27 she still lives with her mom.

In the first version, the optimistic one, she says that she is doing the sensible thing by living rent free as she plans her next career move. After graduating from Loyola University Chicago, Kassinas struggled to support herself in the midst of the recession, working a series of unsatisfying jobs, selling ads at the soon to be bankrupt Sun Times, bagging groceries at Whole Foods, bartending in order to pay down her student loans.

But she inevitably grew frustrated with each job and found herself stuck in one financial mess after another. Now that she's back in her high school bedroom, perhaps she can finally focus on her long-term goals. But in the second version, the bleaker one, Kassinas admits that she fears that her mom's house in Downers Grove, Illinois, half an hour west of the city, has become a crutch.

She has been living in that old bedroom for four years and is nowhere closer to figuring out what she's going to do with her career. "Everyone tells me to just pick something," she says, "but I don't know what to pick." One in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents.

And 60% of all young adults receive financial support from them. To emphasize that, one in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents. And 60% of all young adults receive financial support from them. That's a significant increase from a generation ago, when only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support.

The article goes on and is fairly lengthy. It's worth reading. In a previous version of this recording, I read the entire article and I realized that it just slowed down the pace so much, so I'm only just reading that short excerpt here in today's show. But I will link to it in the show notes.

And it's worth reading, because it does go through and talks about some of the benefits and disadvantages of boomerang kids and of what they're doing and how they're approaching it. And by the way, if you hear banging in the background, my mic probably won't pick it up. But if you do hear banging in the background, it's due to South Florida shutting down and all my neighbors are putting up their hurricane shutters and boarding up their houses and whatnot in preparation for Hurricane Matthew.

And I'm recording this show in hopes of publishing it and getting everything out before we potentially lose power. So that's the banging in the background for today's show. The reason I started with that image though is I think that it's a good way for us to picture children and how we should work with children.

Now I want to start with my presupposition. I define the presence of a boomerang kid in the way that it's pictured here, where 60% of young adults, and they did not cite their sources. I have not reviewed the data to understand how that data was collected, what that's measuring, any of the background.

So I'm just simply going based upon that. So my data here is very thin. Just reading this New York Times article and assuming that it's well sourced. But again, I don't know the definition. But I don't think it's direction all that wrong. But one in five young adults, 20s and 30s living at home with their parents and then 60% of young adults receiving financial support.

So if I define a boomerang kid as a child who has returned home because of their own financial instability, I define that as an ugly thing. And I'm not saying that there's not a place for generations to work together. What I am saying is in the same way that the picture of a mother pig with her children is beautiful when those children are small and they're receiving the breast milk when they're small, but it's very ugly if those pigs were big.

It's the same corollary in humans that is beautiful when we as mothers and fathers support our children when they are young. That's what we should do. But if our children are not independent and able to stand on their own, then it turns into something that's not quite so beautiful.

However, even though I hold that opinion, I do not believe that it's in any way problematic or disadvantageous or something not to be desired for adult children to live in a home with their parents. And I want to give you a different metaphor to pull this out, sticking with the metaphor of animals.

So in the first metaphor, you have a mother nursing her young babies. And if those young babies grow up, grow up, grow up, grow up and continue to be nursing at their mother's breast, that's ugly. But if those babies grow up and become active members, useful members of the herd, even though the mother and the babies might live within the same tribe or within the same herd, depending on what type of animal we're talking about here, that can be something really beautiful.

That can be something really useful. I love to see elephants on nature films, nature documentaries. I think elephants are cool. I think they're cool because they're smart, but they're nearsighted and I share those characteristics with an elephant. I'm practically blind without glasses, but I like to think I at least can understand a few things about life.

Although, the older I get, the more I question that sometimes. But elephants, as my understanding, work very well in a herd. The babies grow up and then they are brought into the herd. And if you've ever seen those pictures of the baby elephant crossing the river in Africa and the muddy bank that it can't get up and the big elephant reaching down its trunk and pushing up from the back or pulling the elephant up, that's the image of a herd working together.

