How do get someone to be self supportive/ grow up, if it seems that they don’t want to?

The answer to the question in Y! Answers.


By Pi


The road to independence is NOT an automatic process. It has to be demonstrated and coached. Preferably by parents by not exclusively so—but there has to be some accountability with a consistent system of rewards and punishments along the way—and I don’t mean emotional or physical abuse either—more along the lines of curtailing and granting of privileges in progressive stages.

Problem today is that many parents quite often don’t have the intellectual and physical resources to be mentors to their own children.

I don’t buy the absent father equals delinquency bit either. Many fine independent people were raised in less than ideal conditions yet still managed to emulate someone they saw as a role model to what they deem success.

Dependent parents cannot teach independency just like an untrained person cannot do a successful operation that requires skill.

In fact, the average dependent person’s idea of success is to be dependent so in their own view they believe they are successes—and they are—according to their value system.

If you inject a lazy person with truth serum and ask them to give their definition of success they will probably answer “to do the least that I can get away with” and in that sense, hey they’re quite successful.

The stages towards dependency can be painful for some, an intellectual realization that leads to opportunities for others, but never an “easy road” and that is where the problem lies a lot of times;

Children have been spoiled to the point where they remain as dependent at age 20 as they were when they were 6.

A dependent kid of 20 yrs of age will need to go through the whole painful course in less time unless he or she can continually be supported indefinitely.

Say the little bird was allowed to stay in the mothers nest until it grew so big and heavy that learning to fly would be practically impossible—same analogy with grown “children.”