Camp Aims to Get Young Men on Their Feet — and Out of Mom’s House

  • Share
  • Read Later
Taxi / Getty Images

Failure to Launch apparently isn’t just a terrible Sarah Jessica Parker movie but an actual phenomenon among young men. Thanks to the sluggish economy and high unemployment rates, more young men across the U.S. are living at home with their parents than in years past.

Of course, much has been made of the increasingly dismal state of today’s young men. But things don’t seem to be picking up, as the Associated Press reports that “[f]ederal statistics show that young men are, for instance, nearly twice as likely to live at home with their parents than young women their age. They’re also less likely to finish college, or to have a job.”

(MORE: 10 Perfect Jobs For The Recession)

But now, according to the same AP story, there’s something that can be done about it. Instead of hiring a woman to pose as your son’s girlfriend — as the frazzled parents do in a certain rom-com — send them on a retreat. The Insight camp takes 18 to 23 year-old men and hosts them stay for three or four-month stretches. During that stay, the men are taught and encouraged to make and achieve a series of goals ranging from the (very) basic like getting out of bed to the advanced like finding a job.

But surely, you might be thinking, these boys’ parents must have taught them these sorts of lessons when they were growing up? Well apparently not, and now they’re literally paying for it. A stay at the camp costs $350 a day and most of these young men’s parents are footing the bill.

The whole thing, frankly, sounds more dubious than the plot of the movie which inspired the phenomenon’s name. While NewsFeed can grasp the bleakness of the current job-market and can even appreciate the challenges facing young college graduates, we fail to see how spending thousands of dollars on a retreat teaching you when to go to bed will help your situation. If this doesn’t embody first-world problems, then NewsFeed gives up now.

MORE: ‘Broetry’: Poetic Meanderings for the Everydude