Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

"There are always good reasons, good excuses, extenuating circumstances that have led to your superhero status as Mom the Enabler. And like most superheroes, you find that you are wholly unappreciated and constantly having to prove that you are one of the good guys; you are constantly on call but it's getting exhausting."
— Perdonna Pisano, Mothering Millenials, 2018

Your adult child is living at home. Why is that? There are many reasons for the situation, but one of the key reasons is: you have not committed to your child's independence. It certainly is not your fault, but if you perceive that it is a problem, there is a good book to read.

Perdonna Pisano wrote Mothering Millennials to share her story, offer ideas, and strengthen your resolve to get better results. I recently had the opportunity to visit Perdonna and her husband Anthony, who are known locally as Sarah and Pi, at their ranch in Bedrock, Colorado. Their ranch is a delightful home to horses and dogs nestled in Paradox Valley. Out on the main road through town they own the historic general store which is stocked with all those things you need on a camping or rafting trip. Their store has large carved wood signs proclaiming it has been "Proudly Serving Outlaws Since 1883." These are genuinely good people.

Completed in October 2018, Perdonna's book shares not only her story but also gives parents excellent tools for self-assessment and for guiding their adult children to a better life. Many insights are available in these pages. You'll see that your love for your child should encourage you to support their independence, that they'll be happier with greater freedom and privacy, that just as they learned to walk as toddlers they are capable of leaving the nest now.

Why do you need tools for self-assessment, though? Is anything the matter with who you are and how you've been behaving? Possibly not, but the odds are very good that you and your child or children living at home have arrived at some unhealthy habitual behaviours that may be described as co-dependent. Perhaps you have been or are being manipulated. Perhaps you are denying yourself good things in life such as privacy, love, intimate time with your spouse or time to date and find a spouse if you seek one, while at the same time hampering the emotional development of your adult child.

Even if none of these concerns apply to you, my experience of Mothering Millennials is that critical thinking, spiritual self-assessment, and emotional healing are available to you from reading this book. Please consider a few of the topics found within, such as the emotional manipulation exercise, the cost calculator exercise, tough love, what's so bad about your child finding her way into and out of the gutter, the meaning of grace, the atonement meditation, meditation to create the future, the time travel journal exercise to revisit the past, creating a vision board, observing self-talk, and many more.

One of the greatest topics is the tiny heart meditation, which goes along with the open heart meditation, doing what makes your heart sing, and the self-care writing exercise. You really should consider whether all your choice taking should come from the mind or from the heart. Yes, we live in a culture that emphasises the importance of rationality, coldly intellectual calculation, and which says you should only do what is logical. But we are not purely logical creatures.

Indeed, my view has always been that there is a logical, an emotional, and a spiritual aspect to each person. You cannot function as the Vulcan science officer Spock in the Star Trek television shows and films being completely unemotional because you yourself are not of that same species. Indeed, it is an aspect of that fictional narrative that Vulcans would have a very emotional period every seven years called " amok time" described in the original series episode of the same name. So not even Vulcans are without emotion.

Moreover, healthy emotions are good for you. There are good reasons to have emotional reactions, and if a behaviour purports to be logically best for you but feels completely wrong, then it isn't actually best. You cannot measure everything on the logic scale while ignoring your emotions. Nor can you dwell only on logic and emotions while ignoring your spiritual nature. It has been well said that we are not really human beings who have spiritual experiences, but that we are spiritual beings who are currently having human experiences.

Perdonna offers to help bring you into touch with your spiritual existence. She writes in her bonus chapter at the end of the book about angels and spirit guides. She conducts workshops to help you with the tiny heart and open heart meditations. She shares her thoughts about numerology, the Kabbalah, the Ancient Grandmothers, and many spiritual events in her life. Finding your way in the universe involves understanding the nature of our multi-dimensional universe, which includes not only the three spatial dimensions and the one time dimension of classical mechanics, but according to string theory perhaps as many as twelve dimensions, and almost certainly many thousands of other dimensions. Of great significance is the lesson on your parallel universe and how to be the star of your own narrative thread.

You are who you choose to be. So are each of your children. The choices you have taken in these matters are important, and the work you are doing on improving yourself affects everyone around you. What do you really want for your adult child who is living at home? You want them to thrive and flourish and be as awesome a being as they are able to become. Guiding them on that journey to independence and self-sovereignty is important. Perdonna's book Mothering Millennials offers you many tools and techniques for giving good guidance, as well as receiving good guidance from all around you.

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, actor, dancer, and friend. You can find him at Dayton Friends Meeting, at Shakespeare in South Park of Dayton, and at events around the United States. He is currently working with the team at Kaneh on their August 2019 product launch. He also supports Resilient Ways Foundation, Houston Space Society, and Science of Society Foundation.