Travis gets home late in his parents’ range rover puffing the roach of a blunt. He flicks it out the window where it sizzles on the street in a puddle of run off from the midnight sprinkler. He parks in the garage then sneaks up stairs. Why go quietly? Everyone in the family knows the drill. 

At 1pm that day, mom or dad knocks on the door, cajoling Travis awake. He comes down stairs to arms folded, the rest of the family long into their day, his younger sister prepares for her soccer game. His younger brother watches the scene quietly with dad who sips his coffee.

This man boy, like many of his peers, lives with his parents well past the point where parental and societal expectations are comfortable, long past the point that he feels at home in the promised arc of his life

Travis is labeled “failure to launch” and often checks the following boxes:

• avoiding risk and responsibility (certain risky behaviors)
• unfulfilling or nonexistent social connections 
• suffering relationships with family
• lack of vision for the future
• a pervasive sense of stuckness
• one or more addictive behaviors like gaming, gambling, pornography use, weed or other substance use
• perceived and/or genuine laziness

This is not a diagnostic term or exhaustive checklist, but a handy colloquialism that reveals the implicit expectations society has of young men during a time where, in many culture regions in America, expectations themselves are unpopular. They challenge parents and caregivers to take a stand amidst a hyper multiple cultural milieu where expectations are fluid and social support structures are degraded. Parents struggle to parse and enact the views of an older morality and make a compromise with the new psychology of trauma and parenting-experts. 

When parents avoid their inner conflicts around raising their kids, they avoid conflict with their kids, a tempting bypass, and thus their kids avoid developmental conflicts that generate growth.

Should Travis’s dad confront him about smoking weed and coming home late, demanding a blanket ban on all unwelcome behaviors? What about Travis’s fears, hopes, and childhood traumas, which (Travis Senior feels guilty for participating in)? How should these influence his parenting now? Consequences or conversations, and how much of each?

The tension between old and new produces confusion that mental health experts step in to answer. But Travis’s once a week therapy isn’t enough to address his challenges.

Many parents are doing their best in their well-intentioned effort to remove obstacles from their children’s lives, but in an ironic twist, they’re disabling their will and drive by eliminating adversity and challenge. Without a sense of capacity to face the increasingly complex and destabilizing demands of their lives, young men are ashamed. Shame begets a frozen inaction which creates conflict through missed opportunities and unmet expectations and thus more shame.

Implicit in the label, “Failure to Launch,” is shame, so it’s reasonable to propose alternatives, if, as the adage goes, what is shamed stays the same.

As those advocating for transformation and growth for our young men, we should check our premises.

The animated tension that gives life to the “Failure to launch” term plays out in a foundational culture war battle between personal responsibility versus the influence of culture.

Often, we are goaded into a false choice between the two, and we collapse a vibrant spectrum into a false and rigid binary.

At antedote, our aim is to preserve the productive tension between the agency of our members and the influence of the nested and complexly interrelated cultural worlds we all live in.

The young man who grew up in a nerfed environment is threatened by challenges yet also expects his parents to clear the way for him. Entitlement amplifies discord in the family and further inhibits his innate capacity from surfacing.

For the “failure to launch individual” we at Antedote respect and uphold their response-ability in addition to their interdependent identity where choices are influenced by invisible and mulit-faceted causal factors far beyond their control and understanding. In the storm of life, we can make a choice to engage the difficulties that are on our plate weather we succeed or fail.

Too often our schools, job market and families are zeroing in on achievements and results rather than the natural journey of failures and successes that develop agentic human beings.

In response to the shaming implicit in the term failure and the suggestion that there is a valid yardstick for measuring progress (i.e. there is a way to successfully launch), an alternative label, a gentler label, has emerged, and like many new-think terms that aim to be softer and more accommodating, it’s much wordier and clunkier than the original:

“young adult who is struggling with the transition to adulthood.”

This generous alternative does highlight something very important that the “failure to launch” label does not. One word changes the landscape of this archetype and gives us a portal to its depth and richness, can you find it?

The crux here is “transition.”

It implies that there is some distinction between child and adult that is not undertaken. More importantly, it’s not facilitated.

As 100 years of anthropology tells us, Modernity is bereft of initiation rituals, rites of passages and wisdom transmission infrastructure.

Young men need a stable community of embodied practice over a sufficiently long period to encounter and integrate developmental challenges.

At Antedote, we recognize that failure to launch is a relational phenomenon. The locus of change is not the individual but the relationships within and around our clients. To meet the demands of this phenomenon, we advocate a whole family, whole person response.

We believe that a launch is possible, but its essential to have buy in and effort from parents and caregivers. Our family program is a cornerstone to re-launching their son into the world in a way that honors his agency by encouraging everyone to own up to their part in the dynamic.