[quote=AN]Ladies, I totally agree that if the child is abusive and the parents are affraid for their safety, the parents should kick the kids out of the house. On the other hand, if child are deadbeats and the parents are enabling that, the blame goes as much to the enabler as the deadbeat. If I screwed up as a parent and my children become deadbeat, then it’s my responsibility as a parent to fix that problem. [/quote]
This has been pointed out in several of the posts…in fact, I think the blame goes more to the enabler. A child (even an adult one) cannot act any differently than the way he’s been taught. If he/she has never been taught basic life skills or made to bear personal responsibility for wrongdoing (in essence, been taught that mom and dad are their personal servants, and they can do anything they want without personal repercussions), how can they be expected to act otherwise?
However, this begs the question: If you have realized that you’ve made serious mistakes and made genuine efforts to undo the damage your “parenting” (or lack thereof) has done, are you “helping” them by allowing them to continue using and abusing you, or simply continuing to enable their escalating deviant behavior?
[quote=AN] I’m of the mind that family who stick together and help each other will be better off than those who thinks everyone for themselves. My parents did everything they could for me (pay for my tuition, let me live at home for as long as I want, etc), and in return, now that I’m independent, I will be there to support them anytime they need/want me to. They would never have kick me out of the house and I will never put them in a home when it’s time for me to take care of my parents in return. I’m doing the same thing to my kids as my parents did to me. Just because my parents paid everything for me doesn’t make me lazy and a deadbeat. I help out around the house when I was little and start working when I was 15 and never stopped working since. But because they helped me out financially, it sure made my life a lot easier. I don’t have to worry about student loans. I can save a lot more than I would have if I have a pile of student loans to worry about. I will take that advantage my parents gave me to take it to the next level and pass on that advantage to my kids.[/quote]
This is the point that I have been trying to make: Your family **helps each other**. From your description, you and your parents have a mutually beneficial relationship, a true parent-child relationship. This does not exist in the “deadbeat” adult children we talk about here: they exist in relationships from which they, alone, benefit. They’re not grateful for their parents’ assistance and financial help because they don’t think of it as anything exceptional; they consider it their due, and that it is their parents’ responsibility to take complete care of them, and bail them out of whatever problem situation they manage to get themselves into.
And, yes, it usually results from the parents being enablers. It’s not a problem for the parents when the child is 12 because this is the socially-acceptable role for the parents at that stage of life. But when the child is 28 or 35 or 42, the parents are uncomfortable with the social role of complete caretaker. What’s more is that the stakes are higher with an adult child: the trouble they get into tends to be on a much greater scale, so it can have a much greater impact on the parents, physically, mentally, financially, emotionally. No matter what, eventually a time will come where the enabling parent will no longer feel good in that role. Yet they don’t know how to extricate themselves from it.
