From "Stay-at-home sons are here — and they’re not going anywhere
Why some young men are finding happiness in their parents’ homes" (WaPo)(gift link).
"'I’m sort of the origin of all this discourse,' [Brendan] Liaw, 28, said. He was speaking from an apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia.... After his 'Jeopardy!' appearance — during which he won almost $60,000 across four games — several media outlets, including Vanity Fair, People and the Wall Street Journal published stories about a rise in 'trad sons' or 'hub-sons.'"
Posts
22 comments:
Soft.
Should've shown up at Sony Studios in his pajamas.
It is easier to live off the transfer payments to his parents than it is to go work so you can pay the transfer payments to someone else's parents.
The word for home in Chinese is "Jiā" (家), which combines the "roof" reticle (宀) and the "boar" reticle (豕), but the 2nd reticle is less literal and more symbolic. Because it contains 7 strokes it symbolizes something auspicious in ancient Chinese culture, "7 Generations Under One Roof" (modernly four...but you get the idea).
For 99% of human history multi-generational households were the norm, and boy howdy does that help with childcare especially since we've got lots of 30yo kids running around.
He's only a trad son if he marries, moves into his parent's bedroom, and takes over the running of the house and family business.
Otherwise, whatever journalist coined the term is an intellectually lazy ignoramus.
I wonder if anyone is going to mention DEI anywhere.
There is an entire generation of asian and white men who have been shut out of the job market.
What is she doing?
I never know what she's doing... back there.
Nothing "trad" about it.
I moved out as soon as I could because I thought I would never get laid properly as long as I lived in my parents' house. My brother, on the other hand, lived with my mom and dad until the day he got married. He valued the meals, the ironing, the laundry, and the pampering he was used to as the baby - much more than sex.
This was common when i lived in Europe thirty plus years ago. I knew several men in their thirties who still lived with their parents. One drove a Ferrari. The wouldn't leave until they married. Heck, some of them even stayed after they married. It was very common.
That's kind of how they did it on Downton Abbey, seems more like a sign of affluenza...
Trad sons? First: I've never heard that term before. Second: There is nothing "traditional" about an adult son living with their parents. I'm not saying that a child needs to move out when they turn eighteen, but they need to leave the nest as soon as possible to mature into an independent adult. College is usually a good transition time for that. The child lives away from home during the school year and comes back to their parent's house during school breaks. Then on graduation day, the parents change the locks on their house.
I have a grandson who is a stay at home son. Recent engineering graduate, actually Dec 2024. Brilliant student, full scholarship. Parents are at wits end.
"Parents are at wits end."
I guess it must not work this way anymore, but when I was growing up it was made clear to my brother, sister and me that when we finished school, it was time to put on our big boy (or girl) pants and leave the nest.
Our son lives with us. Has a good paying job, and he even moved out for six months into his own apartment before learning that the bachelor life wasn't all that cracked up to be. So, yeah, call him names. He's banking his paycheck for an early retirement, contributing to the house that, God willing, he'll inherit, doing what interests him, and winning at life.
Amazing how free you feel when you don't listen to the media.
This was common when i lived in Europe thirty plus years ago. I knew several men in their thirties who still lived with their parents. One drove a Ferrari. The wouldn't leave until they married. Heck, some of them even stayed after they married. It was very common.
A large extended family of Swiss-Italians in my rural Arizona town, whose ancestors immigrated around the turn of the last century to work in the mines, still lived communally when I was a kid. I think at one point there were 25 or 30 people living there. The family remains quite numerous, and quite prominent in the community, but they no longer live together in the "Big House", as they called it back in the day. They'd need a college dormitory nowadays.
"7 Generations Under One Roof"
I didn't think that was possible at first, but I did the math and indeed it would be, if every woman had babies at 15 or 16, which probably was the case in those days. Actually 8 or even 9 generations is not out of reach in a long human lifespan.
I know half a dozen people in their late ‘30’s who are basically just marking time waiting to inherit their parent’s painstakingly accumulated wealth. They work, more or less, but typically live beyond their means due to parental subsidizing. At least two “rent” their parent’s investment second houses.
They’re not bad people but every one of them had their college fully paid for by their parents and still couldn’t quite be bothered to strive for full independence. Ah, well. They’ve made good object lessons for my own sons, to whom it was made clear in their early teens that they wouldn’t be living off their parents into their twenties and thirties.
My family was unusual, and my two little brothers were notably . . . peculiar. Neither of them left home, not even the older of the two (we, the two middle boys, were most alike in our interests but he didn't follow me out and into marriage and homeownership).
He got an accounting degree and made good money; the youngest did OK as a general handyman/painter; they smoked a lot of pot there, but OTOH if they hadn't been around our mother would doubtlessly have died in a diabetic coma at a much younger age than the 91 she reached.
Bro died in 2010, and youngest bro spent the next eight years looking after her (with my help, especially after I retried in mid-2015); after she died I quitclaimed my interest in the house to him and he lives there still.
Our older brother joined the army at 17 (in preference to two years juvenile probation) and you might think he would have learned independence and self-reliance but you would be wrong. He crashed on a couch out there for weeks or months at a time, over a span of decades, before finding a desperate woman to marry and leech off of.
My own son has been out and on his own since he was 20--the age I was when I left home.
Oh yeah, our mother always insisted that we should try out for Jeopardy. She was probably right, especially in regard to me and my next brother.
America embraced "take your daughter to work" day without ever realizing that their sons were even more alienated from the world of work. Hence the men who won't get off the couch.
“For 99% of human history multi-generational households were the norm, and boy howdy does that help with childcare especially since we've got lots of 30yo kids running around.”
Maybe so, but able-bodied young men for 99% of humanity were typically working long hours doing hard labor to help feed the multiple generations sharing the same roof. They weren’t sitting around getting stoned and playing video games.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.