When is the right time to leave home? Italian government minister Renato Brunetta thinks it’s age 18, and recently suggested a new law to require it.
Brunetta’s proposal is a reaction to an Italian judge’s decision that Giancarlo Casagrande resume paying a monthly allowance to his 32-year-old daughter, who lives with her mother and has been working on her graduate thesis for eight years. Her father stopped paying the allowance (a requirement of the parents’ divorce) three years ago without the courts’ permission. Britain’s Daily Telegraph reports that in Italy, “48 percent of offspring between the ages of 18 and 39 [are] still living with their parents.” In Italian, this phenomenon is called the bamboccione, or “big baby” syndrome … Canadian columnist Mark Steyn points out in Macleans:
[M]ost developed nations have managed to defer adulthood and thus to disincentive parenthood—quite dramatically so, if the judgment against Signor Casagrande holds. It’s no coincidence that the countries most prone to bamboccioni and parasite singles are the world’s oldest and fastest aging, with the lowest fertility rate: Japan, Germany and Italy are already in net population decline.
I wrote recently about modern China, where very different social pressures have also created a problem of demographics and economic peril. But I don’t think it’s fair to conclude that living at home is symptomatic of delayed adulthood. No, the real problem is not grown-up children living at home, but their using it to shirk responsibility and hard work.
Many of my childhood friends were raised with inherent assumptions about “leaving the nest.” However, most of them were also female, and whether unspoken or understood, most expected that by the time they reached 18—or about 21, if they went to college—they would find someone to marry. Leaving home would then be the natural next step. Leaving home in order to cleave to a mate would provide its own compensation, in other words.
At 26, unmarried, and currently living at home again (temporarily?), I could tell my friends that life does not always follow a series of steps. Instead of bamboccione, in the U.S. we have “boomerangers”: a Pew Research Study from November 2009 found that 13 percent of parents with grown children had one of them move back home within the past year, while the number of adults ages 18 to 29 has decreased since 2007. (The study linked the trend to the economic recession.) Plus, although I used to think of marriage as a clear-cut signal to leave home, it is not always as definitive as we tend to think.
Last May, Lisa Graham McMinn wrote for Her.meneutics that having her daughter and son-in-law move back in had blessed her. I think Christians, of all people, should be brave enough to consider alternatives to society’s idea that autonomy signals true adulthood. By bowing to social pressure, it would be just as easy to miss God’s best plan for our lives clinging to home as leaving home too fast.
Beyond my childhood assumptions, I have discovered that there are many ways of “cleaving” (the same word is translated in other versions as “hold fast” or “cling”) outside of marriage. Many of my fellow college graduates, male and female, ended up cleaving to their college roommates or friends for stability after school ended. Meanwhile, I have traveled—alone—yet always circled back to my roots. I don’t think mandating an arbitrary deadline for leaving home or for any other stage of life is appropriate. Avoiding the temptation to cleave to someone or something in a situation that God has not designed requires personal discernment.
In your own life, did a certain age, circumstance, or stage of economic stability signal the time to leave home? Are you still waiting for the right time, or do you feel you left too soon? Would you ever go back?
