They should be glad he wants to spread his wings.

Not all parents are excited about their kids growing up. In their ideal world, their adult children would live with them indefinitely, spending every evening at the family dinner table and every night sleeping in their childhood bedrooms. You would assume that failure to launch would distress nearly all empty nesters, but you’d be surprised by how many aging parents are not ready to move on to their next stage of life. They miss the feeling of having their family together all the time, and their child’s independence gets in the way of holding on to that fantasy. 

Some parents want their adult kids to live at home for practical reasons. Maybe one of them has issues and needs their kids to help out during flare-ups. If they live in a high-cost-of-living area, they know their kids would really struggle to save any money if they had to spend half of their income on rent. These practical considerations should be kept in mind, and if living together benefits both the parents and their adult children, then they should go for it. But no adult child should be held hostage in their childhood home under any circumstances. It doesn’t matter if their parents don’t think they can support themselves. If a young person is eager and willing to go out on their own and live in less-than-ideal conditions for the trade-off of independence, their parents should encourage them to do so. They’re going to learn a lot more from three years of living independently from their parents than they’d learn from pretending like they’re still in high school. They might sacrifice some savings by choosing not to live at home, but it might be worth the peace of being responsible for yourself.