I can't attest to the situations of my brothers and sisters as some of them owed our parents money, but I was financially independent of them at 18. The rule was that if you are not in school full time, you pay for your room and board. The tuition and financial largesse except for birthday gifts etc stopped when we graduated high school. I paid for my college education entirely out of my own pocket, and my brothers and sister did the same, albeit with loans or financial aid. Later, when they were more financially secure, I believe they loaned some of the younger ones money for school, but it was strictly a loan, not financial support.

I bring that stuff up, because it seems to be a thing in the last couple of years for neocons to make snide references to this practice as if it is something shameful. It seemed to be the alternative theme at C-PAC 2012, as I heard references of that sort almost as much as I heard the ostensible theme of "We still hold these truths". I can only presume this is some sort of presumption of financial incapacity on the part of young people, which was not ever the case with me, and probably not with my brothers, as they all moved right in with their wives after their weddings, and none of their weddings were scheduled to accommodate such necessities. When another brother and sister each moved to be closer to their jobs, they again had no problem doing so.

It's kind of funny the attitude about this. At about 24, I changed jobs. In the prior job, I worked with a lot of teenagers and college students who reacted with revulsion and sympathy when they learned I lived at home, all stating that they could never tolerate that and would kill themselves if they were still living with their parents when they reached 24. At my next job, I was one of the younger people working there, and the general response from my single coworkers to that same datum was "I wish I still lived at home." I might also point out that these were all hard-drinking, excessively promiscuous and nonreligious men with well-paying jobs, for whom none of the usual things that might compel people to live at home when they might prefer to live on their own, applied.

In any event, I find it a bit surprising that one of the most out-spoken purported conservatives on this site finds the traditional family model to be such a sign of political disaster. This is why we're losing. Because people without a coherent political philosophy or values system instead adopt a patchwork slapdash platform of cafeteria conservatism, and let liberal cultural attitudes ooze through the cracks.