Stay-At-Home Babies Should Be Kicked Out?
One of the latest moral panics coming out from a few European Union member states concerns our need to kick out of the family home those lazy, selfish and immature kids that should be adults. Far too many adult kids remain at the family home for far too long, or so it is claimed. Yes, we have a new moral panic on our hands.
The latest example of this moral panic comes from Italy of all the places. Italy the land of mother as being the big hero and icon for all. The land of ”Mamma”. However Italian minister, Renato Brunetta, calls for a kind of new law to force these ”bamboccione” to move away from the family home and to learn to stand on their own two feet and not be a ”mothers boy or girl”. Far too many people, sometimes 50 % in places, between the ages of 18 and 34 years of age are hanging on to the apron strings of Mamma. Minister Brunetta has called for 18 year old stay-at-home babies to be ruled to leave home and thereby become self-reliant and an individual asset to society.
This argument and debate is also quite a hot topic in many European lands. Many demand that we return to a kind of philosophy that says – every fish hangs by its own tail. This is a very hard-headed and brutal philosophy to live by. Of course we have many politicians that would like nothing better than to create as many individualised atoms in society as possible because then there are more private ownerships for taxing, less collective strengths for bargaining and more money passing hands in the consumerist merry-go-round. A politicians dream no more and no less. That is if you follow and believe in Thatcherite anti-social policy making.
Again we know quite well that certain politics fear the power of the family unit and especially the power of the larger extended-family unit. Russian communism tried so hard to destroy such family powers. They failed. Casino capitalism keeps trying to destroy any extended-family networks because they are less profitable. They fail too. Anyway I really cannot stand it when politics tries to make rules and laws that attempt to govern the powers of any family. The family is like a friendship group. There is here a kind of friendly subversiveness involved. Friends and family can survive and will survive even the most brutal of political manipulations. Long live the family I say and long live that kind of family which is happy to live as it does. Larger extended familes are quite useful in so many ways.
Yet surely we are adult enough to allow differences. I left home around 17 years of age but my cousin stayed with his mother and father. I fact my cousin is now 64 years of age and still remains in his original family home even after the death of his mother and father. That one home had proved very sustainable, practical and even ecological. But as far as I can see both my way and the way of my cousin was fair enough because we were different people. Surely we are adult enough to allow differences and not to make absurd rules to ”encourage” family members to be this way or that way to suit any political ideology.
I hope all of my four children (adults actually) feel the freedom to either fly away from the nest or stay. In fact even if they fly away towards new adventures they will know that they can also return whenever they might feel the need. Such is family. At least that is my attitude.
Message to politicians: stay away from things that do not concern you.
Anyway in the family home we have one of the last remaining sanctuaries for subversive behaviour. If I want to make a little doll of an Italian minister and then stick pins into it I can do so at home in safety. But such a comment I hardly can make in the public sphere – can I?
Steve Bowles
