It used to be said that the purpose of journalism was to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.” While I’m not sure if that is still true for journalism today (Fox News seems particularly confused as to which side needs the comforting), as a description of my parenting style is could not be more apt: when my children are upset I want to be the first one to make them feel better, but when they are comfortable there is nothing I like better than to stir them up.
Don’t get me wrong: by “comfortable” I don’t mean “happy.” Happy is good. Happy is the preferred state of existence for all beings. No, when I say “comfortable” I mean “complacent.” I mean “unmotivated.” I mean “sedentary.” When I think of “comfortable” I think of butts on a couch—my couch—and I am immediately filled with the urge to make those butts get up and go do something. Maybe not right this second (although sometimes, yes, right this very second, as in “turn off the PS3 and get off the couch now”), but always eventually. And always sooner rather than later. And oh-so-most-definitely always the very moment those butts have turned eighteen and have graduated from high school.
Am I the only one who still feels this way? Sometimes, judging from the number of young adults I still see living with their parents, it certainly seems like it. And this, I must admit, is something that strikes me as just unnatural and odd: when I was eighteen I couldn’t wait to leave home and start the next chapter of my life. This wasn’t because my home life was so terrible: while it was by no means perfect, it wasn’t like it was so awful I contemplated dropping out of high school and running away. However, by the same token it wasn’t such a cushy place that I was loathe to leave it and create my own version of home somewhere else. In other words, it was the perfect combination of comfortable and afflicting: I wanted to leave, but if I had to, I wouldn’t have been inconsolable if I had had to stay. (Well, maybe a little inconsolable.) Nowadays, however, at least judging from the number of twenty-three-year olds who have never left home—not even once—I’m not so sure that we, as parents, are so good at providing that “afflictingly comfortable” place anymore.
Of course, usually whenever I voice these concerns out loud people all say the same thing: it’s the economy. To which I always reply: are you kidding me? We graduated high school smack dab in the middle of the Reagan years, when interest rates were at thirteen percent and the unemployment rate was close to ten, and yet we managed to pry ourselves out of the nest soon after high school graduation. So it’s not the economy—at least not the national one.
Is it a personal economy then? Is it a paucity of inner resources, of self-confidence and gumption? Is it fear—the fear of leaving a house where there is always heat, always food, the internet and cable bills are always paid on time, and laundry detergent magically replenishes itself? Is it the fear of downsizing, of making do with less?
That would make sense: after all, leaving the nest is kind of scary. It always has been. The thing we need to teach as parents, however, is that there is a difference between “roller coaster through a dark tunnel” kind of scary and “axe murderer in the closet” fear. And the easiest, and probably the best way to do that is by inserting that lever and prying those butts off of our couches.
I’m sure they’ll thank us for it later. (And if not—well, at least we got our couches back.)