How to Get Your Adult Kid off the Couch

Bold strategies for navigating the quarterlife crisis

Welcome back to Geoff Rodkey’s Bad Advice! Today, we’re taking another plunge into the bottomless well of parent-child issues—with bonus detours into career management and microeconomics—courtesy of this question from Vampire Tofu, who supplied her own pseudonym but then signed off as “A Mom on the Edge,” leaving me a little confused as to her preferred form of address:

“I’m at my wit’s end here! My son, the “Computer Whiz,” has finally graduated after what felt like an eternity of ramen noodles and late-night coding sessions. But lo and behold, he’s now a couch ornament, with his degree in computer science collecting more dust than his social skills.

He’s applied to so many jobs that I’m starting to think his resume might just be a new form of digital art. 

Any advice on how to launch my homegrown tech guru into the orbit of employment? Or at least off the couch?

Sincerely, A Mom on the Edge (of buying more ramen)”

Thanks for writing in, Vampire Tofu and/or A Mom on the Edge! 

Let’s pluck the low-hanging fruit first: QUIT BUYING HIM RAMEN. It has no nutritional value, and it’s so cheap he ought to be able to pay for it himself even if he has to rummage through the cushions of the couch he’s sitting on to come up with the necessary buck-and-a-quarter.

Second—and I can’t believe I’m writing this, because there’s nothing I love more than wagging my finger in smug condemnation of twentysomethings—the problem may not lie with your kid. 

It might just be bad luck. Due to a confluence of interest-rate hikes, pandemic-era overhiring, and possibly the first stirrings of the A.I. apocalypse, 2024 looks like the worst job market for computer science grads since the dot-com bust of 2000. Here are two recent articles, from Miami of Ohio’s student newspaper and The Brown Daily Herald, that both underscore how hard it is to land a gig in that field right now.

And while the Bureau of Labor Statistics will tell you the job outlook for comp sci majors is still better than most fields over the next decade, what do they know? If we’re on the cusp of a paradigm shift in the tech industry, it won’t show up in the BLS numbers until it’s already happened.

I’m speaking from experience, because my own industry collapsed a while back. Let me tell you…

A cautionary tale about the economics of toilet humor.

I used to make a really good living writing poop jokes. Like, shockingly good. Hand to God, you’d be stunned at how lucrative it was. 

This poop joke alone put two-and-a-half kids through college:

Then social media came along and ruined the whole grift. Platforms like Twitter and YouTube decoupled bathroom humor from its traditional delivery vehicle of anodyne family films in which the main character, portrayed by a $25-million-a-movie Hollywood actor, learns a mind-numbingly obvious lesson about the importance of not ignoring your kids. 

Almost overnight, the market was flooded with amateurs, just giving their shit away. As an art form, the poop joke became not only commoditized, but vulnerable to direct, lethal competition from hundreds of millions of funny cat videos. 

And as anybody who’s taken a first-year economics class can tell you, when the supply of a commodity expands almost to infinity, its price inevitably falls to zero.

Which is why you’re reading this column for free.

And you know what? Not a single goddam Bureau of Labor Statistics report saw it coming. Poop-joke professionals like me were caught with our pants down, and while I can’t predict whether the same fate is in store for today’s computer science majors¹, you might want to point your son in the direction of my previously published thoughts on the relative attractiveness of careers in plumbing, electrical, or HVAC to see if it sparks any interest in a career switch. 

But that’s a long-term play. In the short term, you absolutely, positively need to get that kid off the couch ASAP. 

Because…

The mental health of an unemployed recent college grad is perilously fragile.

This is another subject on which I can claim direct personal experience. Psychologically, the two years after I graduated from college were the most difficult of my life. 

Not that they WERE difficult. They just felt like it.

This was partly because of what an absolute cakewalk the years preceding them had been. To be a full-time college student, at least as I had the absurd good fortune of experiencing it in the early Nineties, was to live in a mental universe of clearly defined and easily achievable measures of self-worth. 

As long as my grades were passable and I was clawing my way to some mediocre level of accomplishment in an extracurricular activity, I had nothing—literally nothing—to worry about. There was unlimited food in the dining hall, somebody else was getting paid to clean the toilets in my dorm, and I would never again enjoy so much concentrated access to friends, potential sex partners, and consequence-free consumption of intoxicants. 

Then I graduated, and everything went to hell. 

Not only did all of those perks vanish overnight, but I quickly discovered that nothing in my seventeen consecutive years of full-time education had taught me basic life skills like food preparation, domestic upkeep, financial literacy (especially with respect to credit card debt), auto maintenance, navigating health care bureaucracies, or renting an apartment without getting ripped off.

As a human being, I felt—and pretty much was!—next to useless.

I compounded this problem by making one of the biggest mistakes of my life: I didn’t immediately look for a full-time job.

