How Defining the Delay to Adulthood Is Maturing

This may seem obvious: calling a person a failure may foster a sense of shame in the individual. Yet, in the United States, we sometimes deem folks whose sense of social withdrawal and difficulty with self-actualization keeps them from leaving their parents’ home a failure to launch. This is unrelated to the 2006 movie Failure to Launch, in which Matthew McConaughey coasts on his parent’s dime in a state of suspended man-childhood. Rather, the concept is a complex presentation that has different variations across Westernized cultures. Some clinical folks dub it a delayed transition to adulthood, manifesting in extreme social withdrawal for over six months, most commonly with their parents. Hence the term that references a baby bird’s inability to fly from the nest. In Western culture, we see this through the lens of free will: someone’s inability to actualize reveals a choice incongruent with capitalism; therefore, it’s bad. However, there is more at play than the media portrays.

Welcome to Liftoff, dedicated to exploring issues impacting notions of self-actualization, particularly in young adults. We’ll explore this concept in society, its causes—innate, environmental, societal—and the micro-to-macro interventions. Today we’ll focus on how it appears in the media alongside the language researchers are adopting to help clinicians classify what they’re seeing.

The Wall Street Journal reported that more boys are falling behind in school as conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are increasing. The Economist reported on this international trend, noting that while much energy was placed on improving education for girls, that subtracted from the development of boys. Adult women in the U.S. are opining on it, too, noting that they’re freezing their eggs waiting for men to grow up. New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt is currently promoting his book, based on academic research, that suggests younger generations are more anxious and depressed because of technology. He has also written extensively about the trend of “coddling” that has rendered younger generations more fragile and unwilling to take risks. Although there is truth to Haidt’s assertions, not every young adult is failing to launch.

In 2015, researchers saw “boomerang” kids returning to live at home with their parents because of a “failure to launch,” noting that 50% of U.S. parents with children 19-25 had a child who had returned to live with them. Although these individuals are dependent on their parents, living at home actually shouldn’t be a criterion because many adults in many cultures live with their parents into adulthood. In some cases, this can be a good thing. From Athens, Greece, to Athens, Georgia, some multi-generational households report high levels of satisfaction, provided the younger generations are pulling their weight. Furthermore, as the Wall Street Journal reported, 57% of adults under 25 now live with their parents, and 59% of baby boomers regularly gift money to their adult children, a trend that speaks more to a myriad of economic trends unrelated to parenting.

While there is a trend of young adults' delayed independence, having depression or ADHD is a feature, not a predictor; many people with those diagnoses hold jobs, are independent, and cycle through the diagnosis. Japan is home to the bulk of this research, which started in the late 1990s and has been called Hikikomori, a portmanteau meaning “to pull back” (hiki) and “to seclude oneself” (komori). Hikikomori is a state of extreme social withdrawal (ESW). Its defining criteria reveal a continuous social isolation of at least six months with significant functional impairment or distress associated with social isolation. Although this presentation primarily shows up in 18 to 30-year-old males, the elderly can meet the criteria, speaking to a rise in loneliness that’s been growing since before the pandemic.

The paper points out that internationally, hikikomori “commonly report having few meaningful social relationships and little social interaction, but deny avoiding social interactions.” This lack of avoidance is what separates hikikomori from a social anxiety disorder. In fact, if you read Reddit channels where hikikomori chat, the individuals embrace not only the label but use it as a badge. Hence one of the items in the questionnaire: “I do not live by society’s rules and values.” Kato et al. observed this as a sense of “relief at being able to escape from the painful realities of life outside the boundaries of their home.” But like all avoidances, as disengagement is prolonged, more isolation ensues.

Hikikomori is the extreme, but other terms have been applied for lesser degrees of this presentation: NEET (not employed, in education or training), Freeter (Free timer), "adultolescence," and quasi-adult. The refusal to engage alongside lower levels of persistence, distress tolerance, anxiety, anger, and boredom render it similar to depressive and anxiety disorders. However, it’s the hazy vision of what adulthood means, a grandiose sense of self, and of impending doom that are universal hallmarks to all of these categories.

All of these seek to define a phenomenon of early adults not transitioning as proscribed by what society deems normative. Categorizing things is inherently human. Here, in Liftoff, I will explore the negative connotations and experiences when one doesn’t hit standard milestones. Failure is how most folks learn and become adults. Ironically, we can’t launch without it.