Isn’t 32 a little old for an allowance?

In creaky melodramas of the old school, there came a moment when the plucky heroine would announce her intention to go ahead with some ill-advised courtship, and her father would threaten to cut her off without a cent.

Easier said than done. In Italy, a court has ordered, upon pain of having his assets seized, Giancarlo Casagrande of Bergamo to pay his daughter an allowance of 350 euros—approximately $525—every month. Signor Casagrande is 60. His daughter Marina is 32. She was supposed to have graduated with a degree in philosophy eight years ago but, though her classes ended way back at the beginning of the century, she’s still working on her thesis. So Signor Casagrande is obliged to pay up, either in perpetuity or until the completion of Marina’s thesis, whichever comes sooner. Her thesis is about the Holy Grail. Which it’s hard to see why Marina would have any use for, given that she’s already found a source of miraculous life-transforming powers in Papa’s chequebook.

Marina is what they call in Italy a “bambocciona,” which translates, roughly, as “big baby”—the term for the ever-growing number of young adults still living at home. Not their home—with a spouse and young kids and putting out the garbage and repainting the stairs and so forth—but at their parents’ home, in the same bedroom they’ve slept in since they were in diapers.

There was, as usual, a momentary spasm of ineffectual outrage over the judge’s decision against Signor Casagrande, whose very name is mocked by this demographic trend: the casa would seem much grande if only Junior would move out. But in Italy they rarely do. Renato Brunetta, the Minister of Public Administration and Innovation, announced his support for a law requiring children to skedaddle out of their parents’ pad when they turned 18. That would certainly be an Innovation but might well put strains on Public Administration: right now, seven out of 10 adults aged 18-39 live with their folks. Indeed, Signor Brunetta blushed to admit that he himself had lived at home until he was 30. “My mother made my bed up until I left and I am ashamed of that,” he confessed. Italy increasingly resembles the old Benny Hill sketch in which he and his dolly bird are bikers who can’t find affordable housing.

“Why don’t you move back in with your parents?” suggests the BBC interviewer.

“We would do,” says Benny, “but they’ve moved back in with theirs.”

Indeed. Sixtysomething Italians ordered to pay “child support” to thirtysomething kids should move back in with their nonagenarian parents and sue for a monthly allowance backdated to the early ’70s.

Italy’s bamboccioni have their equivalents around the developed world. In Japan, they’re called parasaito shinguru—or “parasite singles,” after the horror film Parasite Eve, in which alien spawn grow in human bellies feeding off the host until they’re ready to burst through. In Germany, they’re Nesthockers with no plans to move out of “Hotel Mama.” In Britain, they’re KIPPERS (Kids In Parents’ Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings). In Canada, we have the phenomenon but without any disparaging term: by 2006, 43.5 per cent of adults aged 20-29 lived with their parents. Between 1981 and 2006, the percentage of men in their late twenties living at home doubled, and the percentage of women near tripled. By 2006, 31 per cent of Canadian men aged 25-29 were still sleeping in their childhood bedroom each night.

In 2007, Diana West wrote a book called The Death of the Grown-Up. Complacent types might assume she was speaking metaphorically. But in much of the Western world the condition is very literal—and increasingly, as we see in Italy, de jure. It’s not so much that “The Grown-Up” has died but that he’s born later and later, if at all. A couple of years back, I attended a conference in Queensland in which an Australian demographer explained the differences between life then and life now. In the old days, there were, broadly, two phases of life: you were a child until, say, 13. Then you were a working adult. Then you died. Now there are four phases: you’re a child until, say, 12, 11, 9—or whenever enlightened jurisdictions think you’re entitled to go on the pill without parental notification. Then you’re an “adolescent,” a term of art now stretching well into middle age and of which a 32-year-old taking eight years to complete a thesis on the Holy Grail would appear to be a near parodic example. Then you work, after a fashion. Then you quit at 65, 60, 55, 52, whatever you can get away with, and enjoy a three-decade retirement at public expense. Functioning adulthood is that ever-shrinking space between adolescence and retirement.