It's not the relationship of a parasite. It's the relationship of a community. Parasitic relationships are ugly. Community relationships are beautiful. Now, I think community relationships can look different for different people depending on the nature and makeup of a particular community, obviously. So I have no intention of prescribing a particular way that you and your relationship with your children should or should not look.

But I think it should look like a community and not like a parasite relationship. Now sticking with the baby metaphor, it's important to note that there are transitions and there are stages of parenting. And it's beautiful to support a small baby. Babies need the support of their parents. Babies and young children need the support of their parents.

Perhaps one of those things that just strikes us the hardest is when we come across baby animals in the wild who've been either abandoned or rejected by their parents, whether that's a bird that fell out of its nest or whether that's – I used to raise rabbits and sometimes you'd find the little rabbits, little kits that have been pushed out of their nest and their mother rejected them for some reason.

So it's so heartbreaking when people interact with animals in the wild and then they – because the baby animal is tainted with human scent and it goes back to its mother and its mother rejects that animal. There's something really heartbreaking about that. And we know instinctively and intuitively that babies – baby humans deserve our protection just like baby animals do.

A normal healthy parent will always prioritize the well-being and the good of their child above and beyond their own well-being. We know that there's something incredibly ugly about a parent who tramples upon their child so that they can get ahead. So we know that babies need care. And the same thing when we look to the financial lives of our children, our children need care.

But again, that care can't continue for too long. So how do you make a transition to where if you have a boomerang child, how do you help that child to leave? First and foremost, I believe that begins with recognizing that what you are doing to enable your child is a very ugly thing.

If you are a father, picture your wife doing this. If you're a mother, picture your 25-year-old son or daughter, 30-year-old son or daughter walking up to you, lifting your shirt up and asking to breastfeed as an adult. It's a revolting concept. And yet that's often what we do as parents by financially supporting lazy, shiftless, undisciplined leeches we call our children.

If you are financially supporting bad habits of your child, you are not helping them. The animals have this figured out. I understand, I guess it's in the eagles. I've read stories. You never know whether to believe the inspirational stories that you read. But I've read stories where the eagle, what, at some point starts pulling out feathers from the nest and tries to make the nest uncomfortable.

If the eagle can do that, if that's true, how much more you as a parent? Your job as a parent is to raise your child to maturity, to where they can be an independent, self-sustaining, autonomous human being, aka an adult. And one of the most difficult things about our society is that we have taken this concept of childhood and we've extended it far beyond any reasonable, normal understanding of childhood.

I was interested to see that this was even talked about in the New York Times article. I'll read you a paragraph on it here from about the fifth paragraph, a little lower down than that. Reading from the New York Times article, "Childhood is a fairly recent economic innovation. For most of recorded history, a vast majority of people began working by age four, typically on a farm, and were full-time by 10.

According to James Martin, a historian at Marquette University and the editor of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, it wasn't until the 1830s, as the US economy began to shift from subsistence agriculture to industry and markets, that life began to change slowly for little kids. Parents were getting richer, family sizes fell, and by the 1850s, school attendance started to become mandatory.

By the end of the Civil War, much of American culture had accepted the notion that children under 13 should be protected from economic life, and child labor laws started emerging around the turn of the century. As the country grew wealthier over the ensuing decades, childhood expanded along with it.

Eventually, teenagers were no longer considered younger, less competent adults, but rather older children who should be nurtured and encouraged to explore." End of the quote that I'm reading. Now, I'm not opposed to childhood. Childhood is fantastic. Childhood is beautiful. And I think that when possible, we should work with our children to help them to use childhood to their advantage.

Childhood should, if you read the educational experts, one thing that many of them agree on is that childhood should have a large amount of uninterrupted freedom to be able to explore and to process things and to develop unique characteristics. So childhood is great. But adults who act like children are not great.

So here's the question. Is your adult child who's living with you a parasite on your life? Or are they a valuable member of your home making contributions to your household economy? The point is not where they live. The point is what's the nature of the relationship. Let's talk about option one, your child is a parasite.

If your child, no matter the age, is a parasite on your family life, you need to work on a plan where you can systematically and in an appropriate way help them to mature. The way that you help somebody to mature is you progressively put more responsibility onto them as they are able and capable of bearing it.

