Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
![](https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/jenny-100x100.jpg)
The story of Michael Rotondo, the 30-year-old New Yorker whose parents took out an eviction order in an effort to get him to move out of their house, has captured the world’s imagination. While it might be unlucky for Mr Rotondo that – thanks to global media – he has become the international poster-son for millennial filial dysfunction, sympathy with his parents tends to increase the more one reads of the case.
Mr Rotondo – who is a father himself, of a young boy to whom he has disputed access – has been living at home with his parents Christina and Mark since the age of 22. Last year they finally decided that they would like him to move out, a view that they expressed clearly in five notices before taking things to court.
Their letters reveal an agonised struggle to combine continuing parental assistance with frustration at his long-term inaction. The letter in February, in which they also gave him $1,100 to help with finding a new place to live, reeks of desperation. Under the heading “Some advice” they told him: “Sell the other things you have that have any significant value…this is particularly true of any weapons that you might have”, and “There are jobs available even for those with a poor work history like you. Get one – you have to work!” Behind the headlines, the details of the case – hinting at deeper personal issues in their son – are serious, painful and sad.
This is, of course, an extreme case – but variations on such disputes are more frequent in Italy, for example, where grown-up children are often reluctant to leave home. Italians blame this in part on a phenomenon dubbed “mammismo”: a somewhat stifling, infantilising bond of affection between sons and mothers, continuing into the adult years. In 2011 a Venetian couple took similar court action – any allure of mammismo, presumably, having long ago expired – arguing that their 41-year-old son had a job but refused to get his own place, still expecting his meals to be served and clothes washed and ironed by his increasingly elderly parents. There was even, in some reports, a suggestion that the son had become aggressive at requests to leave.
Connected to this culture of “mammismo” is the emergence of “bamboccioni”: the somewhat derogatory Italian term meaning “big babies,” applied to grown-up children who are still living with their parents (65% of young adults aged 18-34, a higher proportion than in any other European country.) The factors behind this go beyond the cultural to the economic and political: one key factor in keeping young Italians at home, increasingly familiar in the UK, is the prohibitively high cost of renting. It is combined in Italy with high youth unemployment (currently around 35 per cent). A strikingly high number of well-educated young Italians are now leaving Italy to go and work elsewhere – finding, perhaps, that it is easier to leave Italy than to live in Italy and leave home.
In the UK, too, the number of young adults still living at home with their parents is now at an all-time high – one in four 20 to 34 years olds in 2017, and the proportion is higher still among young men at one in three.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe