How was the question of kids leaving home handled in your family?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The recent discussion “How did you come to leave home as a young person?” yielded an interesting gamut of responses, ranging from at least one Doper who continued living at home well into adulthood to several who reported being forced out of their homes or walking out as teenagers. Most of the information given stuck to the plain facts; I would be interested in knowing something about the attitudes and family values underlying the stated outcomes. So I have the following questions connected with your/your siblings’ leaving home after being raised by your parents:

  1. How long were your parents willing to have their children at home? Did they have a set age/life stage by which they were adamant that their children leave, or were they flexible about it or even willing to abide you living at home indefinitely once you had finished schooling and gotten your first real job?

  2. How and when did your parents broach the topic of your eventually leaving home? Were they tactful or blunt about it? Did they sit you down at a certain age and have a respectful, heart-to-heart talk with you about when you would be expected to leave - and why -, or did they just assume it was understood you would eventually leave, without going into the rationale?

  3. For those who went away to college and e.g. came home for the holidays (or didn’t come home), did you have the option of living at home during college as well (I.E. if there was a college in your town to which you could commute), or did your parents insist that, wherever you went to college, you moved out and lived in dorm/anywhere other than at home, in order to foster your independence/separation from them?

  4. Growing up, how cool were you with eventually leaving home, and how attached were you to the family home? Did you feel any angst in connection with the thought of being required to leave one day? At the time that leaving home became a reality, did you resent being expected to do so in any way, or were you on the same page with your parents about it?

My own answers to these questions are:

  1. This question was somewhat ambiguous in my family. I am an only child of a Serbian family, and in my parents’ culture AFAIK it is not rare for young adults to live with their parents. I lived with my parents through university and through a gap year afterward during which I made my second failed attempt to get into teachers’ college. I did leave to go to Quebec City for two summer jobs, each lasting three months, and “truly” left home at 23 to teach English in Prague. It was never an issue of “you need to leave by X age”, but rather the end result of circumstances. For while I did stay at home relatively long, the latter part of that period was marked by endless strife with my mother, whose tyrannical, narcissistic behavior I have described multiple times here. Her (and, quite frankly, my father’s) attitude was very much “my way or the highway”, and a lot of her rules were really anal (I spoke about some of them in the “your childhood room” thread), and the period during which I lived at home as a young adult was spent by her in large part attempting to micromanage me. From when I turned 16 to when I left home, my mother regularly threatened to kick me out of the house, partly as a means of controlling me and partly as a way of venting her narcissitic rage. She did so often for the most frivolous and paranoid reasons, such as not finding me engaged in studying at a random moment on what was probably a Saturday morning or misinterpreting something I had said in good faith as a negative comment directed at her. In fact, she once during my studies expelled me to my grandmother’s subsidized apartment, where I stayed clandestinely for two weeks or so, because at the time she was angry at my father and misinterpreted an action of mine as directed against her. Going abroad in the end was simply a chance to become independent of her, after I had not managed to get into teachers’ college due to high demand.

  2. We never really had an explicit discussion in my family about how long I could live with my parents.

  3. A non-issue with me, as I lived at home and went to a local university.

  4. As a small child, I was quite attached to my parents and the thought of leaving home as an adult gave me serious separation anxiety. As late as 11, I thought I would like to live with my parents forever. As I got older (and as my relationship with my parents deteriorated), this shifted to a different concern - I was quite attached to the family home, especially the garden, and while I would have eventually been OK with moving out someday, I didn’t like the thought of having to move as an adult to some little rented apartment and having to save up for years to be able to afford a home like that which my parents had bought. I was totally cool with growing up, finishing school, getting a job, and paying my way in life. I just disliked the prospect of what I perceived would be a drop in my standard of living. I felt that, once I got my ultimate job, I should be able to live with my parents (let’s say while helping out with chores and making some kind of financial contribution) until I could save up for a downpayment on a house. My mother’s authoritarian attitude while I was living there and her constant threats to kick me out for frivolous and paranoid reasons did not motivate me to leave home as early as possible. It only heightened my resentment of her authority in that house.

If I could redo things, though, I would have spent the energy which, during my studies, I spent on certain other concerns, rather on becoming more independent at an earler age in one capacity or another.

2

1,2. It was always assumed that I would go to college. I remember my mom at one point saying that after I was an adult if I weren’t going to school I would be expected to pay rent, but I don’t think anyone ever thought that was a realistic thing. I was an excellent student and was excited to go to college.

  1. I came home for holidays for a while, but did my own thing the summer between junior and senior year. No way in hell would I have lived at home during college unless finances had made it a necessity, and I’m grateful to my parents that it was not.

