How can we help adult son to launch

[Needstolaunch]

Deliberately keeping this vague.

Adult son, 25, earns £34 K a year has a degree, is working full time.

Never lived away from home. A total and utter inertia to anything including looking for new job or area, going on holiday. He has one friend from school that is unemployed and living at home and similar.

Will not see a GP under any circumstances and is very vocal about it. - I put this in, in case someone takes about depression etc - he doesn’t seem depressed, he had always been the way he is.

Drives a car. Owns a car.

We have offered a huge deposit to help him buy. We have offered to help him get a mortgage.

Over the last year he has talked about renting as we want him to live independently which he is more than capable of doing. He is lazy and if allowed would quite happily accept someone else cleaning, cooking etc for him. In the last year, he has not arranged a single viewing for a property so DH and I have told him by Christmas he needs to be out. He can come back twice a week for meals and talk to us daily, but he needs to launch.

He initially talked about buying. Then renting. He rejects every property available for rent - reached breaking point today as he said he couldn’t look at x property and would not even say why- the area he wanted, within his budget etc He doesn’t even particularly socialise with us.

Anyone successfully got an adult to launch. We have a time frame now. Younger siblings launching etc

His hobbies are scrolling on his phone (funny ideas there and recently become more misogynistic which is challenged daily by DH and I) and nothing really. Spends most of his time in ‘his room’. He will cook but moans about it. Likewise he will do chores when directed. We do challenge him and like yesterday said they were all coming on a walk etc we love him but we need him to move out and be independent.

He does not pay rent but a contribution to bills and has saved £25 K plus. We are willing to gift him £50 K which is our savings.

2 younger siblings with no failure to launch one already at university in halls and one going in 2 years but already can’t wait and both contribute.

Please he is NT, no mental health issues. He is very tight with money etc please no we are bad parents why can’t he stay, he’s just a child etc

Do NOT give him money unless you are giving the others the same amount. I have seen where unfair division of funds leads and it’s not pretty.

Stick to your guns. He needs a short sharp shock and if you push the deadline back, he will never leave. Even if it means he has to check into a hotel or sleep in his car!

We use this method for our DS anxiety (he's younger) and it's supposed to be really helpful for Failure to Launch.
claritycbt.com/failure-to-launch-a-space-program-for-young-adults/

Why are you giving him £50k? Are the others getting this amount of money, or just him because he’s been the laziest by way of “launching”? Is there a chance he knows you would just pay him off, essentially, if he put it off long enough? Personally, I would just start charging him the same amount as he would pay for a rental. He earns enough. Also, make him buy his own food in and stop doing his washing (if you are). If home isn’t as cushy, he won’t want to stay.

Do not give him your savings. Wtaf!

When he leaves for work one day, pack all his belongings, get a locksmith in, and change all the house locks. Bring his stuff to a storage locker that you will have booked and paid the first month for ahead of D(eparture) Day. Call him and tell him where his stuff is and that the the key is at the facility front desk. Tell him he can book himself in to a Premier Inn while he looks for a flat for himself.

@mathanxiety I was also thinking that a booking a storage unit would be a good idea.

No idea.

No drugs, he rarely drinks, doesn’t watch TV, obsessed with his phone and no he is not a criminal mastermind or whatever.

The obsession with money was always there. No spending of pocket money. No trauma - no engagement with any counselling set up etc We have even asked him what amount he is saving for and we don’t get any answer.

Literally take away night, his younger brother who has a Saturday job will offer to go and get it - he won’t. No offer to buy anything when out or on holiday or even if a pub. He is the same with extended family and his only friend.

Believe me we have tried over the years and looked into helping him etc

I honestly think we will still be here in 30 years if we did nothing. A year might have been a long time but we were hoping he would buy.

OMG this is useful. Thank you 🙏

I don’t think ours is anxious or worried. Just doesn’t like doing anything. But this has some very very useful strategies.

By the time he was 16 he just would not engage with any professionals. Getting him into university was bloody hard work - to find a course he would do etc but at least he chose it. But he wasn’t keen to go but he did at least do it and get a good degree.

Because it would enable him to buy. Properties around here are expensive. We’ve done the Math - or at least DH has and this enables him to buy a 2 bed locally here. It’s not a random figure.

I’m clearly meaner than @mathanxiety cos my first thought was remove his bed!

…the specific amount really wasn’t the point of my comment here… I mean why are you giving him money at all? You described it as “your savings”, so assuming this is most if not all of it (?) and therefore are you able to give this to your other children in the near future? I personally think the solution is simple: to stop making your home/his current set-up so cushy for him and he’ll soon go.

