Failure to Launch
The Efficacy of Intrinsic Motivation in the Successful Transition of Teenagers into Adults
In Mark Conville’s “ Failure to Launch,” the author recounts his time as a clinical psychologist specializing in young adults who struggle with transitioning into adulthood after highschool. He also describes relevant challenges that many parents face today in redefining their relationship with their adult children and why when it comes to struggling transitioners, parenting techniques that may have worked during adolescence no longer work when their child is an adult. When a transitioner is “no longer required to fulfill unspoken or spoken expectations and stay engaged,” McConville states maintaining interdependence, mutuality, and existential hope serve as three critical cornerstones that represent a successful transition into adulthood.
Transitioners generally have a hard time engaging in and maintaining interdependent roles in which a person must consistently interact with another person in order to meet their goals. These interdependent rules are particularly important to transitioners in that they represent a paradigm shift in which the administrative roles of everyday life are shifted from the parent to the child. Instances which require interdependence include everyday responsibilities like filling out forms, paying bills, attending to license renewals, and changing the oil. Conville argues that fulfilling small mundane tasks represent a transition into adulthood because it requires someone to actively take ownership of their lives and follow through with commitments that they deem important. By doing so, they are directing the design of their own lives and taking responsibility for their own failures and successes.
The author further states that struggling transitioners must learn and integrate the concept of mutuality in their lives. Mutuality is formed when the relationship takes on a more “reciprocal appreciation, where relationships are more equal, or horizontal.” Transitioners must first develop a sense of mutuality in their relationship with their parents as it allows them to gain a genuine sense of adulthood. This mindset is achieved when a transitioner deprioritizes “what will happen to me or my wants” and instead prioritizes “what will happen to my bond or connection or relationship with my parents.” By seeing their parents more as people as opposed to someone of higher ranking them themselves, transitioners become more tolerant of their parents disapproval or disappointment and enter into a more independent state of mind. This desire for independence generally serves as the inertial force for developing a relationship based on mutuality. With this horizontalizing of relationships, transitioners can also focus on forming a more concrete sense of self. Although many transitioners desire this independence, without mutuality, a crisis occurs in which a transitioner's growth becomes stunted.
Struggling transitioners also generally suffer from a lack of direction, or have a sense of hopelessness that makes it almost impossible for them to seriously reflect on their current situation and consider different ways of thinking and living. Often, struggling transitioners are absorbed in the present tense and find themselves in bubble worlds, which serve as a substitute life structure complete with a “network of involvements, commitments, objectives, obligations, and relationships.” Of course these worlds hold no real life value and although they can be considered relatively healthy hobbies for others, they tend to consume transitioners and drain their time and energy. Examples of bubble worlds can include computer games, poker, or drug usage. In summation, all the time and energy transitioners spend developing themselves within these bubble worlds reflect little to no positive improvement in their real lives.
Unsurprisingly, when asked to consider adulthood, transitioners lack existential hope, or a “hope that is more open-ended.” This “paradoxically involves a sort of active waiting for an outcome that is uncertain.” This more open-ended approach to life is essential because as transitioners embark on paths that are uncertain or unspecified, those with existential hope are able to do so because they “surmise that the path as well as destination will be hospitable.” Existential hope serves as a catalyst for jump-starting a transitioner's journey into adulthood and manifests into actions related to adulthood: which includes going to school, learning a trade, developing marketable knowledge, or joining the workforce.
Ultimately, struggling transitioners must be intrinsically motivated in order to successfully overcome the challenges and necessities of adulthood. Intrinsic motivation stems from an individual's inner desire, and usually presents itself in the form of interest, initiative, and in the best scenario, passion. When transitioners are placed in situations where they feel as if they have no choice but to take initiative, an “aha moment” generally paves the way for interactions that require them to try to solve their own problems. As such, transitioners begin to change their attitude and behaviors towards adulthood and develop a sort of existential hope that ultimately leads to intrinsic motivation.