  2. Excited to go. College was awesome! Why would I want to stay at home?!

3

As I explained in the other thread, my mother’s attitude was that you lived at home until you got married. I commuted to college and when, at age 20, I decided to share an apartment with a college friend she just about blew a gasket. I stayed in the same school for grad school and lived at home on and off. Then I finished and got a job in NY and that was it at age 25.

My brother enlisted in the Air Force at age 19, to my parents’ great displeasure. When he got out of the Air force at age 23, he went off to Penn State and was married before he finished. My sister got married at age 20 (on a day she had to go to the hospital for a miscarriage and then came back and got married). They did live with my parents for 6 months, but they found an apartment and moved out.

4

My parents didn’t have any hard cut-off. It was made clear that after high school, the options for staying at home were either attend college or pay rent. There was never any “you need to be out by this age”.
My older sister stayed at home her entire college career - two years at the local community college and two years at a commuter state university about 27 miles away. After graduating she paid rent a few years and moved out at 25 to move in with her boyfriend.

I went to a university 17 miles away. Either lived in the dorms or commuted when I was on the dorm wait list. Came home every Christmas and summer. Moved back home after graduation and found a job. Stayed another year paying rent while I built up a small nest egg. At 23, moved out and got an apartment with my girlfriend. Never spent the night there again except for housesitting when my parents were on vacation or staying with my mother when she was in home hospice.

  1. Leaving - I felt it was time to go, and they were cool with it. No drama.

ETA: When I was 29, I went back to grad school. My parents offered to let me move back in if it would help. Hell no!!! I was way too independent by then.(I think they were hoping I’d say no, but felt obligated to offer)

5

It’s was left just a little murky, but very generally they were neither thrilled nor particularly upset to have kids staying at home for awhile, but room + board was conditional. You were expected to be either going to school or working or de facto both (since they didn’t pay for college). And no “frills”. They weren’t about to pay college tuition for example, that was on us. No allowances of spending money, clothes, etc. - basically they pushed independence hard. If you were making enough to pay rent somewhere else, you were making enough to pay them at least a bit of rent. Both had left home at 18 themselves and never returned and though they were tolerant of our young adult struggles (and we were in a generally expensive urban area), they weren’t about to coddle them.

Partly it was assumed, but it was on a few occasions it was laid out briefly that nothing was owed to us after age 18 and they were fairly blunt about it (though not mean). Going to college? Finish in a normal number of years (4-5), get a job, get out. Not going to college? Get a job, get out. Can’t earn enough at your job to get out? Stay and work on getting a better job, then get out. Having really persistent trouble getting a job good enough to get out? They’d start half-humorously singing “Be All that You Can Be” (U.S. military recruiting add at the time) - one of us eventually went down that road.

As I mentioned in the other thread I was a full-time student at a commuter university and stayed at home continuously up until I became a full-time worker. My two sibling each moved out and back on two separate occasions each (that’s how I went from having the worst bedroom to the best by the end :wink:). At the end it was me and my oldest sibling (who had moved back in for a few months not from poverty, but as a side effect of splitting with his girlfriend and surrendering their apartment to her - he paid rent to my folks while he looked for a new place). Both of us had good jobs and were ready to go and my parents were actually chomping at the bit to move at that point, so the timing all worked out.

No family house per se. We were renters in the same house from when I was in 7th grade on, a sizeable duplex of sorts where we occupied the front two-thirds and a succession of family friends the back third (steered by my parents to the easy-going landlords). It was perfectly fine, but I had no great emotional attachment to it.

No real angst at leaving or the thought of entering adult life. If anything I was starting to chaff over time at living at home.

Pretty much on the same page, though I found their open joy at finally getting rid of the kids and moving to be a little lacking in tact :laughing:.

6

I moved out about two weeks after I graduated–I’d been volunteering on a tiny organic farm, and the farmer let me stay in the barn loft in exchange for farmwork. I moved back in with my mom about a year and a half later, but I paid rent.

During college, I came home over a summer or two and stayed with one or another of my parents. At one point I took a semester off, because I didn’t need any of the classes being offered; I lived with roommates, until one of the roommates went psycho and I moved back in with my dad for two or three months.

Again, I paid rent when I moved in: I was working, and why wouldn’t I?

7

1 - I don’t recall being given a specific deadline, but I do know that if we had a job while living at home, we were expected to pay board. Except when in high school, I was saving most of my earnings for college, so I was spared the board expense.

