Failure To Launch in Young Adults
Wisdom of the crowd needed here! I need help.
About three days ago at our annual office Christmas party, I had a conversation with two colleagues. One stated his daughter is basically failing her last year of Highschool and nothing seems to work to make her put in the effort needed to simply pass. The other colleague confirmed that her daughter finished college a while ago, wants to apply to med school, but is just not doing anything to get there. She is part time working at a McDondal’s and just simply not progressing. She is approaching her second year out of college, still living at home, has not used her degree and is just getting by.
I have my own story that fits the same trend.
Since late September 2023 my stepdaughter has been living with us. She had a fight with her mom and decided she no longer wanted to live with her Cluster B mother. Understandably.
However, when she moved in, we made an agreement that she would work while going to college and had to work hard in exchange for us letting her live with us for free. I have known this girl since she was 16. And since she had always lived with her mom (By her own choosing since her friends are close by. We had multiple times offered to take her in, but thanks to covid and online school she preferred the other stay with remote school), I simply did not know her well.
Since then, she took one (!) college class which she basically dropped the same week school started by immediately flying with a friend to Florida during the first week of classes. She has only worked as a server a couple of days a week. She has refused to take on any full time position with a longer term perspective. She does not clean her bathroom and her room is a mess. I mean a mess with trash, clothes, and other things cluttering the floor. There is barely room to step anywhere. We barely got her to move dirty dishes and food out of her room. The dresser in her room that she is using is covered in glue and the surface destroyed from make up products or spilled nail polish. She typically spends her money she earns on nails, lash treatments, make-up, vapes, expensive restaurants, and clothes.
After about a year of pleading for her to do something with her live things are escalating in the wrong direction. First, we started by charging rent. The house is mine and I pay for all expenses because of an income disparity between my husband and me. She knows that. So I felt it was necessary to show that me (a somewhat stranger) should not pay for her living arrangement when her own parents do not.
When the terms of the agreement around cleanliness and helping in the household were not met, we finally said she needed to move out. I insisted. I no longer want to pay for someone who is not even doing the bare minimum of being a room mate. Since then she has worked less, depleted her savings account to a point that she is over-drafting, and is going to the gym every day for at least 2 to 3h. Something she had not done before. She also stopped paying rent (which is btw a very small contribution to household expenses).
She is in her early 20s. She has barely a GED like Highschool diploma (she did not attend a regular Highschool, but one for unambitious or learning challenged kids and her diploma is not tied to grades, so she has no GPA). She has no college degree or associates. She only worked as a server so far which does not give her a good enough verification of income. She has no clue what she wants to be in the future.
She is intelligent. We are not talking about someone who has a mental disability. We are talking about someone who learned from the best of the worst: her own mom. Her mom spends her time at the gym (she is a bodybuilder), never had a solid job, sleeps her way around (one of the reasons my now husband divorced her), and when we saw the house she lived in after the mom moved out recently it was not only messy, but smelled like cat pee (every bit of the carpet was stained), and half of the appliances, walls, and furniture were trashed.
We are at a standstill with my step daughter. We will have to kick her out without her having a place to live. It is unlikely that she even qualifies for an apartment nor can she afford one. She does not seem to have any real friends that she could room with. The few she has do not seem to be close friends and do not want to move in with her if we can believe what she says. She lies a lot about so many things that it is very hard to know what is true or not.
If you noticed: all of the young adults or teens in this essay are girls. Why is that? Is there a new trend that women just give up? That young women feel they do not need to do anything? Yes, you hear about young men, too, that spend their time in a basement video gaming and not maturing, but in the examples with my colleagues, it was only the girls who completely fail to launch. And not just that. They actively sabotage their own lives to not have to.
I hate feeling like an asshole.
Who has any better suggestions then just throwing the young woman into cold water. Here is what we have tried so far in order of when they were applied:
When she initially moved in in late September 2023:
Clear expectations around work and school established
Talking about future plans and issues
Regular family dinners (she stopped attending without communication, so I stopped making her food)
I paid for a therapy session for her
After she dropped out of college in February 2024 and constantly came home after midnight even on weekdays waking me up every other night:
Regular check ins with family meetings
Contract with roles and responsibilities about living in this house
Showed her how to set a weekly goals plan and discussed how to follow through
Set a budget plan for her to reign in her spending
After she refused to work full time or go back to college the next 6months:
Asked her to pay rent and a clear expectation of household chores with a cadence
Sent constant reminders about cleaning her bathroom, room, and maintain her car
When nothing improved:
Asked her in October to move out by the end of January 2025
I have never regretted helping so much. And I hate even more that I feel like an asshole. I just feel it is the only way to show that boundaries need to be set. And to force her to take action towards bettering her own life.
What do you think?
Suggestions?
Throw her ass out, it’s the only way she’s going to learn!
I had to "invite" two of my four kids (both of them boys) to leave at 18. The oldest one was oppositional and scary. He joined the Navy a few months later and became a different person--responsible and motivated. He's 51 now, master's degree, a terrific husband and father, gainfully employed, and has solid values (despite living in California). Yes, he hated my guts for a few years, but we now have more mutual respect than I could have imagined.
The other one was a serial loser. Couldn't keep a job. Enrolled in school several times with little to show for it. Drug problem (which started with weed at age 14). When I told him he had to leave and to figure it out on his own, it was the saddest day of my life. Was homeless for several months. I resolved that yes, I loved him and wished him well, but no, he couldn't live at home and I wasn't going to pay for more schooling or financially support him. For years I expected a phone call that he had died of an overdose or was killed in a drug deal gone bad. Somehow he found a girlfriend for whom he had to up his game (she now has a PhD and is a professor in a small college). He's 45 now, has a master's in Accounting, owns his home, hasn't used drugs in many years, and works for a large multinational. He's still with the same lady. We talk several times a year and it's fine.
Yes, it's hard to see one's son or daughter make one bad decision after another. But sometime young people DO turn things around, in their own way and their own time.