UCGal & BG, definitely relate to your comments about getting your own place as soon as you were able. That was where I was at in the mid-70s. In fact, I remember, at age 12, doing interior design sketches for the “dream apartment” into which I was going to move as soon as I was legally able (you don’t have accurate ideas about the cost of rent when you’re 12, which is why “financially-able” didn’t trump emancipation on my list of barriers to freedom).
I grew up in a very loving home with two parents who kept a close watch on our activities and applied discipline (fairly) as needed. However, they made it clear that we were expected to go out the day after high school graduation and get a paying job, from which we would commence paying room and board immediately. For the females among us who chose to go to college, there would be no financial assistance from the parents, but we would not be charged R&B so long as we were attending school on a full-time basis (this was not the generous offer that it initially appeared to be: between full-time employment and full-time education, I was never home long enough to eat, only to shower and change clothes). I didn’t feel singled-out or persecuted: most of the parents in our working-class suburb had the same policy. Our Depression-era parents pounded a strong work ethic into us, and there weren’t many of us who were confident enough to settle into life as a deadbeat.
Even if some of us remained at home, our parents retained control over our lives that, for most, proved unbearable. Rules were loosened after high school, but still very much in place. I was not able to spend nights (elsewhere) with a boyfriend or a fiance. I wasn’t allowed to ride (my own) motorcycle. I was (still) not permitted to “talk back” to my parents. I didn’t like it, but I totally understood it, and I still do to this day: it was my parents’ house and they could set any rules they damn well pleased. Astoundingly enough (said tongue-in-cheek), those “rules” were an incredible motivating force. I COULD live life on my own terms – just so long as I could PAY for it.
Hell, I don’t blame kids for staying with their parents these days!! Why not?! Most parents place no limitations on their adult children. Parents give their kids free rein in a nicely-furnished home, wash their clothes, cook their food (to order), pick up constantly after them (and whatever “friends” come to visit or stay), give them spending money and cover their credit card bills; pay for their cars and insurance, cell phones and electronic devices, clothes and cosmetics; and bail them out of financial and legal difficulties. And they do all this despite the fact that their kids treat them with a total lack of respect, telling them to shut up and get out, and hurling abusive invective peppered liberally with foul language.
Why don’t adult kids move out on their own or make an effort to establish independent lives? Are people serious when they ask that question??? But, for the many parents out there who are unhappy in their situation of having to take care of their adult children, I have the answer to one very important question you all seem to have. It’s NO. As in “No, there is no magical moment in your child’s lifespan at which time he (or she) will decide for themselves that they have to show some self-responsibility and make it on their own”. Allow me to establish, firmly and definitively, there is no such spontaneous moment. If you continue to enable them to remain the lazy, immature, totally self-involved, abusive, truly unlikeable brats that you raised……NO, they will never move. Permit me to further state that the problem is what YOU are doing, not what your child is doing.
Be honest. Admit that you sometimes get pissed off looking at your kids sitting there on your couch, beautiful and trim and healthy in their 20s. That you’re resentful at their greed and slothfulness and their ingratitude, and angry that you’re doing their laundry and picking up after them on the weekends, which is the only time YOU have off from your full-time job.
Now think about what it will be like fifteen years down the road. You’ll be in your 60s, and unable to retire from a job that you hate. Because they’ll still be sitting there on your couch. Only by this time your darlings will be in their late 30s or early 40s, and flanked on one side by their three out-of-control bratty kids, and their third spouse (“between jobs”) on the other. They’ll weigh twice as much, and have Type II diabetes, a bad back, and no health insurance. They’ll still be rude and disrespectful, hurling demands and insults at you just as they did in their 20s, but it now has 15 years of resentment layered in.
