Nesthocker Trend: When the kids just do not want to move out
It is Sunday, a bright day in Berlin, as the message of her daughter aufpoppt on the phone: "Hey mom, fancy a stroll in the park?"
Mom picks up the phone and starts typing, "Sorry darling, I can not, I have a date." And she wonders: is that touching or rather strange, when her 22-year-old daughter can not imagine anything better on such a day than to go for a walk with Mama?
Marie, the daughter, is again on the road with a friend who jealously squints on the screen: "You're fine, I wish my mom was so independent too."
Marie's cool mother is Gerlinde Unverzagt, author, single parent, four children in her twenties. When Marie, the youngest, returned to her old nursery after a stay abroad, Unverzagt started to think.
Is something lazy about the harmony?
Staying together for longer, celebrating together more often, lending each other t-shirts? Is this just the logical continuation of a loving childhood? Or is something lazy about this harmony? In her latest book, Generation of Best Friends, why it is so difficult to let go of the grown-up children today (€ 16.95, Beltz), she has collected questions and answers, and daughter Marie added a few chapters from her perspective.
What is certain: adults Children and their parents are closer today than ever? and on many levels.
One factor is increased costs
On the one hand spatially: In 1970, every second person moved away from home at the age of 20, today every third person in the age group 25 to 34 still lives or returns home, two thirds of them men. Not infrequently, this is partly because it is convenient for the grown-up kids: why exploding city-center rents for shared rooms or apartments when you can get it cheaper at home, including laundry service and catering made by Mama ? In addition come increased demands.
Unverzagt remembers:
"I lived in an occupied house in the early 20's, with orange juice boxes as furniture, and my children are expecting PowerShopping at Ikea."
This fits the findings of the current Shell Youth Study, which gives young adults the label "pragmatic generation".
Pretty much best friends
Nevertheless, it is usually not only about cost-benefit balance. 90 percent of all adolescents say they have a good relationship with their parents. Nearly three-quarters would raise their own children the way they themselves have, a value that has risen steadily since the early 1990s. And according to a study by the TU Chemnitz, every second young woman regularly discusses personal matters with her mother.
Anyone who distrusts the naked numbers only has to turn on at any TV casting show: Hardly anything is so tearfully staged, as when mom and dad come to visit the model or music training camp.
A surprising ritual for those who were young in the eighties and nineties: one would rather be buried in the ground than to fall around the neck in front of the camera on camera. But then parents would be too? did not come up with the idea to accompany ten-year-olds on the way to school and? freshman students to study guidance? Both are commonplace today.
Renaissance of the we-feeling
Perhaps the new closeness is also an expression of the zeitgeist, the renaissance of the we-feeling. Whether "public viewing", "sharing economy" or Scandinavian hygge cosiness: unlike in the past, mega-individualistic? Times do we long in the? shaky world of today across generations? togetherness, predictability, tranquility.
It may be coincidence - or not that? Number of adult nursery residents has risen rapidly since the early 1990s? the time when the 9/11 attack marked a turning point, from the fun society to the new threat feeling.
Author Gerlinde Unverzagt finds the moving together comprehensible. Nevertheless, she sees it critically in this form:
"The word 'family' has gotten an unpleasant pathos today, and conservative values are back in full swing."
In fact, there is a lot of the current development that causes her abdominal pain. Not so much the comfort of the younger ones? but even more the neediness of the elders. Unverzagt believes:
"Having children is a deeply narcissistic project for many people today"
As a child, she herself was more "involved" while children and adolescents today are conscientiously supported, from the dwarven music class to the "gap year" in Southeast Asia after graduation. An investment whose fruits you would like to profit from.
It does not have to go as far as New York's East Side society mothers, who get financial bonuses for teenage grades from their husbands, as if the child were a mutual fund and their success a maternal management task.
Children as meaning of life
But even average middle-class part-time mothers in Germany are not immune to such attacks, Gerlinde Unverzagt believes:
"Although working with mothers today is much more common than it was a generation ago, women especially consider their children as meaningful and identity-creating - and then do not bear it, if at this central point a void arises."
Because then you would have to ask unpleasant questions: What about my partnership? What else is my life? Or, exacerbated by single parents: How do I deal with the feeling of abandonment? Of visible aging?
The alternative is tempting: adult children at home to prepare all the comforts, including parties together with whimsy WhatsApps in between, and make the certainty: Hey, I'm maybe 30 years older, but inwardly just as young and cool!
The sentence of a single mother from a TV documentary is Unverzagt particularly uncomfortable in the memory remained: 'My son is the man of my life'? such a statement borders on emotional abuse for me! "
The non-letting skills are more likely to affect the metropolitan education environment
The psychotherapist and developmental psychologist Christiane Wempe from Ludwigshafen sees things a little less dramatically: "This non-relinquishing ability, this role reversal, which concerns more of a particular, metropolitan education milieu, not the society as a whole, but in general one can say: separation processes are today a bit more buffered, not so radical anymore. "
This has to do with the modern media: If you half-heartedly promised 20 years ago on the Interrail tour once a week to visit a phone booth, today parents are by messenger service daily in the picture, which Mäuschen has breakfasted in Jakarta or Hanoi.
On the other hand, CVs are less predictable today. Abi at 19, civil service, study plus shared room? that is totally nineties. Modern stories sound more like this: graduating with 17, one year of work and travel, with 18 only back home and apply for a place to study.
How do you relieve yourself from letting go?
All experts are in agreement: Inner and outer independence are an important development step for the younger ones, as well as the older ones let go. That this can be a painful process? like any big change in life ?, no one disputes.
Often it is small rituals that facilitate the transition. "When my eldest son moved out, we had a date in the first six months: once a week, everyone comes to eat together," recalls Gerlinde Unverzagt.
Above all, she recommends parents to deal with what is inevitable in advance: "Where children withdraw from their own lives, fill up the open spaces with their own, this is a good preliminary exercise."
This begins with the first pub stroll after the baby-lactation and goes on with the first holiday without children, if they prefer to go on a party tour to Spain as a cultural trip to the Baltic States.
The emptiness as an opportunity
An emptiness, yes? but one that offers space for new content: again have time for the partner, give gas in the job, freedom for friendship, hobbies, travel. Finally, it is something fundamentally different, whether a love relationship breaks down or an adult child fledges, Unverzagt says: "The daughter, the son goes? And still loves us."
By the way, her daughter Marie is currently applying for a place to study. The field of study is clear, the place of study is not yet. With one exception: Berlin, Marie thinks, does not work.