That means that you don't go from years and years and years of bearing with somebody and doing everything for them and then all of a sudden just toss them out on their ear unless they're violating the moral rules of your household or they are violating the authority in your household.

In that case, toss them out on their ear. If they're going to live in your home, they need to respect the rules of your home, especially if they're an adult. But generally, that's probably not the best course of action. But if you recognize that your child is a parasite in your life, you need to help them to not be a parasite.

You may have weaned them 25 years ago from your breast, but now you need to wean them from your checkbook. So I recommend that you start that process because the sooner you start the process, the better it will be for your child and for their self-confidence. You have a unique opportunity to hear from somebody who is right smack dab in the middle of this generation.

I'm 31 years old and I have many friends who are living in the reality that this article talks about, the economic instability, blah, blah, blah, all the challenges and all the problems. I will tell you this, from speaking firsthand with many of my friends who are boomerang kids or who have been boomerang kids, your economic outpatient care is destroying their self-confidence and it's delaying the maturing process unnecessarily.

It's destroying their self-confidence because they haven't figured out how to be an adult. They don't have the autonomy that they desire to have because they feel like they're a leech. None of us like to be a leech on another person. And so for their own good, start the process of helping them to be a leech.

First and foremost, put household responsibility on them. That should probably include rent, but if the child is not yet capable of rent, they can work their rent off. So begin with some simple things. They can do their own laundry. They can do their own cooking. They can do the housework.

They can do the yard work. Figure out what an appropriate rent is. Most areas of the United States, probably about $500 a month to rent a bedroom, somewhere in that range, and figure out $500 a month worth of activities and duties and work that they can do for you that will help them to be able to feel like they're actually earning their keep and start assigning them those tasks.

If they don't want to do it, let them go, aka usher them out, because it's far better for them to face contact with the world where they can learn to make it as an independent, autonomous, self-sustaining human being, aka an adult, than for you to continue to have them suckle at your teat until they're old and wrinkled.

So a good way to do that is start giving them responsibilities and helping them create a plan. It's also wise to put some financial pressure on them. Many people find that when there is financial pressure on their bank account balance, they can magically come up with better jobs, better work.

There is not really a shortage of employment out there for those who are willing to work, but there's a tremendous shortage of employment out there right now in our economy currently today for those who are unwilling to work or who are unwilling to work hard. Hard work is good for their soul.

And so if your child is a parasite, help them have motivation to enter into the world of hard work. You will be doing them a favor. Good way to do that, if you're already doing chores and things like that, a good way to do it is to go ahead and start charging rent.

Give them a warning. Meaning one month from today or two months from today, you owe me rent of this amount. If your child is not at least paying you rent or a token rent, they're sucking off of your bank account and they feel bad about it and you feel bad about it.

The whole idea of the boomerang generation is a very ugly idea. Excuse me. I had to pause my recording here. A neighbor came needing some help with the hurricane shutter. So and I apologize, I didn't make a note. So I can't continue the perfectly the train of thought here.

So forgive the interruption. At least I'm getting some work done in the middle of the hurricane or in the middle of the preparation for the hurricane. So the summary here on this section of the show is this. If your child is not contributing to your household, you're not serving them.

You're not helping them and you need to help them by placing responsibility onto them. I think you should be wise in how you do this. It's very easy to all of a sudden feel like, "Well, I'm just all of a sudden going to flip out and put a ton of responsibility on them all of a sudden." Well, if you haven't trained a child for responsibility, I think that would be very unwise.

It could even be traumatic. Many people have all of a sudden had to face significant responsibility in their lives and usually it seems like they come up with a way to deal with it. But that experience is not always without trauma and you have no desire to inflict trauma on your child.

But begin the process now of steadily moving with a vision to put responsibility onto them. Have a vision of perhaps a year, perhaps two, something like that where systematically, steadily, in a sensible way, you're going to put the appropriate amount of pressure on them until they are a contributing member of your household.

If you have failed in the past at putting responsibility on them and training them to be responsible, you may have to start with baby steps. But start where you are and begin that process. Believe me, your child will thank you. Now, we need to expand the discussion just a little bit because just because your child is living at home does not mean that they're a leech.

