Give therapy a real chance or he's out. (Side: is your mother married to Methuselah?)
Our son is 28 and made a complete mess out of his life. He has failed more educational courses than I can count, can’t keep a job, and has not had a romantic relationship that wasn’t a dumpster fire. My husband and I are baffled because our son always did well in high school. We just kept making the excuse that it was young adult growing pains. It is always someone else’s fault: bad bosses, mean co-workers, crazy exes. Our son refuses to admit that the common denominator is him. Every time we try to get him into therapy, he blows up and doesn’t talk to us for a while.
Our daughters are 24 and 21. Both of them went into technological fields and lived at home to save money. They have enough to put a down payment on a place together. When our son found out, he blew up. He screamed during my mother’s 921st birthday party about how his sisters were the “golden ones” of the family and how we deliberately screwed him over. He made a huge scene and stormed off.
—Last Straw
Re: Give therapy a real chance or he's out. (Side: is your mother married to Methuselah?)
You're enabling him. Parenting can suck and I only know what it's like to have the two I do. But there's nothing to be gained by not creating rules and sticking to them and your son is calling your bluff.
Make the plan with your H. If it was my child it would be "You're going to find a therapist and you're going to get a job and you're going to be paying rent. A portion of that will go towards an account that will be opened and you will get the $ with the interest accrued on a move out date of X." Create a lease with a start and end date and as parents, do not let your son continue to act as if all of the problems in his life are from an external locus of control.
Kick him out. He's had enough second chances and deals. Give him a hard date to be out of your house and stick to it. He will figure it out if he has to; he's never had to before.
Because if they cave again, he will take them even less seriously the next time.
His entitlement even goes so far as to be angry that his sisters both have a good chunk of money saved. Because they applied themselves. Got an education and/or experience that set them up to get good jobs. Yeah, dude. Sitting around on your ass all day doesn't fatten your bank account.
The biggest obstacle to this son's success is the parents who do him no favors by enabling him.
But Mom and Dad at midnight opened the door and with the hissing smoking car in the driveway said "he's not home" and allowed their son to plead to the lesser charge of 'leaving the scene of the accident' rather than adding the intoxication. And the cops said, "We've dealt with them before." So their 30 year old son (we knew because we later found out he was a friend's former FI) was just protected from growing up.