Do adult kids eventually grow up?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have a 22 year old son and 26 year old daughter. They have lived with their mother exclusively since the ages of 10 and 14 respectively. My son is addicted to video games. He barely graduated high school and flunked out of Jr College because he would never do his homework, and would stay up all might gaming. He recently lost his job in food service because he was late once too often because he stayed up late gaming. It was his first real job and it hit him hard to lose it. That was 4 months ago and he has been back to gaming during his waking hours ever since. I have tried to convince him repeatedly to try the military, but he “doesn’t want people telling him what to do” and not have the ability to quit if he wishes. He has had no girlfriend and effectively no social life other than his Warcraft buddies for the past 4 years.

My daughter finally got into her Jr year of college at age 24. Over the years she has had to retake about half all her courses to stay eligible because she did not do the coursework. She has had a number of part time jobs over the years and is usually let go after awhile for one thing or another re tardiness or similar. She was recently let go from her waitress job for not mastering the register and is back to hanging out in her room. Her mother is prone to having irrational fits if she is late getting back in the evening and “grounding” her for several weeks, by taking away use of the car after 5PM.

She called me this morning after another of these incidents and wanted to talk with re getting back on track to get a job. I told her I would do what I could, but she really need to look at this in the big picture sense. Yes her mother was being irrational, but her mother also provided a 26 year old woman making only minimal efforts to get ahead a roof over her head, food, internet service, a bedroom, a car, and car insurance. Her mother’s lack of rationality that allowed her (and her brother) to have her low effort lifestyle without consequences because she didn’t want to be alone is also the one with the emotional hair trigger.

I told her the car issue was inconsequential in the larger scheme of things and she needed to focus on what her goals were. None of this really mattered as all she wanted was someone to console her about the fact she had been grounded yet again, and what an outrageous bitch her mother was being.

I really don’t know where to go with this, I have almost no power in this situation. I have provided my daughter with many, many thousands of dollars to pursue her education, get her car fixed, provide her with a smart phone and service, and give her weekly cash for gas and sundries while she was working. In talking to her she says she wants to get moving on stuff, but as soon as the phone hangs up it’s back to hanging out. In talking to her I get the distinct impression I’m talking to a petulant child, not a 26 year old woman.

I love my kids dearly, but to be frank I’m halfway to just giving up on the notion they will ever climb out of this mutual well of dysfunction with my ex.

Do adult kids eventually grown up?

2

Many do.

Final physiological maturity of the young brain doesn’t occur until the mid 20’s for females and late 20’s for males, on average.

So there is hope that eventually they may yet pull their own heads from their own hindquarters, based on becoming more biologically mature than they are at present.

My 28 year old daughter is a nicely functioning adult at present, my 24 year old daughter is making more moves in that direction, but is hindered by chronic illness which unfortunately consumes a lot of her attention.

3

I think only if they’re forced to. It’s like an addiction in that they have to be allowed to hit rock bottom, like given a firm deadline to accomplish something (say, rent starts next month, better get a job or you’re evicted) and then stick to it.

You can do your part by refusing any further assistance except as it relates to a specific goal with details - no money, no room to live in, nothing else except moral support for that goal.

Your ex is her own person, and will probably not get on board. All you can do is model responsible behavior for them and hope they want that more than their mom’s life.

And you know what else? Quit nagging them. Nothing about the Army, the jobs, the schools. They know what you want from them, they know what they should be doing. Turn ownership of their own lives over to them, and relate to them as adults. I’m not sure I would want to emulate my dad if he was ragging on me constantly.

Would you talk to another unrelated adult that way, and tell them how to fix things all the time?

4

Your description of your daughter reminds me of a relative of mine, “Angie”. It took Angie eight years and three schools to earn her BA, she’d never had a job she wasn’t fired from, spent up to a year at a stretch neither working nor going to school, and she not only lived with her mother “Beatrice” into her late 20s but lived rent-free and didn’t even clean up after herself. I remember having dinner at Beatrice’s house once and hearing Angie complain at length about being asked to rinse her plate before putting it in the dishwasher.

What brought an end to this was that, when Angie was about 27, her mother moved away. Beatrice was offered a much higher paying job in another state and took it. She also sold the house. I don’t know if Beatrice offered Angie the chance to come with her or not, but Angie stayed in their original town. She had several months’ notice that the gravy train was ending and did manage to find both a job and an affordable apartment during that time. She has held down that same job for nearly three years now and is apparently doing okay, although Beatrice told me that for about the first year she would get a lot of phone calls from Angie asking how to do X or Y.