2 - I honestly don’t remember any specific conversations about moving on. But I do remember looking up rents and such and realizing I couldn’t afford to move out alone, especially since I had minimal marketable job skills at 19, hence my decision to join the Navy.

3 - Once I left, I never lived with my folks again. On the occasions when I visited, I was consigned to a sofabed in the basement because bedrooms were reallocated after my departure. Even after they moved to a bigger house, there was no guest room as 2 of my sisters were still minors, so I slept in a bigger basement.

4 - I wasn’t all that attached to my childhood home, but I did think I’d stay in the area forever. Turns out, the closest I lived was about 15 miles away for just under 3 years. Most of the time, I was hundreds or thousands of miles away. Even today, I’m about a hundred miles away and not missing the old neighborhood at all!

I would like to see inside the house again, just wondering how many of the things my dad built-in have endured. If the house ever went on the market, I’d be tempted to pretend to be a buyer… :wink:

8

In my family it was expected that you go to college and, except for visits, never again live at home. I, for one, couldn’t wait to leave, to the point of literally counting the days.

9

I remember when I was around 5-6 years old announcing my intentions to move out and go to college when I was 18. It was never really a question. My mother and her 5 siblings had all moved out to go to college or be married at that age. Pretty much the same for my father and step-father (college, military, or marriage).

I moved out, decided to go to school locally, and rented a 4 bedroom house with roommates when I was 18. I had been employed since I was 14 and before that counting "under the table’ jobs. Sometime between then and my mid-20s I ended up dropping out of school a half-dozen times or so and living with and breaking up with GF. I ended up moving back home and working 7 days a week while crashing on the couch for a summer. Outside of that, I stayed out.

My brother and sister are much younger and followed a similar path. My sister, though, moved back for awhile after a career change and going back to school for her doctorate. They are much closer to our mother and more likely to move back or just be around the house doing things. I like a good thousand mile buffer between most of my family members.

10

  1. Don’t know. neither me nor my two brothers waited long enough for them to suggest it was time.

  2. I can’t remember it ever being discussed. It’s a cultural norm in Norway for kids to move out for/after college.

  3. It would have been a serious commute, and public Universities and university housing in Norway are extremely affordable compared to the US.

  4. I can’t recall ever worrying about leaving home. During university I got used to the responsibilities/freedom of living on my own. I had no desire to go back to living at home after that, though I did, sort of, while doing (back then) compulsory military service (which most got done before university, and I did after). I was lucky to be asked by my Air Defense Forces room mate to share a sublet apartment with him and could move almost straight in there.

11

It wasn’t really discussed. I went to school far from home and visited less and less until they eventually converted my bedroom into an exercise room that actually got used for storage. There was still a guest bedroom available.

12

In my case, this simply never came up. I went to college at 18, got my bachelor’s degree at 22, my master’s degree at 24, all the while knowing that I was highly unlikely to be moving back to my hometown after school, much less moving back to my parents’ house.

OTOH, my sister has lived with my parents, on and off, for her entire adult life. She has several learning disabilities and emotional issues, and while my parents did try to help her establish herself independently (20 years ago, they helped her start a day spa, after she got her aesthetician license), they came to realize that she probably would never be able to truly live independently, and they have been willing to (though not entirely happy about) have her back in their home.

She’s lived back home with them for the past decade-plus; now that our parents are in their 80s, my sister does help them out a lot around the house, and acts as a caregiver when needed, so it’s wound up being a mutually-beneficial situation.

The latter. It literally never came up in a conversation between my parents and me.

I am not sure what sorts of conversations they have had with my sister.

I went to college 130 miles away from home, so commuting wasn’t an option. I lived in campus dorms for all four years of my undergrad studies, and then in off-campus apartments during my MBA program.

I did return home for the summer, between my freshman and sophomore years, and then between my sophomore and junior years. The first summer, I worked all summer, moving a hardware store from one location to another (some of the hardest, heaviest work I’ve ever done). The second summer, I was taking summer courses at the local branch of our state university (which transferred back to my campus). Both times, my parents (my mother in particular) were happy to have me home; I don’t think that there was any concern on their parts that I would somehow decide to not leave again.

Whenever I would come back home to visit during college (holidays, as well as just non-holiday weekend visits), my parents welcomed me back in the family home. To this day, when I go back up to visit them, I am always welcome in their home (though my old bedroom was converted to a guest room decades ago). I suspect that, if I were to suggest that I might stay in a hotel when I came to town to visit, they would be very sad about that, so I’ve never brought it up – they want me back in the house for the visit.

