Grown-up kids who never grow up

How sad for Mums and Dads when the kids leave home. Past tense, I should add. Now the sadness is because they won't leave home.

And kids still don't want to leave home by their twentieth, thirtieth birthday, and even later. And they don't.

In UK, some parents blame affluence – rents are too high, there are not enough homes to rent, and sometimes that there's nowhere quite good enough for their brats, er, their model citizens.

Social media gets blamed often, which in a way is only fair because it's blamed for just about everything else that's wrong with society.

Well-off society

 Of course, in a society that is well off, and huge, and where accommodation is hardly plentiful, housing is bound to be a problem.

Financiers with money invested in renting won't be looking for the type of young people happy to lounge at home. To afford rent and the deposits necessary, people have to be motivated. It seems unlikely that the present generation of home-birds happiest at home long after their education is over will ever be sufficiently well-heeled.

Mum's cooking, like

'Still at home?' I asked a talkative fellow on the 281 the other day. 'Why, for heaven's sake?'

He mumbled quite a list. Eventually, just before my bus-stop, he admitted it was his mother's cooking. 'Nobody what I met every cooked as good as what she done.'

A friend excused her much older, well-divorced son, with the thought that he returned to look after her in her later years. At mealtimes, though, it is the son who is served at the table.

Another friend with two mature sons living at home told me, 'It was never like this in my day. My mum made it clear. Once you're 19, she said, out you go. And we did. We saw it as a sign that we were all grown up.

'Very strange kids don't see it that way now.'

Continues on the blogs for my ocean sailing adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com