Advise your layabout offspring to enrol for a degree in reality at the University of Life

I was interested to half-hear on the radio the other morning about this new 'Generation X' of idlers who are leaving school with no qualifications and can't be fagged to register as unemployed and sign up for free money, because what's the point when you can sponge off your mum and dad for the rest of your life, hidden up there in your bedroom watching telly and smoking and eating Cheerios out of the box, safe beyond the radar and databases of the social services and tax authorities, your existence known only to your immediate family and the marketing department of Reader's Digest? Add these malingerers to all the young adults who do scrape enough GCSEs to get a job packing wholesale tripe for years but can't afford to move out until their parents stump up a deposit for a house by selling the roof off their own and you've got a demographic time bomb just waiting to be hummed and hawed at by social commentators.

I only care, of course, because I've got four boys, and they're the ones you can't get rid of, unlike girls who very wisely save up their alcopop money and escape the nest before they start turning into proper women and have to skivvy round after everyone.

Our little fellows are still quite young, though, which means we've still got time to make things a bit less like a hotel around here for the day they get their girlfriends pregnant and expect us to keep them in rent-free indolence. Because isn't this what it really boils down to? Some of us are old enough to remember the days when having sex in your mum and dad's house was against the law, and finding a place of your own was the only way to avoid having to do it in the graveyard, which though perfectly convenient for a first date became a fading novelty by the third year of your engagement, especially in the winter months. Accordingly, teenage marriages were very popular in my street, and any man still living with his parents by the time he could grow a proper moustache was rightly looked upon as someone likely to spend his weekends asking unaccompanied children if they wanted to come and see rabbits in the wood.

Was Mussolini's mother still having to clear last week's kebab and chips from under his bed when he was 25? No, the young rabble-rouser was busy planning a new Roman Empire, and who is to say he wouldn't have succeeded, had his career not been so tragically interrupted by the Second World War, in particular the bit where he was chased down the street and hanged from a lamp post. Where, these days, is the sense of adventure and purpose? Even I, at the age of 21, had somehow contrived to move into a minuscule south London flat with 11 beefy Australians, whose cheery take on life and relaxed attitude to urinating out of the window proved just the robust challenge needed for an anxious, exiled Yorkshireman on the road to maturity and freedom with a dog-eared copy of The Glass Bead Game about his person. No one talked about property ladders back then.

Just boldly go, is my exhortation to the nation's youth. I mean it's not as if you can't still ring your mum every week, or even visit if you've got a bag of washing that needs doing. Look at nature, I say, where a young man might aspire to the condition of the sperm whale (for example), who on reaching that awkward spotty age disappears off to live with fellow bachelors of his ilk, roving the deep and ostentatiously spouting out of that hole they have in their heads until such time as a nice girl agrees to sleep with him. Male foxes, too, go off to establish new territories, leaving younger siblings and the occasional effeminate uncle who sticks around to help knock people's dustbins over.

Of course some children won't listen. So I have already started telling ours how great it will be to have them around when we're older and need someone to wheel us out to the park or empty our colostomy bags. Stay as long as you like, I say. It's an old trick but it might just work.

· Phil Hogan's novel The Freedom Thing is published by Abacus at £6.99