Having unwisely concluded that the fastest route to establishing a writing career was to pretend I already had one, I tried to subsist on a handful of short-term writing gigs that didn’t pay me nearly enough to support myself. As a result, I stayed both underemployed—with WAY too much free time for a kid in his early twenties—and financially semi-dependent on my well-meaning but probably too indulgent parents for about eighteen months, by the end of which I’d dug myself into a moderately serious clinical depression.

The depression eventually lifted, not because I got therapy or medication—one of the many things I failed to learn in college was how to ask for help, even when I desperately needed it—but because I got a full-time job. 

It only paid ten bucks an hour, but the rent on the bedroom in my group house in a crime-ridden D.C. neighborhood was just $240, and it was close enough to a bus line that I didn’t need a car. So for the first time in my life, I was financially independent. 

Which felt AMAZING. And although it’d be years before I could recognize or articulate this, I learned what I think is a universally applicable life lesson:  

The only way to build self-esteem is by taking esteemable actions.

If you ask me (and you did, this is an advice column), the most esteemable action a young adult can take is to get a job that pays them enough to support themselves without help from their parents or anybody else. 

While propping up your kid financially may seem like an act of kindness, it’s often self-defeating, because once someone’s old enough to be an independent adult, anything that delays their actually becoming one risks imposing a not-insignificant tax on their mental and emotional well-being.

Plus, until your kid enters the adult workforce, he’ll be deprived of the similarly esteem-building realization that most people are either not very smart or not very motivated, and if he just shows up on time every day and does what’s expected of him with a positive attitude and at least a smidgen of concern for the people around him and the overall health of the organization that’s paying his wages, he’ll be eighty percent of the way to success.

Any job is better than no job, so if he can’t find something in his chosen field, the next best thing is whatever he can get, as long as it comes with a paycheck.

Having said all this, Vampire Tofu, I am not a licensed therapist, career advisor, or even someone who dispenses good advice. I have no idea what’s going on between your kid’s ears, or if anything in my experience applies to him.

But if some fraction of the above resonates, and your kid’s unwilling or unable to launch himself off the couch, I have two suggestions. First…

See if you can traffic him to a foreign military. 

It’s kind of a shame that underage sex slavery has given human trafficking such a lousy reputation. And don’t get me wrong: that stuff is really bad! I am morally outraged at the idea that Hillary Clinton is harvesting adrenochrome from the brains of kidnapped children, whether she’s actually doing it or not. 

But I do worry that as a culture, we might have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. If we’re talking about an able-bodied adult male who’s not being pimped, should it really be that big a deal to secure him employment without his consent? Some kids just need a kick in the pants to get their career started. 

And if you lived in 18th-century Liverpool, all you’d have to do is take him out to dinner at a restaurant near the docks, get him drunk, then ask the waiter to call for a press gang. Your boy would wake up in the Royal Navy under sail to India, where you can bet he’d learn some marketable skills. 

It used to be soooo easy

Unfortunately, press gangs no longer exist, except possibly in a handful of ports like Mogadishu or Aden. Neither of which I’d recommend due to a lack of good restaurants. 

And while I have no doubt the Russian military would take your kid off your hands with no questions asked, given sanction-related travel restrictions, you may have a hard time getting one of their recruiters to come to your house and pick him up. 

The only ray of hope I can offer you: the French Foreign Legion is still a thing! And they’re hiring!

The bad news is that the minimum enlistment is five years, which is probably longer than the current downturn in the computer science job market will last. And in 2024, even the French Foreign Legion has gone so woke that they require consent. So if your kid nixes the idea, you’re back to square one.

And I do wonder, Vampire Tofu, if you’re capable of the kind of tough love necessary to traffic your son. Notwithstanding the swagger in your pseudonym, when push comes to shove, is it possible you’re all tofu and no vampire?

If that’s the case, you’ll have to go the passive-aggressive route:

Sell your house. 

I realize this sounds drastic. And I guess you could start small, by selling the couch your kid’s sitting on. But he’d probably just move to another piece of furniture.

And what’s the alternative? A gentle-yet-firm conversation about the many benefits of self-sufficiency, followed by a reasonable deadline for your son to find gainful employment and move out?

That would be awkward and uncomfortable. So as long as you’re old enough to qualify, wouldn’t you rather pass the responsibility for having that conversation to a security guard at the gate of a strictly age-enforced 55-and-up community like The Villages?

I think we both know the answer. And when you move into the new home that only has enough room for you, don’t put a couch in there until you’re absolutely sure your kid won’t try to sleep on it. 

Good luck! I hope this was unhelpful to both of you.

For everyone else who’s read this far: if you’re enjoying the answers, PLEASE SEND ME QUESTIONS! I’m running low, and I don’t want to start making them up. Because that would be cheating.

And if you’re a regular reader, I’d be eternally grateful if you could share my bad advice with others by picking your favorite column and sending the link to anybody who you think might find it as unhelpful as you did. Thanks!

1. In contrast to Vampire Tofu’s kid, I didn’t major in poop jokes before entering the poop-joke industry. I studied political science, which is an adjacent field in the sense that the effort to reduce politics to a science has occasionally laughable results, and the people who attempt it are sometimes full of shit.