Do young people want to leave their parents’ house? – 02/13/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

There are controversies. I would say that young people in general want to get rid of their parents’ strict control. It comes from the melee of childhood and becomes increasingly anachronistic with the onset of adolescence. But getting rid of the teasing of those responsible goes hand in hand with taking responsibility. Then begins the game of losses and gains of an accounting not always well managed.

One cannot speak of youth in a generic way, as the reality of those who work and do not have access to study is very different from that of those who study and do not need to work. Furthermore, the study is different for those who intend to take over the family business or benefit from their social and financial capital to start a career that responds to their aspiration. Those who work to help at home and “make do in their thirties” to study barely have time to dream of a career, having to work whatever is necessary.

Meritocracy should be the measure of the difference between the point from which one left and the point at which one arrived, taking into account the “means of transport” to which one had access. The means of transport here concerns subjective, material, social, racial and gender conditions.

Hence, for young people who already assume responsibility inside and outside the home since childhood, the dream of leaving home is more hampered by material reality than by the fear of taking responsibility for their lives.

As for young people with greater purchasing power, the situation is more unusual. Why give up washing clothes, a clean house, a ready-made supermarket, ready-to-eat food, trips? The answer until then was obvious: for freedom! But today, wealthy young people have real “flats” at home, with a private bathroom, minibar, television and, as one domestic worker said, depending on the family style, someone to pick up condoms and butts from the floor.

What are parents afraid of who treat their children as if they were the masters of the house and not the other way around? Are you afraid of feeling alone with your departure? The desire to remain with the children is also present in the popular classes, where the bourgeois obsession with privacy sounds strange. Living among neighbors, relatives and children makes up the community’s soul, while in wealthy condominiums living outside the family circle is seen as a nightmare. Even so, at all levels, young people have always yearned to emancipate themselves.

In a country like Brazil, where everything is used to mark the separation between the poor and the rich (color, language, clothes, consumption, territories of circulation), it can be difficult to see your children manage with the standard of who is starting. Seeing them deprived of walks or consumer goods should be a source of pride, as it reveals the young man’s effort, but it seems to have become an embarrassment. Hence, young people are leveraged with trips and purchases that they are unable to afford, further undermining their aspiration for personal achievements.

Financial emancipation is not easy at all, which makes many cases understandable in which the child remains at home in spite of his or her parents’ wishes. But it is in domestic life that we will see what is at stake in the emancipation project of parents and children. If he has adult rights he should have his obligations too, if he doesn’t have them, he should have his rights restricted. But the balance has tipped in favor of privilege, not responsibility. We are facing a version of the Italian “mammones” —children who don’t leave home before 30— , fruit of the recession, the quiet life offered by parents and an ideal of a united family.

Young people continue to want to separate from their parents, but on the paradoxical condition that the latter remain their providers. Parents, in turn, are unable to give up the fantasy of being eternal.

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