A recent opinion piece by Mark Steyn on Macleans.ca talked about the impacts of adult children living at home, pegged to the story of Giancarlo Casagrande, a 60-year-old Italian father who has been ordered by the Italian court to pay support to his 32-year-old daughter until she finishes her thesis — which she’s been working on for eight years.

This might sound utterly bizarre, but it’s simply an extreme example of the cultural shifts that have allowed adult children living at home to become such a problem all over the world (and it is a problem — statistics show that there are numerous financial and emotional consequences for both the parents and the adult child).

As Steyn says in his piece:

If you’re a 30-year-old Japanese gal or 38-year-old Italian guy, why move out of the house? You’ve got all the benefits of adulthood (shagging, boozing, your own TV) with none of the responsibilities (cooking, laundry, property tax bills). We’ve created a world in which a 37-year-old Italian male can stroll into a singles bar, tell the chicks he lives at his mum and dad’s place in the same bedroom he’s slept in since he was in grade school—and he can still walk out with a hot-looking babe. This guy would have been a laughingstock at any other point in human history.

To read the rest of Steyn’s piece, click here.