I see the same thing going on in the families of my patients and in the families of people I have met in everyday life. Is it just me and advice columnists, or is everyone else seeing more and more twenty-somethings freeloading off of their parents with their parents' cooperation?

Yes, I said with the parents' cooperation. Oh, the parents may complain about their kids' behavior, but they never seem to actually do anything about the situation. Their children therefore tend to believe that they merely like to complain, not that the parents want them to move out and become independent.

The father in the Annie's Mailbox case complains about his wife's treatment of the son but does nothing to stop her from enabling him. It is the parents' behavior, as time goes on, that produces most of these Freddie Freeloaders and Minnie the Moochers.

I am also certain that if these twenty-somethings were dragged to psychiatrists, they would be immediately diagnosed as "Adult ADHD" or some other nonsense diagnosis, and the parents would then be reassured that they had done absolutely nothing wrong.

Why do children react to their parents enabling behavior in this odd way? Because the parents compulsively do everything for their kids and expect nothing from them, their kids get the idea that providing for children is an extremely vital activity for their parents.

If the parents fight over what to do with the kids but never come to any agreement or compromise, the kids think they like to do that as well. The "children" continue to offer up themselves so that the parents can continue with the role they seem to want to play so desperately. Far be it from children to deprive their parents of a cherished role!

Do children really give a damn about what their parents expect from them? Readers, what do you think?

So what is going on with the parents? Often, one can show these parents reams of expert opinions of all sorts that almost unanimously say something to the effect tha:, "If you don't let kids do for themselves, they never learn how." If you quote these experts, said parents will, more often than not, get extremely defensive. All the while, they will completely ignore the evidence.

The fact that the expert opinion may be correct is, as evidenced by their children's continuous helpless behavior, seems to means nothing to them. Expert advice goes in one head and out the other.

When some horrid psychiatrist asserts that the kids' failures are really due to some sort of brain pathology, and immediately put the offspring on medication, it obviously does not change the kids' overall behavior one bit.

Nonetheless, a significant percentage of parents will then hurry off to join the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation  instead of looking at their own seemingly counter-productive behavior, in order to have their views reinforced by like-minded parents.

Actually, I disagree with the experts who believe that offspring growing up in this environment "never learn" to take care of themselves. What dysfunctional individuals are and are not able to do, and what knowledge they do or do not possess, is not something they are necessarily going to admit to for fear of not being able to continue in their role of "losers who are totally dependent on their parents."

Quite often they are secretly capable individuals indeed. How do I know this if they will not demonstrate competence nor admit to any if they have it? Simple. If they learn to trust a therapist, and if the therapist knows how to ask the right questions, they will then admit to said competence and then clearly demonstrate it in order to remove all doubt.

So again, what's going on with the parents? There are several possibilities, but the most common are three in number.

The first is sort of a pathological empty nest syndrome. These parents are so wrapped up in taking care of children that they would literally have an existential crisis if the kids left, and not know what to do with themselves any more. They might become extremely depressed.

If they are covertly conflicted over the very role of being a parent and feel guilty about those feelings, they may also have a compulsive need to parent and yet constantly be angry with their children for continuing to be around. This is the situation that is most frequently seen in offspring who develop borderline personality disorder (BPD). "Don't leave me, I hate you."

The second family dynamic in which a Freddie or a Minnie results is when the child is triangulated into the parents' relationship. They parents do not get along with each other but remain so focused on the alleged inadequacies of their hapless offspring that there is almost no time left for them to get on one another's nerves.

If the child "grows up" and moves away, they then start fighting with each other more and more.

In a milder version of this dynamic, an adult child moves nearby and is "on call" for the parents to mediate disputes. Usually it's a daughter but not always. Mom will come over and say: "Your father won't do [such and such] for me. But he'll do it if you ask!"

Said daughter will often not marry because when she asks Mom why she does not ask for help from the daughter's brother or sister, Mom says, "Well, she has a family and I don't want to bother her." In other words, "She has a family and you don't." Since Mom seems to need someone to do this, daughter takes Mom's statement as an instruction for her to remain single. Otherwise Mom is in trouble.

The daughter will accomplish this feat in a number of ways. She might choose to stay celibate, but if this is unsatisfactory, she may instead date - nothing but a series of commitment-phobic or married men. At least then she gets to have sex and companionship. But that's just a silver lining to a rather disturbing cloud.

The third common family dynamic is the most interesting. To the outside world as well as to the family, the parents appear to be taking care of their incompetent child, but underneath the surface, the child is actually taking care of the parents' emotional or physical needs. I refer to this shell game as Who Is Taking Care of Whom? The answer to this question depends on the answer to another question: Exactly which needs are we talking about here?

In my book, How Dysfunctional Families Spur Mental Disorders, I described an interesting example of this. It is the story of a man in his late thirties who still lived with his parents. He would rarely keep a job for long, often stole money from them, and ran up significant bills on their credit card without permission.