And I always see these discussions confused in articles and it was even confused in this article. For example, this article from the New York Times goes on and talks about how a lot of these children have high amounts of debt. It talks about how they're making less money, blah, blah, blah.

It talks about how they're doing all these things. But then at the end, it comes in and talks about how living at home with your parents might help them to do a startup and start a new business. I think it's perfectly reasonable and even laudable as a parent that you have a desire to help your child.

And I think it's perfectly reasonable and laudable that you may even help them financially. And helping a child financially, probably one of the healthiest ways to do that is to help by defraying – help them to defray some of their expenses. If you start giving money, that comes with its own set of baggage.

If you start just simply giving things, that brings its own set of baggage. But if you give something that for you is a little bit costly but not too costly such as subsidized or free housing, that can be really beneficial because it can help them to address their budget and lower their budget in order to do something like start a business, in order to do something like go to college.

That can be really beneficial and it can be really healthy. But what you're looking for is a sense of responsibility and an industriousness and a productivity on behalf of your child. If those things are present, then the economic aid is probably not hurtful to them. It's probably simply helpful.

So look to see what is your child actually doing. In my own experience, I can attest to this from my own personal entrepreneurial endeavors. I grew up in my parents' household of course and I lived at home with my parents until I turned 18. I spent the first year of my college life living on campus.

The university is about 20 miles away from my parents' house. The second year of my college life, I didn't have the money to live on campus and so I moved home. The deal that my dad made for me was that his way of helping me with college would be that he would subsidize my rent if I lived at home during college.

So I don't think I paid any rent during that sophomore year. Went back to – in my junior year, I studied abroad the first semester, dropped out for the second semester. During that time, I moved back home with my parents. I was working full time plus. I was working about 60 hours – somewhere between 50 and 60 hours a week in the agricultural industry.

At that point in time, I was paying rent I think. I don't remember for sure but I'm pretty sure I was paying rent at that time. Then my senior year of school, I went back, lived on campus and I moved back home after living on campus. When I moved back home, I again took up paying rent, reasonable, $500 a month but it's helpful to my parents and helpful to me.

So I picked up paying rent. Then fast forward a year and a half when I began my business with Northwestern Mutual, I knew that going into that, the cost was going to be very, very – the pay was going to be relatively low. So I paid rent for as long as I could but then I ran out of money and I was still struggling to get the business going.

So I went several months without paying rent, four or five months, something like that, without paying rent until I was stable again, had my business working and then at that point in time, I was able to pick up paying rent. I paid rent from then on until I married and I moved out of my parents' house when I married.

So the point is not that you have to be a tyrant but you do have to see and make sure that your child is actually doing something that is productive, that they're actually building character. If all those things are there, then it's perfectly reasonable to make choices if you're going to help them start a business and that's perfectly reasonable not to spend the rent money.

But if you don't prepare them, they're at home by paying rent, etc., paying their bills, they're not going to be ready to move out. Now what if you don't need the money? If you don't need the money, you should still do it. I don't care if you put all the rent money aside into a separate account and then give it to your kid as a wedding present or whatever when they're gone and out of your house.

But the point is that the benefit is of paying those bills. I struggle to share some of my own personal experiences because I don't want to seem like I'm tending towards arrogance or trying to think that I have it all together. So hear me clearly, I don't. But I do see very clearly that the level of character and discipline that I have is very different than many of my peers.

And I see some of these things, these formative experiences as being involved in that. When I began driving, my dad's rule is you can start driving but you're going to pay for your insurance. I've never not paid for my own car insurance. I've never not paid for my own car.

I could borrow one of my parents. I was expected to contribute some towards the fuel of that, although I must say that during some of my broker years, my dad was very generous to make sure that I had fuel in the car on occasion. And when it became time that I needed a car, that was on me.

I paid for all of that. But I've also done my own laundry since I was very young. So there are other ways of expressing responsibility that don't involve rent. The point is that these things were helpful to me. These things helped me and they gave me a much higher degree of confidence.

