The romantic comedy “Failure to Launch,” where Matthew McConaughey played a young man who is intelligent, good-looking and completely unmotivated. He still lives at home and seems to have no ambitions beyond playing video games, hanging out with his buddies and girls-girls-girls. In desperation, his parents hire a professional motivation consultant, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who pretends to fall in love with McConaughey’s character in the hope that a romantic relationship will motivate him to move out of his parents’ home and get his own life.

What’s Happen to Boys? They go off to college for 2-4 years, wastes thousands of dollars of their parents’ money, then gets bored and comes home to take up residence in their old room, the same bedroom where he lived when he was in high school. Now he’ll only work part-time (15-20 hours a week). I can understand why parents start pulling their hair out. This phenomenon cuts across all demographics. You’ll find it in families both rich and poor; black, white, Asian and Hispanic; urban, suburban and rural. According to the Census Bureau, fully one-third of young men ages 21 to 35 are still living at home with their parents - a 100% increase in the past 20 years.

No such change has occurred with regard to young women. Why? My friend and colleague Judy Kleinfeld, a professor at the University of Alaska, has spent many years studying this growing phenomenon. She points out that while some young women live at home nowadays as well, those young women usually have a definite plan. They’re working toward a college degree, or they’re saving money to open their own business and if you come back 3 years later, you’ll find that in most cases those young women have achieved their goal… earned their degree, opened their business, etc.

“The girls are driven; the boys have no direction,” is the way Kleinfeld summarizes her findings. Kleinfeld is organizing a national Boys Project, with a board composed of leading researchers and writers such as Sandra Stotsky, Michael Thompson and Richard Whitmire, to figure out what’s going wrong with boys. Maybe it has to do with environmental toxins that affect boys differently than girls. Maybe it has to do with changes in the workforce, with fewer blue-collar jobs and more emphasis on the service industry. Maybe it’s some combination of the above or other factors we haven’t yet identified.

The romantic comedy “Failure to Launch,” where Matthew McConaughey played a young man who is intelligent, good-looking and completely unmotivated. He still lives at home and seems to have no ambitions beyond playing video games, hanging out with his buddies and girls-girls-girls. In desperation, his parents hire a professional motivation consultant, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who pretends to fall in love with McConaughey’s character in the hope that a romantic relationship will motivate him to move out of his parents’ home and get his own life.

REMEMBER: It can be a little frightening moving out on your own but it’s also very empowering to be responsible for your own life.