I don’t remember having any real issue with getting out on my own. I love my parents, and have always had a great relationship with them, but I don’t remember ever having any longing to stay in that home permanently, or any concerns or worries about becoming independent.

Over the course of my career (I’ve worked at five different places in the past 33 years, though all in the same area), my mother has, several times, asked me if I might consider moving back to my home town. I know she misses me, and wishes I was closer (where I live now is a 3-hour drive away from their home), but there are simply very few jobs for what I do in that smallish city, and I’ve now made a life here.

13

We never had no discussions on it growing up other than “I am so out of here when I turn 18” :wink:

I, in fact, was out and married at 19, my sister by 22.

My brother lived at home until he was 30, technically 35. He lived with [his now wife] for 5 years but nothing was done with his room at home. He’d occasionally spend the night and sleep there. All his stuff like clothes, stereo, etc remained there and he had new stuff at the apartment he lived with my now sister in law. It wasn’t until they actuslly got married that he cleaned out his old bedroom.

14

1.Until we graduated from college.

  1. I think it came up organically during dinner table discussions. There was no big announcement. We knew their policy was what they thought best for us, and it made sense. Also, they were loving parents who clearly loved having us around.

  2. It was expected we’d go away to school. I graduated high school a year early, and because I was so young (turned 17 just before college), I went to a local college. My parents encouraged me to transfer after my freshman year because they wanted to encourage independence.

  3. I was conflicted. My family was tight, and I loved my parents dearly. I considered staying at home and paying room and board, as my brother had for a year after graduation., but I also wanted my independence and was excited about starting my adult life. I fell in love my junior year of college and got married two weeks after graduation, so that settled that.

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15

My family lived in London, so housing was expensive.
Once I left University and got a decent job (computer programmer), I asked if I could continue to stay at home until I had saved up for a house deposit.
I paid my parents £200 / month (this was in the 1970s) and they were happy to offer a room, food and laundry for that.
In those bygone days, interest rates were much higher (7+%), so I also saved enough for a deposit by the time I was 33.

My family couldn’t afford for me to stay at University (I had to get a scholarship to go at all), so I had to go to University College, London and live at home.
(If I stayed late at college, I walked home 8 miles (couldn’t afford a taxi) :open_mouth:

Well I have Asperger’s Syndrome (we didn’t know that at the time), so I was happy in a safe familiar environment.

16

  1. My parents told me that as soon as they were no longer legally obligated to provide me shelter, they no longer would.

  2. I graduated high school, had been accepted to several colleges, but my parents decided that they were not going to pay for, or help pay for college, and even refused to give me their financial information needed to fill out the FASFA.

  3. NA

  4. Growing up, I thought about running away on a regular basis, but knew I had nowhere to go. When I was required to leave, it was certainly inconvenient that I didn’t have anywhere to go, and it took a few months to get on my feet. I was more or less on the same page as my parents, though, as I didn’t really want to be there either. Late at night, sweltering in the summer heat while trying to sleep in the back of my car hidden away at the end of a service road, I occasionally missed the comforts of a house, but I never really thought about going back.

17

We actually knocked on the door of our old house, and the new owners invited us in and gave us a tour. They were the ones who bought it from my parents and had been there, like, 30 years at that point. It was interesting! Some things were just the same, but they’d made a lot of changes that didn’t make sense to me. We always regretted that we couldn’t swing buying it from my parents when they sold it. It’s now estimated on zillow as $2.2M. My folks bought it in 1952 for $12K.

18

My parents are still living in the same house into which we moved on my 10th birthday, but I’d be hugely curious to see the inside of our previous house (which is only about a half-hour from where I currently live). I suspect that the inside was gutted about 20 years ago – I drive by it from time to time, and around then, I saw a big dumpster in the driveway, full of building materials. The Google Maps overhead photo suggests that they put an addition in the back, as well.

19

My parents never asked me to move out - in fact, they’d made it clear that their house was my house, and that there would always be food for me on their table. My siblings and I moved out more or less organically at various points in our 20s, and moved back at several points for periods of days, weeks or even months while we were looking for a new place to live.

20

1 and 2 (and 3, actually): Never had any sort of talk. It was assumed that I would go to college in state, which was about 600 miles north of us. I had zero problems with that, as I really wanted to get out in the world and leave all that high school misery behind. When I blew my first semester, I did stay at home and go to night school, but then returned to the Uni the following semester.

  1. I was all for leaving home, but really had no plan other than school. The military settled that question for me after two years. There was definitely some angst, as I had no idea what to expect.

I never regretted leaving home and looked forward to all my travels over the next 55 years, with brief visits to my parents and siblings.