Text 1. The stay-at-home kids

1. Read the first two paragraphs of TEXT 1. What is ‘post-adolescence’?

2. Scan TEXT 1. Put the people below into the following categories:

A experts

B mothers

С post-adolescents

Alain Audirac, Sophie Boissonnant, Ulf Clausen, Christianne Collange, Christine de Solliers, Natasha Chassagne, Alexis de Solliers

3. Read the article carefully, noting down the following points:

A the reasons for post-adolescence

B the reasons why it will probably continue

С the bad things about it

4. Find words or phrases with these meanings:

A absolute

B tendency

C found everywhere

D have been influential

E arrogantly

F unconcealed

G under constant attack

H assume

I too well-looked after

J to end (transitive)

K to end (intransitive)

* * *

When their children have grown up, most parents hope they will finally be able to use their cash for retirement savings or to buy a few home comforts.

Increasingly, parents are finding they have to bailout their children well into adulthood. Not only that, but many are having to provide rent free accommodation, because their children are forced by lack of money to live at home into their twenties and even thirties. As for the children, they have acquired a new name - Kippers, or Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings.

New financial pressures are making some parents feel that, one way or another, they just can't get rid of their children, a survey commissioned by the Money Programme has found. The problem is widespread. One in four parents has grown-up children living at home, the survey found.

For instance, at 25, Alfred Hennemann seems to have it made. A law student at the University of Bonn, he lives in a spacious four-room apartment in his parent’s home. He comes and goes as he wishes and as a rule cooks for himself. But when he is not in the mood to cook, he has a place waiting at the family table. As for the laundry, Alfred sorts his dirty clothes into piles and leaves them by the washing machine. His mother does the rest. As Alfred says, “She doesn’t mind yet.”

Alfred Hennemann is one of the hundreds of thousands of Europeans over the age of 20 who still live in their parent’s home. Some do so out of sheer necessity, when they have lost a job or are unable to find one. Some seek the perpetuation of a warm and supportive parent-child relationship. Some find it is just easier and cheaper to stay in the nest. Whatever their reasons, increasing number of young Europeans, especially well-educated, middle-class young adults, are simply not leaving home. The pattern is beginning to worry some parents and sociologists as well. “Post-adolescence” has emerged as a term to describe the phenomenon, which is now rampant in Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, West Germany and Sweden.

The current trend is an abrupt reversal of the pattern of the 1970s. At that time, says Alain Audirac of the French national demographic institute, “One census after another showed young people leaving home earlier and earlier. Recently, though, it’s been just the opposite”. In France, half the population between the ages of 18 and 25 still live ‘at home’; for those who are not married the figure is three out of four (75%). Italian studies in three cities, Padua, Bari and Matera, indicate that over 30 percent of the 25 to 34 age group live with their parents.

Statistics for West Germany are less dramatic, but Ulf Clausen, a German psychologist, points out: there are 450000 youngsters between 20 and 25 in this country who are jobless. They are forced to stay at home.

While the economic crisis and widespread youth unemployment undoubtedly played a part in keeping post-teenagers at home, the principal motivations have been sociological and psychological. Franco Ferrarotti, professor of sociology at Rome University, believes it is parents, rather than their children, who have changed. ‘Once, parents were seen as oppressors’, Ferrarotti argues. ‘But today, parental authority has softened. Before 1968, leaving home represented winning freedom. Now a generation of permissive parents has made it easy for the generation of ex-rebels to return to the fold.’

Sociologists and post-adolescents agree that shifting parental attitudes toward sex have revolutionized the living-at-home scene. Christine de Solliers, a 45 year-old divorcee in the Paris suburb of Evry, does everything possible to tempt her son Alexis, 21, back to the family homestead. Every Tuesday, Alexis and his girlfriend, Maud, also 21, come for dinner and spend the night together. The sexual revolution has changed everything in 20 years, says Christianne Collange, author of a best-selling book, ‘I, Your Mother’, on the changing relations between parents and grown children. Evelyne Sullerot, a French demographer says that the stay-at-homes are ‘undergoing a semi-initiation into a socio-sexual state. It is, in fact, a second adolescence’.

Loneliness, too, is tending to rush parents and their post-teen children closer together. Sophie Boissonant, a 20 year-old Paris student, tried living in a well-equipped studio apartment, but she quickly found that she missed the lively atmosphere at home and the company of her younger brothers. She has now moved back. She remarks philosophically: ‘I wanted to be independent, but I find it’s better being independent at home’. De Solliers, the mother of three children, admits that she ‘never imagined the day when the children would all be gone’. She is now considering buying a small house in an effort to tempt them back.

Some parents, though, have begun to rebel at what they see as flagrant exploitation of parents by their own children. Collange, whose book has made her a kind of spokesperson for beleaguered parents, complains that children aren’t even embarrassed at being completely dependent. They use the house like a hotel, with all services. They treat parents as moneybags and then ignore them or just plain insult them. Natasha Chassange, a French working mother with a 21-year-old daughter and a 22-year-old son at home says: ‘They take it for granted that the fridge will always be well stocked and the closet full of clean clothes. To get them to do anything around the house, you have to yell bloody murder’. A group of parents in Bremen, West Germany, has formed a self-help and counseling group called Toughlove, where they trade stories about their pampered post-teen children. Professional observers see some even deeper dangers in the emerging situation. ‘Today’, says Ferrarotti, ‘We have grown men with the behaviour patterns of teenagers. They are failing to mature, losing their masculinity, turning into what the French call vieux jeunes hommes, old young men’. Benoit Prot, who edits a magazine for French students, says today’s youngsters are ‘suffering from too much security and are becoming soft. One day, we may yearn back to the old fighting spirit of the 1968 rebels. At least they knew how to tell the world to go to hell’.

The trend towards later separation between European parents and children looks like it will last for some time to come. Youth unemployment on the Continent exceeds 15 per cent in every country and is not expected to fall for a number of years. Young people nowadays tend to get married later than they did a generation ago – if they marry at all. Those who do marry often head for ‘home’ when the relationship breaks up.

Much as parents complain about the overgrown louts hanging about their houses, many of them actually relish the situation. Mothers, especially divorcees and widows, want their kids at home for company. Working mothers, ridden with the guilt that they may have neglected their children in infancy, go on trying to atone for it when the ‘children’ are in their 20s. On the kid’s side, as well, the attractions of protracted adolescence are unlikely to diminish soon. ‘Nowadays’, writes Collange, ‘they don’t have to know problems of bed and board, they have no taxes and no bills and no serious points of difference with Mom and Dad’. What post adolescent in his right mind could turn down that kind of deal?

5. Using your notes from Exercise 4, summarize the reasons for post-adolescence, and its probable continuation.

Rendering

Render the following texts and comment on them.