The following is my girlfriend’s response:
Kick her out! Seriously. You are retarding her development into adulthood by enabling her spoiled, childish behavior. If you and your wife died tomorrow she would be up you know what creek without a paddle.
You might think you are bring harsh, but life can and will be brutally harsh at times.
It is better to learn these lessons early on than to pay for them later in life because someone kept allowing you to make them.
You hold her back every time you bail her out.
If she really needed the help because she tried and failed that would be a different story.
Instead, she is merely taking advantage of you and your coddling is preventing her from trying to do anything productive with her life.
She cannot every learn the relationship among the concepts of work, money and responsibility if you pay all of her important living expenses.
Right now your are parenting out of guilt, to your daughter’s detriment.
It makes you feel good to ‘help’ her but you are really just holding her back.
Kick her out.
Let her fail.
Let her be mad as all hell at you.
She will learn who she is.
She willi learn what she is capable of.
Furthermore, she will learn what it is to be an adult.
Whatever you do, do not look back.
When your kick the baby bird out of the nest it will be harrowing to watch it fall, hoping it spreads its wings to fly.
The point is you have to give it the chance.
It’s probably a good idea to make a call to your insurance agent and make sure that a claim can’t be made against your homeowner’s policy if she does hit someone without coverage on her car. That would be my first worry since she’s living in your home. If you find out you’re in the clear there, I would advise that you do nothing and let her experience the full brunt of driving without insurance, whatever that turns out to be.
Becoming an adult is tricky and requires a great deal of trial and error. The key to helping her move into adulthood isn’t so much about charging her rent or whatever, but about resisting your urge to put yourself between her and the consequences of those errors. Maybe you’re thinking if you can just move her forward in time without allowing any really disastrous errors on her part then she’ll just naturally mature and move into adulthood, but that’s not how it works. Whatever mistakes or bad decisions she’s going to make are vital to her learning how to make better decisions in the future, and that is what growing up is about.
You can avoid all the dramatic conversations about the $800 she owes you or paying rent or working more hours or insurance or whatever because none of those things address the real problem that she has not been allowed to experience and learn from failure.
Step back and stop saving her and she’ll figure out how to save herself.
While that course of action does soothe the soul to contemplate, the matter of the pink slip being in her name appears to complicate it, feasibility-wise.
OP, a data point, if it’s not too much trouble: When does the current registration expire?
And another one: Does your state require proof of insurance to renew registration?
Well, if she gets into an accident with me, my insurance company will sue her. Then when they find out she still lives at home, I’m going to instruct my insurance company and my lawyer to go after the money. That’s you! Seriously, unless you lay down the law (figuratively and literally) this is a timebomb from which she may never recover financially and the collateral damage is going to leave you bloodied as well.
Option #4, Plan B. Tell her to pay her bills now or get evicted and suffer the consequences. I bet she leaves, doesn’t pay the insurance and gets nailed. So call the police and have them stop by with a friendly chat.
How much is your daughter’s life and well-being mean to you?
:smack: Sorry- misread that.
Pawn her ass off to an older, rich guy.
Is that actually possible? It doesn’t seem like it would be. Once you’re over 18 I don’t see why they could sue your parents any more than they could sue your roommate.
And a lot of people here are being a little dramatic. It’s important to have car insurance, but it’s not necessarily going to be the end of the world if you don’t have it. Not everyone gets in accidents or gets pulled over, and even if you do get pulled over, the penalties vary a lot. Here in WA it’s just a ticket, and you don’t have to prove you have insurance before renewing your registration or anything like that.
These things are connected. She doesn’t need to work, because you support her. Stop doing that. She’s 19. Work or college, like everyone else.
Your daughter, therefore, is in grave danger of being labelled a deadbeat.
Then club your half of the car, which happens to contain the steering wheel.
It may be. The car is in their garage or driveway. They are aware of the lack of insurance and are not doing anything about it.
I’d call the police and talk to them. See if they can “help.”
I’d also start the process of moving her out. My sister in law kicked her 19 year old son out, he ended up at a homeless shelter twice before he figured out that his mother’s rules really weren’t that bad if they provided a roof. It takes backbone to do, but its backbone now, when you can provide advice and small amounts of assistance, or when she is 40, its too late, and you are dead. Do what you can to get your wife on the same page, even if that takes marriage counseling for the two of you.
Here’s what puzzles me: the OP said that your daughter’s boss calls to beg her to work more hours, yet she refuses. In this economy? What does she do? At some point, someone who is willing to work more hours will be hired to take her place.
I find it interesting that people are talking about the car insurance at all.
I mean, that’s obviously not the problem; it’a a sympton of the problem. What you’ve got here is a lazy, spoiled kid who only works twelve hours a week.
Fix that, or just learn to live with it.
To the OP: If the insurance “isn’t that big a deal,” then why are you asking what to do? Just keep supporting her, including paying her insurance, and all will be well.
Where there is one screw up, amongst a group of successful siblings, I would posit that the one, is acting on something they subtly understood all along. That the parents would always rescue their ass.
Either way, as soon as the parents rescue them, the first time, having never had the need to rescue the others, the argument they were raised identically loses all merit, to my mind.
Perhaps it is just one child who senses an exploitable weakness, in the parents, that the other siblings don’t.
But I’d need better evidence than, “Well, we’re all good and only my Brother is a screw up!”, as actual proof.
I wasn’t asking for a cite to make you prove your position so much as that would be something I would be very interested in reading, should you find it.
There is no family where each child is treated exactly the same way. None. Each child has their individual responses to the same parenting and then needs parenting tweaked to them. The scenario you are hoping for doesn’t exist. Best you can say is that in the same family with the same values, goals and messages, some kids respond very differently and end up different. More often parents adapt to the child, so the child responds differently to what was successful with the other kids, and so the parents adapt.
In my family we all heard the message that school was the most important thing. It was critical. It was everything. But three of us internalized and and were driven to succeed and one wasn’t. And it was child 3/4 (I’m #4), so it wasn’t that my parents changed their tune. She eventually straightened up but it was decades after the rest of s and I promise, it was not because my parents all of a sudden got tough. She grew up, went into counseling and decided that she wasn’t happy with the life she was leading. This was in her late 30s early 40s.
MHO is that if you are keeping her under your roof and feeding her then you may as well pay the one extra bill that actually could affect other families and get her liability insurance. And I agree that you might want to call your insurance company and find out what exactly your responsibilities are for having a uninsured resident relative living with you. IANA insurance agent or anything, it could be it’s a non-issue, but if it were me I would double check.
Well if you’re not asking for a cite then why don’t you go find it instead of making other people do your work for you.
I would sit her down and make sure that she knows all of the possible consequences to the decision she has made. Then I would tell her that because of that conversation, she can not claim that you did not prepare her for the outcome of her decision.
Then I would do nothing and let nature take it’s course. Some people have to learn lessons the hard way.
This is what I’d do.
But I wouldn’t give her money for anything else. Nothing for gas, cell phone, clothes, movie tickets – nothing.
How does she manage to play all week if she works so few hours?
I’m guessing, but she may be playing you and smarter than we think. If she loses the ability to drive the car then it’s probably can’t get to work so will have to spend more time with my friends.