5

Speaking from experience as someone who’s mother has been pretty much there financially for all her kids no matter what, I can say this. Stop giving her money. If she has no qualms about taking money from you, she has no guilty conscious to encourage her to find her own way in life. I’m over 30 years old and had to move back in with the parents recently and, as much as I hate to admit it, having all my needs (and my daughter’s) met without any sort of expectations from my parents, has made it very easy to just kinda coast along and not aggressively pursue employment. At this point, it’s my guilty conscious that’s urging me on more than anything. Again, not something I’m proud of but I can’t see your current situation with your daughter improving if you continue doing as you are.

Bottom line. She’s 26. She’s WAY past the age of getting allowances (which it sounds like you were/are giving her). And grounding? Wow. Cut off the financial support. If she bitches about needing a phone for work purposes, then get the cheapest phone/plan you can find. Smartphones/data plans are NOT necessary. She clearly doesn’t have the morals or the personal drive to better her life for her own wellbeing.

As for your son…it really sounds like he’s got an addiction going on. Might be time for an intervention. Take away the game systems, internet, etc and if he wants those things back, he better get a job to earn the money to buy them.

6

Based on my non-scientific observations, I would say that the answer is “generally not, if their parents enable them to stay dependent.”

I know lots of kids from wealthy families who are in their 30s and 40s and still just screwing around with their parents’ support.

7

Fixed the thread title as you asked, Astro.

8

LOL. Sounds like they have a lot of retardiness.

9

Seriously, I think the answer is probably “no”. That is unless they are in a position where they are literally forced to. Otherwise they will just find the next sucker to sponge off of - parent, a spouse, whoever will tolerate them.

Another thing. Your “kids” are 22 and 26. They are still dicking around with “some college” and menial jobs. Even if they wanted to straighten up and fly right, what options are available to them?

10

sounds like they’ve never had to do anything for themselves, and really still don’t.

well, that’s fine and all, but I see far too many people trotting that out as a bullshit excuse for offspring like the OP describes. I’m as non-remarkable as can be, but was out of university and working in my career by 21. So yes, I accept that the human brain is not fully developed until the mid-late 20s, but that does not mean a human in their mid-late 20s is incapable of being a fucking adult. if your 22 year old does nothing but play games and loaf around, it’s because he’s able to. and being able to do that isn’t entirely his fault.

11

26 and being “grounded”?! LMFAO. I don’t know who is funnier here: the mother for grounding the 26 year old or the 26 year old for accepting the punishment.

12

I’ve seen some amazing examples. And I tend to avoid these people, so I can’t say I’ve followed very many’s lives long enough to see. But from my limited experience with them, the answer is: “Maybe, but all too often no.”

I do have one cousin whom I’ve not been in contact with for years. But he was similar to the examples of the OP and others here and was thrown out of his safe, secure, enabled world upon the sudden death of his father. In his mid-40s now, the last I heard he was eking out a sad existence doing menial labor, which is about all his high-school diploma from the 1980s qualifies him for, and cursing the world for his ill fortune.

You hear people saying they hope they never grow up, but that’s usually just posturing. The fact is, there comes a time where even if you do maintain the spirit of youth, you pretty much have to start at least acting like an adult to avoid being looked down on as some sort of freak.

13

Boot in the ass. Or at the very least, a paring down of privileges down to food and shelter. Kid wants internet? Get a job. Need money for a date? Get a job. We’re not talking about 16-year-olds, are we?

14

Nope. I have a plethora of kidults in my family. They will never change unless your ex changes, and that’s that. You, unfortunately, had kids with an enabler. Maybe you had no way of knowing that she was an enabler before having kids. Regardless, there’s nothing you can do about it now. They’ve been allowed to extend their childhoods indefinitely, so where is the motivation to change? If they get jobs, they will have to sacrifice 30-40 hours of time every week (plus commute) to have a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs, and a game in the xbox. If they don’t get jobs, they will have a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs, a game in the xbox, and 30-40 more hours of free time. It doesn’t take a temporal physicist to figure out why they’ve chosen the latter.

I recall you asked for advice before WRT signing your son up for the military. And, as I recall, the consensus was that it’d be a terrible idea. It has to be HIS idea, or else it’s not going to work. Moreover, a recruiter probably wouldn’t want him anyway, unless he is truly enthusiastic about joining. The military is not a bastion of last resort to save overgrown manchildren from themselves.

Please realize that *lots *of people are not college material. This would include your kids. For someone to do well in college, they need the financial ability to attend (which you have provided) and intelligence (presumably you thought they were smart enough to do well). But they also need a desired career path and motivation. Your kids don’t appear to have shown either, at least not in anything taught at a university. Your continued insistence that they go to college is only going to frustrate and bankrupt you. Especially in the present employment climate. Even if your kids manage to scrape by and get an associate’s or bachelor’s degree at community college, they’re not going to be able to compete with massive numbers of unemployed, highly-motivated graduates.

