Something troubling is happening to young men today. Many remain tethered to their parents well into adulthood, not only financially but emotionally. And the tether isn’t soft. It is tight, conflicted, and often angry. We see young men caught in a paradox: dependent on their families, yet resentful of the very dependence that sustains them. This is not just a private struggle. It has become a generational pattern.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, describes how children raised in our digital, anxious era are more fragile, less practiced in real-world exploration, and more burdened by the projections of parental fear. Young people are not only navigating their own uncertainty but are carrying the unspoken anxieties of their parents, who, without a village to lean on, try to hold everything themselves. The result is young men angry at being dependent, parents exhausted from trying to hold on, and a culture without clear pathways to maturity.
Carl Jung called the lifelong task of becoming fully oneself “individuation.” It is not only about growing up, but about integration—pulling together the hidden, unconscious parts of the psyche and learning to live as a whole person. For young men, individuation involves claiming a voice, building boundaries, and stepping into responsibility.
But individuation is never simply a solitary achievement. The psychoanalytic tradition reminds us that separation happens in stages, and always in relationship. Margaret Mahler’s separation–individuation theory describes how children move from fusion with the parent into the gradual recognition of their own boundaries. Donald Winnicott gave us the idea of the “holding environment”—a relational container that provides enough safety to explore, fall, and try again. Attachment theory, through John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, showed that healthy development requires a secure base from which exploration is possible. Individuation is both psychic and social: the inner work of identity and the outer work of leaving, risking, failing, and returning. It requires both safety and the freedom to break away.
The difficulty today is that the conditions for individuation have shifted dramatically. Our society has lost many of the cultural containers that once structured the passage into adulthood. In traditional communities, adolescence was scaffolded by apprenticeships, religious rituals, guilds, or military service. A boy became a man not in isolation, but by being received into a wider circle of belonging.
Today, those containers have collapsed. Digital life has replaced embodied apprenticeship. Families are fragmented, religious institutions weakened, and community rituals diminished. Parents, often raising children without extended family support, are stretched thin. They are trying to correct for the gaps in their own upbringing while navigating the constant anxieties of modern life—financial insecurity, political instability, technological overwhelm. Understandably,
they hold on tightly to their children. But overprotection, however well intentioned, suffocates the very process it seeks to guard.
We are living in an anxious age, and the anxiety runs both ways. Young people absorb the insecurity of their parents, and parents tighten their grip in response to their children’s struggles. What should be a gradual letting go becomes a desperate holding on.
In this climate, many young men remain dependent on their parents long past the time when earlier generations would have stepped out. They rely on financial support, guidance, and emotional containment. But because individuation demands separation, this reliance begins to sour. What emerges is hostile dependency: a young man resents his parents for holding him, but also fears life without their support.
The consequences are painful. Instead of moving toward maturity, young men often get stuck in one of three postures. Some grow resentful, angry at their parents for holding them back. Some grow anxious, paralyzed by the fear that they cannot manage on their own. Others grow resigned, quietly giving up on the possibility of leaving at all. Each posture blocks individuation in its own way. Resentment isolates. Anxiety paralyzes. Resignation deadens. Together, they suspend a young man in rebellion without freedom, dependence without trust. He is not yet himself, but no longer a child.
Historically, societies solved this problem by creating rites of passage. The anthropologist Victor Turner described how initiation rituals moved adolescents from one status to another through a period of liminality—a threshold space where the old identity is shed, but the new one not yet solidified. In tribal cultures, a boy was taken into the company of men, tested, taught, and then returned to the community with new standing. Even in modernity, versions of these rituals remained: apprenticeships, religious confirmations, military service, fraternities. They weren’t always perfect, but they served a crucial function. They allowed parents to release their sons into the hands of a larger community, where individuation could be completed through risk, mentorship, and belonging.
Today, that scaffolding is largely absent. Parents must hold the entire process themselves, and many young men have nowhere safe to fall, fail, or find guidance beyond the nuclear family. The consequence is anxiety, anger, and arrested development.
This is where Antedote comes in. We exist to provide a container where individuation can unfold—not in isolation, and not in hostile dependency, but in the presence of mentors, peers, and guides. We aim to re-create, in a modern key, the lost village: a place where young men can test themselves, explore, build bonds, and move toward adulthood with both safety and challenge.
At Antedote, individuation is not understood as severing ties with family, but as transforming them. Parents, freed from the impossible burden of holding every stage themselves, can release their sons into a trusted community. Young men, instead of resenting their dependency, can step
into responsibility through shared work, dialogue, and guidance. What emerges is not rebellion, but growth. Not hostile dependency, but authentic belonging.
In this way, Antedote restores something essential: the rite of passage. We are building a new cultural container for young men to become themselves, in the presence of others, and for families to breathe again.
Individuation is never easy. It has always required risk, loss, and courage. But in an age without villages, the task has become nearly impossible for families to bear alone. Parents and sons find themselves caught in mutual anxiety, struggling to loosen the bonds that must eventually give way. Young men too often become resentful, anxious, or resigned, states that keep them stuck rather than set them free.
The work of Antedote is to stand in that gap: to provide the missing container, the community, the scaffolding for young men to move from dependence into maturity. To help them not only separate, but also belong. Individuation is not the rejection of family. It is the fulfillment of what family was always meant to prepare us for: the freedom to be oneself, and the courage to stand in relationship to the wider world.