I'm dealing with the same thing. SS is 20, turning 21 in 5 months. We paid for college, he flunked out. He's had a slew of dead end jobs that barely cover his cellphone bill and car insurance. He sleeps all day, goes to the gym, plays video games and eats us out of house and home. The only thing that he does do is pick up my son whenever I need him picked up from school or practice. He cleans his room when I make him and he washes his bathroom once a week, also because I make him.
He finally found a new job, starts Monday. He's a good kid, but he is LAZY and has no desire to get ahead. He gets THAT from his lazy ass mother. We have pretty much put our foot down and we ride him constantly because he knows I already threatened with sending him back to his mothers house if he doesn't get his shit together. He does NOT want to go back to her. He hates it over there.

Unfortunately if he has the option of going back to live with mom, there's not much that can be done to change the kid. In an intact family, I'd say charge the kid rent,give him a list of chores and tell him if he doesn't want to be the houseboy, he needs to get his act together and start putting together a real life. In this case, he'll probably go back to mommy.

So what you can do is realize that you didn't create this and no matter how much you want to help him, he has to want to be helped. He probably doesn't. Why would he? He does what he wants, gets babied still, and all that happens is once in a while dad Says something to him. Big deal. Dad needs to Do something.

And he can totally figure out how to feed himself. The Mac and cheese - that's called learned helplessness. All men pull that crap no matter their age. My husband tried that BS with me over a box of Instant!! Freaking pudding. You know, the kind where you dump the packet into 2 cups of milk and poof, pudding? Yeah. He ate a whole batch I was going to use for a pie, I got ticked told him to make another one and he whined that he didn't know how. I just stared at him until he figured it out.

My SS was like this when he first moved in with us. We had moved 35 miles from our old neighborhood so he quit his job and thought he'd find something local. But he sat on his ass for days on end and did nothing but sleep in and play World of Warcraft until 4 am. I told DH I didn't care how hard it was to find a job, his rent was accruing every month he didn't pay it, and if he didn't get off his butt and start looking for a job, I was disconnecting the Internet (that I was paying for!) from his room.

He tried to take the easy way out, I mean, lazy to the extreme. He came across a posting on Craigslist for a guy that was looking for someone to drive his British daughter around while she was vacationing here. First of all, NO ONE vacations where we live, this is not a touristy town by any stretch. Second, the email reply he got sounded weird: generic, grammatical errors, it sounded fishy to me. I told him to forget it and find a real job, no one is going to pay you $600 to drive their daughter around. But, he didn't believe me and he pursued it. One morning, totally out of character, he was up at 7 am and running around, coming and going several times before 9 am. I finally asked what he was doing and he told me he'd gotten that driving job and had received a cashier's check from his "boss" and was going to the bank, the post office, etc. because he needed to wire money to his "employer's" travel agent! I am sooooo glad I asked him because DH didn't want to pry into his son's business but if we hadn't, SS would have been out almost $2,000 from a Craigslist scam! I told him the check was most likely stolen, or else fake, and his bank was going to make him responsible for all of it when they found out in a couple weeks. He had no idea! Thankfully he went back to his bank and explained to them what happened and got it all undone.

Sadly, he still tried to do whatever he could to earn money without working. He enrolled in a clinical trial and spent 12 days at a lab and got paid a few thousand dollars. I'm still waiting for him to grow a tail or something. But at least he finally paid his rent, which had accrued to $600 by then. And he eventually went back to his old job 35 miles away because he couldn't find anything else. Now he's doing a lot better, he works 3 days a week at that job and 2 or 3 days a week and sometimes evenings at his mom's office. He bought a motorcycle and talks about going back to school.

My advice is to disconnect his Internet and stop buying his snacks and favorite foods. He's a big boy, he needs to buy that stuff himself, and no free Internet for a free loader! Be as noisy as possible in the mornings to wake his ass up. And your DH needs to tell him that he can't continue to live there if he doesn't help out around the house. And if he wants to move back to his mom's, LET HIM! If he can't be motivated to do what an adult should, there's nothing you can do, but you sure as hell don't have to just watch him be a total lump and contribute zero to society or your household. You can't be concerned, he's not your kid, and he's only hurting himself by being this lazy. He needs to grow up already. If he wants to be a child, let his mommy take care of him. If you let this continue, you'll eventually have a 30 year old lump in your house.