At Home with the Kids
When I was a kid struggling to come to grips with the funhouse of high school cruelties, my parents made it clear to us boys that when we reached the ripe old age of 18, they were cutting us loose. They really didn’t need to bother. All us brothers were planning our escapes from the Northern Wisconsin hellhole they’d landed us smack into. Some folks complain about the mosquitoes up there but not me. It was the blood suckers who were human that annoyed me more and I intended to leave first chance I got.
Which I did. Went to college and got a 30 hour a week job. I would come home for a holiday or two, but basically I was out of the nest for good. Thanks Mom, thanks Dad, appreciated the raising. Nowadays we got kids living in their old bedrooms until they’re 30. Rents are crazy high, spouses are put on hold, jobs are minimum wage. This seems to me, a guy who couldn’t wait to get on with my life outside the confinement of my parents’ walls and rules and thumbs, a sorry state of affairs.
A couple years ago an eagle’s nest down at the state park was easily watched from a trail above. The two fledglings reached the point where it was time to literally leave the nest, but for some reason one of the kids didn’t want to leave. Probably got used to cheap rent and free meals. Or just couldn’t face the world on its own, who knows. The parents tired of it and one day tore the nest to pieces. Stay if you want, but there’s no home here anymore.
Now, I don’t think human parents ought to burn down the house when Sally or Jimmy are barhopping with their friends, let them come home to a smoldering childhood, see if that doesn’t give them reason to leave, but I can’t see how extending dependence a decade is going to help them become independent, self-sufficient adults. Call me cruel, but life is hard enough without pampering the little beggars. They need to face the world, live with crummy roommates, take a crappy job, eat top ramen and macaroni and cheese the way I did, live in bad apartments, all that young adult learning. So that in the end, if nothing else, they’ll be sympathetic with the underprivileged, the poor and the homeless. That, or they’ll give up and become artists. Not that we need a lot more artists….
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