When I compare that to some of my friends whose parents have enabled them, have supported them and who have artificially extended their childhood up through the age of 30, and then I talk to them and I pick up and see the challenges of confidence that they're facing. Confidence is not a pretty thing.

So as parents, our job is to work with our children and help them. And helping them involves placing responsibility on them. Now you're the only one who can assess your own parenting. You're the only one who can assess the details of the situation. And there is an appropriate balance between complete permissiveness and complete authoritarianism.

Either of those leads to problems. Autopsyism can lead to hurt and bitterness. If your kids think that you're just after their money and you're using them to get rich and build your retirement account at their expense, that can lead to a lot of problems. So you have problems both ways and you need wisdom in your particular situation.

But work with the idea that you're going to build maturity. Maturity comes from bearing responsibility. The second question I want to answer is how to keep your kids from becoming boomerang kids because many of you listening don't have adult children. You don't have children in this circumstance. Well, the way you keep your child from becoming a boomerang kid is a couple of things.

Number one, you put this responsibility on them and you do it from an early age. I personally am convinced with my own children, time will tell, but some of the ideas that I have is a fewfold. One, my goal is starting at about the – by about the age of 12, I want them to be fully trained to handle all of their own financial transactions.

What that means is I owe them a duty of parental care and support. That duty would involve things like clothing, food, et cetera. Now food is provided here at the household. Clothing is a little bit different. But my vision is that by about 12, they will be fully responsible for their own clothing.

Instead of me going and buying it for them, I'll decide the appropriate budgeted amount and I'll give that to them and they're responsible for providing their own clothing. One of the things that I think we as parents can and should be doing is giving our children the opportunity to make economic choices and spending decisions before they've been able to earn all the money themselves.

So as much as possible, I want to take all of the money that I would be spending on them and transfer it over to them, put it under their stewardship. The things that I'm responsible to provide for them as far as their care as a parent, I want them to be responsible for actually doing the transactions.

That helps them to be able to learn while it's simple and easy and the stakes of the consequences of failing are small. Any bill that I can think of that's appropriate and probably the simplest one would be something like a cell phone. I know many parents view cell phones as mandatory equipment for all four-year-olds, but I don't personally hold to that, especially in my circumstances in life.

If you feel differently, that's fine. But something like a cell phone, I think an appropriate time to get a cell phone is when you can pay the bill. If it's cars, if they're not all using Uber and self-driving cars completely when my kids are older, it'll be things like cars, car insurance.

Those are all responsibilities that need to be borne. Now you'll have to assess as a parent, just like I will have to assess as a parent, the changing nature of the world. Is a cell phone for a requirement? Is it a safety need? Well, if so, then I'm probably going to provide it.

I'm not going to expect my four-year-old to pay the iPhone bill. But perhaps that is appropriate for the 13-year-old. So the earlier you start placing responsibility and the more you work at placing responsibility on the children, that'll keep them from becoming boomerang kids. That'll keep them from coming back to you as an adult child and expecting your financial support.

Again, I define a boomerang kid as an ugly thing, but I don't believe that adult kids who live at home is an ugly thing. So think about what your vision of a herd looks like, because I really like that metaphor, the metaphor of a herd. That's what I think about when I think of my children, meaning that each person in the herd is an independent, autonomous person.

But my goal, my vision with parenting is that the herd is moving in a direction together. And I invite my children to move in that direction with me. Any member of a herd can choose to leave the herd. I'm not being strictly faithful to this metaphor to try to say that it's all about living at home and you're out of the herd if you're out of the house.

The point is I want to be moving together. I want to be building collaborative relationships. I want there to be synergy in our family. In my family, I don't want there to be my life and your life. I want there to be our lives, not to cross the barriers of personhood.

It's important to respect those barriers. It's important to give autonomy, but that we don't have to be enemies when we grow up. I'm convinced there's no need whatsoever for children to pass through the stage of being enemies with their parents. There are some consistent reasons why that seems to happen and those, many of those can be avoided.

Not all, but many of them can be avoided. So one of the reasons that you wind up with boomerang kids, however, is because the children don't have something to aspire to. They don't have something to grow up into. So as a parent, the first place that we should be looking is at our own lives and considering our own example, considering our own testimony.

