Dorothy Dix Says...

Ah, the eternal problem of the not-so-empty nesters... A stepmother trying desperately to wean her grown children from home wrote to Dorothy Dix for advice. This column was first printed on December 27, 1940.

Dear Dorothy Dix - I married a widower with three nearly grown children. I was good to them and they love me. So well that they are not willing to leave mother and her cooking. The two girls married soon after leaving college and they chose fine, sensible, well-educated young men, but was it easy to get them out of the house? I should say not. They never would have gone if I had not kept moving into smaller and smaller apartments. Because they can’t come home, where there is no room for them, they have settled down to a salutary routine of cooking and housekeeping and baby-rearing. Now the problem is the boy. He is 21. Won’t go to school. Won’t work. Hates the slightest physical or mental exertion. Sits at home and does nothing but play solitaire and read newspapers and detective stories and smoke. How can I get him on his way out of the nest in a way beneficial to him?

MRS R. J. H.

Answer - Get the boy a job and tell him that henceforth he is his own meal ticket, and that if he wants to eat he will have to work. Then go to live for the time being in one room in a hotel so there will be no place for him. Evidently he is one of the birds that will never leave the warm home nest of his own accord. He will not only have to be pushed out of it, but you also will have to destroy the nest so he cannot return to it.

There is no problem that parents have to face that is more difficult than that of what to do with their lazy, purposeless children who settle down on mother and father to be supported, and who refuse to make the slightest effort to provide for themselves.

It is a problem so complicated with a false idea of parental duty, and so mixed up with maudlin affection, that most fathers and mothers lack the nerve and backbone to solve it in the only rational way. Which is by turning the youngsters out on their own and locking the door behind them.

But few parents have the hardihood to apply such a drastic remedy, although they know it is the only cure. They can’t bear to think that Mamie may be having to cook a poor meal over a gas jet, or Sammy may have no nice, comfortable bed to sleep in. So they let Mamie and Sammy sit around idle year after year, with nothing to do but play golf or pool or follow some sort of temperamental occupation which brings in no pay envelope.

All of us know dozens of cases like these. We know plenty of homes in which there are husky young men and women with plenty of intelligence and plenty of energy in amusing themselves, who positively refuse to leave home long years after they should have been out of it and about their own business.

It is the knowledge that there is always home to stay in and three square meals a day that is responsible for nine-tenths of the no-account loafers that encumber the earth.

It is the boys and girls who know that they can always go back home and be taken care of who are the quitters and shirkers, who throw up a job the minute it gets hard sledding and there are disagreeable bosses to be contended with.

The boys and girls who have no one but themselves to depend on, nowhere to go but the room their labor pays for, nothing to eat but what they can earn, are the ones who stick to their work and put their hearts and backs in it until they win out to success.

So the parents who are afflicted with parasitic children who refuse to take an education or hold on to a job do their youngsters the greatest kindness they can possibly perform when they follow the example of the birds and push them out of the nest and make them try their own wings.