My 39-year-old brother-in-law is dependent on his parents. What can we do?

My 39-year-old brother-in-law still lives with his parents, taking pocket money from them and allowing them to pay for everything for him (including business class flights). He never lived with them; even when he was studying abroad at university, he lived in the family apartment that his parents had paid for.

He is a kind and easy-going person. live and he has a good job, but he doesn't seem to have any friends and has never had a serious girlfriend. I want to have compassion for him and I want him to have a better, fuller life, for his own good. I've spent over 10 years talking to him (and, separately, his mother) about how he plans to move out and live his own life, even helping him view apartments, but it never happens. never. He has few life skills and can't seem to do anything on his own when his mom isn't around.

My husband and I are frustrated and sad that my brother-in-law is letting his life go, especially since he is almost 40 and says he wants to get married and have kids. We also feel frustrated with the co-dependency of him and his mother, and that the money spent on him could be used for his parents' retirement. What can we do?

Eleanor says: The first thing you can do is recognize where this problem and this life belongs: hers. It can be nerve-wracking to see someone you care about wasting their potential, but you will only enter a cycle of mutual resentment if you feel that frustration as your own - as if it thwarts your expectations and your vision of life. a good life, not his. .

The next question is, is this something he or his parents would like to change? This is the only fulcrum on which real change rests. Motivation and self-respect just aren't the kind of things we can sustain for very long when we're doing them for someone else's sake. He's unlikely to make lasting changes because others think he should - he'll have to come to think that too.

So how ( if so) can you get someone to want to change? The pragmatic reality may be that even if the situation frustrates you, expressing it could make it worse. He is someone who - for reasons that are his own concern, best discovered by a professional - chooses to stay with his parents instead of pursuing the life he says he wants.

Unless there is some hidden explanation like illness or a request from them that he stay, he seems like someone who finds more comfort in mom and dad than in the world. If he feels you view him as juvenile or failing, the risk is that he will only need the comforts that keep him at home.

May Maybe your best bet is to come from the opposite direction. To go it alone, your brother-in-law may first have to believe he can do it. It's difficult, because so far he has very little evidence that he is. One of the strange internal structures of big changes is how they require a kind of irrationality. We need to be able to set aside all the evidence about the kind of person we are, based on the choices we've made so far, and instead be guided by the hope that we might make a different choice. These are unreal levels of difficulty, but it's true - sometimes people need to feel great to make big changes. Maybe instead of focusing on how small he looks, you could focus on how taller he might feel.

Ya-t there a hobby or activity that really excites him? It doesn't matter how small he is. You could encourage him to chase it - enter a tournament, learn more about it, meet other people who do the same. Excitement about anything can restore some agency and energy, ideally in a way where trying isn't likely to fail. The more muscle memory he can develop for what it feels like to pursue something independently, the better.

And maybe you could create opportunities for him to learn these life skills. Sometimes people only learn something after they've suffered the consequences of not being able to do it. Could you try relying on him on a small scale - needing a helping hand, asking for help fixing a sink, asking what he would do with a tricky work problem? Things that force him to feel what it's like to work something out.

If he can't be moved by even small displays of excitement or problem solving, I think the.. .