The beautiful thing about SPACE is the YP doesn't have to engage at all.

Don't give him £50k unless you give the same to other siblings now. Don't say you'll even it up later. If you can't afford that then no one should get anything.

I would personally make it uncomfortable to live at your house. Cut the internet off after 7pm for example. Don't buy in any food he likes or food for him.

I pity the poor person who gets lumbered in a relationship with him once he’s launched, he sounds insufferable. Sorry OP. You must be saints putting up with him for so long.

Also, it seems like he has a digital addiction, a little like those Korean men who live in their bedrooms 24/7 playing games with no lives outside in the real world.

You absolutely should NOT be gifting him £50k to move out wtf.
that disadvantages you and your dh and also your other kids.
make a date he just must by and stick with it.

you also should have been charging full rent and making him do his own cooking and laundry. He’s been having it too easy in your hotel

I think you're right in him needing to move out and spread his wings - he's making his life very small, and it doesn't sound like it's going to get better if he doesn't make significant changes, and moving out is one of them.

The deadline to move out by December is quite a long time away, reasonable if he was going to buy, but he doesn't seem to want to. He would be able to rent a room in a shared house a lot quicker than that. Maybe talk to him about the deadline, explain it was for purchase and that if he has no interest in that, he needs to go sooner into a flat or house share.

You’ve given him far too long a deadline. That’s almost a year away; he’s not going to be worrying about that yet. In fact, I’d hazard a guess he doesn’t think you’re serious and that date will come and go with no changes. I’d reduce it to 1st August. Tell him you’ll be willing to consider extending that to accommodate a chain, if he’s buying, but you want to see regular evidence that the chain is progressing or he’ll have to rent a room somewhere.

Start collecting boxes and put them in his room ready for his stuff. Get some paint samples, go in his room and paint some on the wall; he needs to understand that you’re going to redecorate his room as soon as he’s gone. If he hasn’t started packing things up by the first week in July, then you wait until he has gone to work, you and DH get yourselves in his room and pack up everything but his clothes and toiletries.

Tell him that you don’t want to pay bailiffs to physically remove him from the property, but that you will if he leaves you with no choice, and the cost will be coming out of the money you’ve promised him.

If he ignores all of that and just unpacks the boxes again, then your only option is to wait until he has gone to work, bundle everything into bin bags, put it all in the garage if you have one, or the front garden if you don’t, and change the locks. He is a grown man, he is perfectly competent and he has money. He will not be sleeping on a park bench. He has money, he can use it to pay for a hotel.

This is all I'm thinking about now

Can you make life more unpleasant for him at home? Start charging him rent for a start and start being noisier, have friends to stay, cut tv subscriptions, get a lodger, increase his chores and helping out with some bigger tasks like decorating or some garden redesign?

I'm with Lourdes Chan on this one.

Move your deadline up and enforce it. He goes, end of story. He's 25 years old and has plenty of money - he can get a mortgage, he can find a room in a house share, that's up to him, but the one thing he can't do is live in your house. You need to stick firmly to that line and make it clear what the consequences will be if you bit your deadline and he's still here, up to and including changing the locks and chucking his stuff.

He’s got a full time job, a car and lots of savings - that’s not too shabby for 25! His mate who is unemployed is the one who hasn’t launched.

You say his younger sibling has launched because she’s at uni. Doesn’t that mean he launched when he went to uni?

He’d benefit from moving out and living in a flat share. He’s doing ok though.

This makes me sad. I was 26 when I moved out, never felt any pressure from my parents to ‘launch’ whatever that means, they just waited until the time was right for me and off I went, successful career and family now, didn’t do me any harm not ‘launching’ until I was a bit older and I was never made to feel unwelcome or in the way in my family home.

At least he’s working which is something

i would put down a deposit on a flat for him to rent

then I’d change the locks on my house

brutal but necessary

so he sounds intelligent and capable but entirely non-sociable almost to the point of agoraphobia eg the takeaway story.
Has he got any friends or does he talk about work colleagues? Maybe he knows his limits socially and doesn’t want to live with anyone else but doesn’t want to be alone either?
You and DH are his safe social input- without you to come home to it sounds like he’d be very introverted and he might be aware of this.
in which case maybe he could live somewhere on your road. Or as near to you as possible, just not inside your house?!

Can you downsize and effectively 'kick' him out? Or travel the world with DH for a year and renting the whole house out