Could be a partner, roommate, coworker, or somebody you volunteered with. They could have stopped for any reason from leaving, getting sick or hurt or even dying to just getting sick of doing that one thing and stopping.
I’ve got a kid who is nearly out of school. There’s a real sense that his idea of the future is eternal summer vacation at his parents’ house earning just enough money to hang out with friends. It’s a struggle to decide how to deter that pattern of behavior. As parents we want to be able to do anything for our kids, but we also need to do what’s best for them, not just what they want.
The kid is going to learn a lot about what we do to keep the house in reasonable order and stocked for life. We’ve been trying to teach that as we go, but it doesn’t always seem to sink in.
Get them to cook dinner for the family once a week. Help em if they get stuck but that alone would set them up immensely.
We’re moving to more of this for the whole household (there’s a couple kids at home still). They’re all able to generate meals and do chores. The requirements are being ratcheted up across the board. My wife and I are busier than ever trying to make ends meet, so the work is trickling down to the whole household one way or another.
I have heard it’s good to have a small house, so they move out for more room. I didn’t get the chance to find out (or maybe it worked really well) as mine left home aged 16 for the sort of reasons 16 year olds have
Interesting strategy, and likely one that has some merit. Though, I’d point to similar problems in Japan where it’s not rare to have incredibly tiny homes/apartments, but a very high rate of youths staying at their parents’ places well into adulthood.
The US has reached around 50% of young adults continuing to stay with their parents beyond school. It’s up to a similar rate as the Great Depression era. We’ve priced our kids out of independence to try to satisfy a few billionaires’ desire to be ever richer.
But also like your economy was golden compared to the current, at even fairly reasonable housing prices its still gonna be far out of most budgets for the foreseeable feature.
How bout you try and be a good parent and give your kid their best life regardless of things out of their control?
You can say that to genX, but the bulk of genX’s kids are adults now (at least genX women aren’t having many more). We did have it easy. We got houses at prices that had only doubled in price in the time it took to raise a deposit. I bought my place for about $150k including the upgrades in 2001. The same place in worse condition now is worth 500k. The person I bought it off paid 67K in 1997
I dropped out of uni and stepped straight into an IT job
I met a partner through social contacts, a friend paired up with someone in their dancing club.
But Millennials (probably your parents if they’re under 45) had it just as bad as you, but they didn’t have iPads as babies
They had it bad for sure but has the rate of decline really slowed?
Like sure buying a house is impossible, but shit that was a recession or 3 ago - and every single one has just pulled homeownership higher.
As easy as it is to say ‘back in my day’, I think its important to look at it numerically to avoid the mistakes of our ancestor’s (since at least baby boomers, but realistically probably even longer)
I’m well aware of how hard it is to get to anything resembling a healthy independent living situation in the US these days. It’s completely stacked against everyone not already in wealthy starting positions. We have other kids working to build more than a hardscrabble financial situation and we’re more than happy to help as we can.
We’ll help this kid too. What I’m not interested in doing is providing them a roof, food, clothes, doing their dishes, and paying for their hobbies for the rest of my life. This is an intelligent, capable, and healthy young man. The issue is the attitude we’re seeing that he doesn’t seem to see what it takes to be an independent adult, even if he’s still relying on some help while he builds up the resources to get by in this incredibly shitty society we’ve allowed to accrete over generations.
Yes, the economy was way better when I was a young adult. I also had some fortunate happenings (bought a house in a stable local market going into the 2008 banks fraud crash) and unfortunate ones (graduated college right into the Dot Com Bubble burst. 3 months of work, then layoffs into years of dead job markets, yay!). I am extremely scared for my childrens’ futures because of how anti-humanist the US has become. Letting this kid in question fuck around for a few years while I take care of everything for him and hope my next heart attack (that’s one of the unfortunate issues) doesn’t kill me before he figures out how to be an independent and self sufficient adult isn’t something that I feel will serve either one of us in a positive way.
The gradual increase in responsibility. They have to pay board. A roster for dinners, a bill out into their name (one that you can deal with being cut off for a little bit (!!!).
But ultimately, it is also out habit of just getting it done that means we just do it.
I expect that it is a conversation and agreement of shared tasks and responsibilities.
Cutoff access to wifi and don’t pay phone bills, plenty of ways to get started, but it always starts with a chat.
My parents kicked me out twice as a kid. One time was when I was 18, and I ended up homeless for almost 5 months on the other side of the country. The shit I went through fucked me up good. They said it was “tough love.”
Please please please don’t do something like that to your kid if you’re trying to teach them a lesson. Those 4+ months still haunt me a decade later and continue to cause me immense pain.
Oh hell no. My partner and I are in no way interested in just kicking anyone out. The reason we’re trying to work on the attitudes and trajectory now is to have time to set goals and work together to build up his skills & resources to enable independence, which is a far cry from a kick out.
I’m sorry to hear that I happened to you even once. We’ve had some friends of our kids end up being treated that way, so the kids ended up at our place briefly while they found their feet.
Will they be able to afford their own place and have access to healthcare? I’ve got siblings that have failed to launch even after several attempts. It’s possible this isn’t a failure of parenting.
But if it is fixable, you may want to check out William Glasser’s writings on the workless (I forget what books of his he writes about it in). Be warned that it’s not mainstream psychology and I don’t generally think that his views on medication and several other things are good, but the specific ideas about how to deal with a household member that doesn’t contribute or take care of themselves might have something useful for you. From what I can remember, it’s things like making ingredients available but not prepared foods so they get into the habit of doing things. (Naturally, this is a super bad idea if there’s a different issue like depression that should be dealt with first.) That may be difficult to do with apps and streaming services where there’s very little between a person and food/entertainment, but you might get some new ideas.
It’s still early days on them being in a position to afford a place, and in the US healthcare is a fucking abomination, so it’s going to take some real effort to reach a point of independence.
We’re in no hurry to move anyone out. It’s still early enough that we planet of time to wire in work on skills and such. I’m mostly worried about the general attitude more than individual skills though. His sense of what it takes to keep yourself afloat in the world and little open desire to achieve independence is just worrying at this point. Likely I’m being too worried at this stage, but I’d rather turn the ship in a positive direction earlier and easier rather than later and with more difficulty.
