"Kids Should Remain In The Home Until They Are Married"

Adult kids don't belong at home. That's not frumkeit, but failure.

I was at someone’s house for Shabbos, sitting at the table, minding my own kugel, when the father of the home casually drops a line that made me choke on my seltzer. He says, completely straight-faced, that kids should remain in the home until they are married.

Not “it is nice when kids stay close.” Not “I hope they stick around.” No. A full, confident declaration that a twenty six year old adult should basically be a basement pet until they put on a ring.

And immediately my brain flashed back to my piece on sheltering, because this mindset is not just sheltering, it is the final evolutionary form. It is sheltering with a black belt, the yeshiva gedolah of insecurity.

Think about what someone is really admitting when they say this. They are announcing to the world that they have zero confidence in their own parenting. Not low confidence, but zero, negative numbers. They are basically confessing, “If my child walks into the world unsupervised, the entire value system I supposedly raised them with will evaporate in fifteen minutes.” If they believed they parented even slightly decently, they would trust that their kid can survive in an actual apartment, paying actual bills, making actual decisions.

But no, in this messed up worldview, the moment the child crosses the property line, the neshama spontaneously combusts.

And here is the irony they never notice. The purpose of parenting is to prepare your child to stand on their own, not to keep them cloistered in your musty basement. If your kid is a legal adult and still living at home by default, something already failed. Staying home as an adult is not “fine,” it is stagnation with a Shabbos plate. At some point you graduate from childhood and move out into actual life.

What is not fine is inventing a theology where trapping your grown children under your roof is suddenly the holy approach. That is not Judaism, but anxiety disguised as piety. It is fear marketed as frumkeit and it says far more about the parent than it does about the world outside.

If you cannot trust the morals you put into your children to survive a studio apartment four blocks away, the problem was never “the world.” The problem was the parenting.