Perhaps it would be better for you to focus on accepting that your kids are adults now and, thus, are old enough to make their own decisions in life. Even (or perhaps especially) when those decisions are lazy, self-sabotaging, and/or donkey-brained. You don’t have to enable them like your ex is doing. And if they end up on your doorstep someday (if she gets fed up and kicks them out, or [more likely] when she dies), I would recommend applying tough love as appropriate. But even if you think they’re making the WORST decisions in the world, you can keep on loving and emotionally supporting them.

15

This phenomenon puzzles the hell out of me. When I graduated from college (I lived at home because I had a full scholarship to a local university), I couldn’t wait to get out on my own. My friends felt the same way. We wanted to be on our own, have our own place, support ourselves. The feeling of being independent was heady. And if it meant living in a mouse-infested apartment, eating baloney sandwiches, and pinching pennies, then so be it. We didn’t expect to move out of our parents’ house into the level of luxury that they had spent their whole lives acquiring. To say that someone still lived with their parents when well into their 20’s or beyond was a strike against them and a possible red flag. (It may still be a red flag. But people don’t seem to care as much.)

Somewhere along the line, that changed.

To answer the OP question: if by “grow up,” you mean move out and become independent, no, not unless what they’re doing now stops working for them. So in the specific case of your kids: definitely no.

16

Indeed. In my cousin’s example previously, he did move into an apartment not too far away for a few months – not sure whose idea that was – but could not hack it and moved back. And I don’t mean he couldn’t hack it financially, as his father paid the rent. He didn’t really have any friends he could have roomed with anyway from what I could tell.

17

I think it’s time to treat her like an adult and lay the cards out on the table. Tell her the truth, that you know and respect that she does indeed want to get out. Tell her it’s time she knew the truth. That while you respect her Mom, this separating , getting the chicks out of the nest and into the real world, is clearly not her strong suit.

Tell her you honestly do understand how hard it is for them because their Mom is this way. Point out that this is how codependent dysfunction begins, it’s a dance, it’s easy to fall into and as crippling as any addiction. The thing is you know that it’s the twenty’s when she should be having adventures, learning to make your way in the world. You fear that if she doesn’t break free very soon, she never will, and miss her chance to have a life away from Mom’s home. Every year after 30 severely decreases the chances she’ll ever break free. The drive to separate will diminish, it will become more difficult as she falls farther and farther behind her cohort in life experience. If she doesn’t get out and start picking up the most basic life skills she’s dooming herself to a lifetime of being awkward and ill at ease when anywhere but home.

Be honest and tell her you are having this frank discussion with her now because you sense that she can kinda feel it too. Be open and say you have not spoken so frankly with your son, as your fear it is too late. (They will talk, if she gets out, he might too!) Tell her you think she actually knows all of this, in her heart. That you can offer her advice and emotional support, that you love and adore her. And you fear for her, that this is all she’ll ever have or be, or see.

Then leave it alone, don’t return to the topic unless she brings it up!

(I am assuming, of course, that this is how you sort of feel. Forgive me if I’m way out of line. Just an opinion.)

18

Replace them with robot kids.

19

Addicted to video games: Maybe he feels like he has no control, that other efforts have not worked out for him and he retreats to where he can find success and have some control. Instant gratification vs delayed gratification issues?

Failing multiple courses for not doing the coursework: Doesn’t care about the material, isn’t motivated to achieve, the degree is not seen as something valuable? Maybe she finds the material too difficult or confusing, and covers that by not doing it. If she tried and failed, she’d be dumb. This way, she’s not dumb, but uncaring. If she’s thought of herself as smart, or others have called her smart or an underachiever, she might do this to maintain her self-image. Again, maybe issues with instant vs delayed gratification. Doing that report and getting closer to her degree doesn’t seem as appealing as fun with her friends.

I think there’s an underlying problem, not just that they’re childlike. That’s just a symptom. If the issue could be identified, progress might be gained. Of course, if there is a problem, it’s never as easy as just asking them. They might not be conscious of the reasons why they’re doing what they do, or they might actively fight to maintain their self-identity. Facing the problems might be painful for them to admit, even to themselves.

Food for thought. It’s free, take it for what it’s worth.

20

Both my kids went away to college, which helped with independence. Not that there was much of a problem with either.
The time to fix these problems was in high school or before, but that doesn’t help now. I definitely agree about not giving them any money. You son should have his game system taken away. And they should get kicked out on a schedule. About the only other solution would for them to find a boyfriend/girlfriend for whom they’d be willing to shape up, but that might be a tall order.