Many baby boomers removed the burden of social expectations and duties from their children (including the duty to provide grandchildren) in the name of freedom. But it turns out that there is no freedom to move in zero gravity—you just float aimlessly. By refusing to weigh their children down with norms and hard economic realities, parents have left them unable to stand at all on their own two feet.

In the classic children’s tale Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie dramatizes the struggle that every child faces in coming of age. Peter famously declares his intention to “never grow up,” preferring to inhabit Neverland, the realm of innocence, play, and endless possibility. While he does his best to persuade the protagonist Wendy to join him in perpetual childhood, she ultimately accepts the call to return to the real world and prepare to accept adulthood’s mantles of responsibility.

Today, fewer and fewer Americans are following Wendy’s example, opting instead to remain with Peter in Neverland: never marrying, never having children, and sometimes never even leaving their parents’ basement.

A thought-provoking recent Wall Street Journal feature, “What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up?” summarizes the disturbing trends: plunging rates of marriage and family formation, a near-majority of 18- to 34-year-olds who see no reason to ever have kids, and a country in which nearly a tenth of 30- to 40-year-olds still live with their parents—and seeks to grapple with what is behind them. Predictably, the writer focuses on financial factors, but with some puzzlement, given that young adults are, by most measures, significantly richer than their far more self-reliant parents and grandparents were at the same stage of life.

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