If I as a parent teach my children that the purpose of life is my own happiness and that happiness is defined as self-indulgence, then is it any surprise that if given the opportunity they can come and live in my basement, rent free and play video games all day long and have work 10 hours a week just to have a little bit of spending money?

Is that any surprise or is that an expression of the vision that I've given to them because they've seen me model that? If I'm living a life of maximum self-indulgence, why would I ever expect my child to do anything other than to live the life like mine? If I struggle to work on a plan and to gain the benefits of a job, even though it may not be perfectly suited to where I want to be forever, but all I do is complain about it, then why would I expect my child to do anything else about it?

If it's good enough for dad and mom, it's good enough for me. So therefore, it's fine if they stay unemployed or underemployed because they just haven't found the right thing to do yet. In many ways, one of the most humbling things about parenting is the recognition that for good or for bad, we can usually expect our children to turn out just about like us.

And so change, dealing with boomerang children, probably doesn't necessarily need to start with them. It probably needs to start with us, we who are parents. And if we desire to avoid having boomerang children, we probably don't start necessarily with learning some new parenting technique or learning for some new thing to do.

It probably starts with assessing what type of leadership are we giving? Am I living for fun? If so, my child is going to live for fun. Or am I living for purpose? If so, my child might live for purpose. Am I living for self-indulgence? If so, I could probably expect my child to model my example.

Or am I living for others? If so, I can probably expect my child to live for others. So as we close the show today, consider your life. Consider the outcome of your life. Are you living a life of maturity? Are you giving your child something to come up to?

Something to aspire to? One of the major trends I've noticed in my life is it seems like adults have somehow decided they want to be more like kids than give kids something to be something... Let me try again. It seems like adults have decided that they want to be more like kids than that they want to give their kids an example of what an adult is to be like.

A few months ago, I went to a special event that was held at a big mega church here in West Palm Beach. It was a special event and I went to this big mega church building and the pastor came on stage. And this pastor's in his late 40s. He came on stage and he bounced up on stage wearing skinny jeans, tennis shoes, sneakers, whatever, fashionable athletic footwear, and one of these little shirts with a hoodie built in.

I looked at him and I said, "Are you trying to look like a 22? If a 22-year-old wants to dress that way, fine." But I had to work very hard to maintain my respect for him just simply based upon the way he was dressed. And it seemed to me, "You're trying way too hard.

Why don't you give the people here an opportunity to aspire to be like you?" Here where I live in West Palm Beach, it seems like the mothers want to dress more like their 16-year-old than that they want to give their 16-year-old a way to dress. I'm sharing this simply because that's something I was convicted on recently and I thought to myself, "Am I giving my children an example of the way an adult dresses and the way an adult behaves?" So consider the example that you're setting for your children and recognize that if you want to get your boomerang kid out of the house, it's going to be as simple as you systematically starting to put the pressure and the responsibility on them.

And you'll either be able to get them out of the house in the way that they say, "Hey, this is too much and I'm going to leave," or my preferred way, you get them out of the house in the sense that they're no longer a leech but now they're a valuable part of your community.

Bring them into your herd, the herd that is going somewhere. Help them to become an active contributing member of the community. Now they'll matriculate out at a different time. When they marry, they'll matriculate out and they'll begin a new household. That's the appropriate order. That's the appropriate model. The Bible teaches in Genesis 2, it says, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife." There's got to be a leaving.

It should be an establishment of a new household. Just because your adult child is living at home doesn't mean they have to be a leech. Thank you for listening to the show today. Hope these thoughts and these ideas are useful to you. I just want to encourage you that if you are a parent of a boomerang child, it's not hopeless.

The world is different than it was when you were in your child's situation, but it's not harder or easier, this New York Times article notwithstanding. It's different. The point is that there's a different value system and it's your responsibility as the parent to be the parent. That means starting with your own example and then actually behaving and acting like a parent.

And if you are a parent of younger children, work to build your children up, to help them to be responsible members of your household and to develop a common vision for your family so that you don't have this angst that so many have. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance.

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