Is standing up to my parents a good idea?

At what point do you believe it would be a good time for you to start taking responsibility for your own life and stop blaming you parents for everything?

Is that something you think is even a realistic outcome for you?

Now that all mistakes have been made, it is irrelevant what fraction of ``blame" is on me, on my parents, on my therapists.

What is important is to advice young people to learn from my mistakes without making their own.

The OPer hasn’t come back. I am picturing him cleaning out the ashes of the fireplace, then sweeping the floor, with the help of some amiable birds and mice.

Unfortunately, I have of late had more experience with the after-effects of toxic parents* than with entitled children, so that may be skewing my opinions. I am not aware of any statistics, and I’m not sure how they could ever be compiled.

*Try dealing with a woman, now in her 60s and in long-term therapy, who is still panicky at the thought of having to make her own choice from a restaurant menu, because for the first 50+ years of her life that wasn’t a choice she was allowed to make. Mommy decided what she was going to eat. Mommy decided what she was going to wear. Mommy decided where she was going to live, where she was going to work, who her friends would be, what doctor she could see, what medications she could take, and what time she got out of bed in the morning. Then Mommy got Alzheimers.

Sadly severe parental control of adult children is a frequent situation.

Definitely, I must appreciate my parents much more given that they are nice people. I also made mistakes in life.

The OP described the various problems he has with his parents. If his parents were physically abusive, it seems like something that would have been added to the list. So we can assume there hasn’t been any physical abuse. And while there are undeniably physically abusive parents out there, I think the number of them who wait until their children are in college to begin abusing them is vanishingly small. Therefore, based on what the OP said, physical abuse is a remote possibility in this situation.

I’m not a parent, and although my kids have never said anything nasty to my face , I did hear a lot of “why do you make us go everywhere with you”. They were neither exaggerating nor telling the literal truth - it’s just that they didn’t define “go everywhere” as meaning literally every time I left the house. “Go everywhere” meant such things as going to a family holiday or birthday. And I suspect that the OP defines “travel everywhere” similarly , or at least not literally. After all, he attends classes and presumably least one parent goes to work- it’s unlikely they never leave the house while he’s in class and I’m certain they don’t demand that he goes to work with them.

I agree. The OP definitely was painting a negative picture of his parents (deservedly or not). If his parents were physically abusing him, why would he withhold that information? It would only strengthen his case.

In some families, abuse stems from what’s going on in the parents’ lives. Daddy had a bad day at work, so Daddy takes it out on the kids; Mommy got drunk, so Mommy beat the kid. The frequency and severity of abuse does not depend on the kid’s behavior at all; the parent is out of control.

In other families, though, physical violence is a deliberate means of enforcing control. Physical discipline is taken as a given; as a little kid, you get smacked around (or threatened with being smacked around) for talking back, so you learn never to talk back. If you don’t talk back or otherwise act contrary to parental wishes, you won’t face physical threats, because the parent is very much in control of themselves and of the family.

Now, however, OP is being counseled to step outside parental wishes. IF he is from a family of the second type (and yes, I appreciate that we don’t have evidence one way or another), the very act of deviating from the established order can trigger a parental attempt to enforce the “proper” discipline on a misbehaving child, and in subcultures where physical violence is viewed as an acceptable form of discipline, things can get ugly fast.

So the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others. :wink:

This is so fucked up! So how did receiving an advanced technical degree ruin your life? Why couldn’t you have gone on and earned whatever useful or useless bachelor’s degree you wanted? What the hell degree do you think would be more useful than most STEM degrees? Which degrees ensure rewarding jobs and personal lives? And how did your education choice ruin your social life?

My daughter was in a molecular bio Ph.D. program, but decided to Master out and is now working in the technology field. You have had - and continue to have - many options. You want to go back to school and start a family? Well, get started! You could have 45 more years on this planet to do with whatever you want. When are you going to stop blaming your parents for your actions?

You sound incredibly immature for someone of your years. It is never too late to grow up.

OP has succeeded in making a great Rorshach test of a post. It’s generic enough that we can all read our own parents failings into it.

It’s hard to tell if the OP is accurately describing emotionally abusive parents, or using hyperbole (as teenagers who aren’t actually independent adults are prone to do). I remember clearly thinking that all I did were chores, but, looking back at it, and now living as an adult who actually does have to take care of himself and others, I realize that I was not shouldering nearly as much of the load as I thought I was.

Is the OP’s time literally entirely consumed by the whims of his parents, or is he annoyed that he gets asked to do more chores than he thinks are fair.

This might be how a sullen teenager would describe the semi-reasonable expectation of being part of a household. I certainly wouldn’t wander off without telling my wife where I were going and when I expected to be back. And I remember my parents having similar rules for me. Now, if they expected a minute by minute report or an exact route for my bike ride, that might be unreasonable.

See, I’d be more convinced that this was overbearing parents if the OP said something like “including the preparation of all meals”, or listed more things. Because as one person in a three person household, having to prepare one of three major meals each day in addition to “many of the household responsibilities” isn’t exactly indentured servitude.

Welcome to adulthood. I’ve got a six-week-old son and a yard that I haven’t quite managed to kill all the plants on yet, so you’re ahead of me if you’ve got time to sleep. (there’s a support group. It’s called everybody, and we meet at the bar.)

Could be reasonable or unreasonable, depending on what the parents’ travel requests are.

This might be a cultural difference, and it might be reasonable or unreasonable. Some parents are more strict about balk talk. Some are unreasonable and expect to be given the deference demanded by drill sergeants. And of course there’s a wide difference between not being able to say “I’m bummed because I didn’t get to go to the movie with my friends last weekend because I was hoeing the back nine” and “<food> again?! Gross!” Restrictions against both might reasonably be construed as the OP has.

The other open question, should the OP respond, is whether the parents also work themselves as hard. OP is living at home for financial reasons during college. Now, that might mean that the bank of mom and pop can’t spring for a fancy college private tuition and the luxury dorm, or it might mean that they’re scraping by and scrimping to keep the car limping along and somehow pull together tuition for a community college. We don’t really know. If the parents are working 10 hour days and juggling multiple low-wage jobs, or supporting other family we don’t know about, and leaning on the OP to keep the family ship afloat, then the OP might be out of line. Poorer families expect everyone to pull their weight. Free time is a luxury that’s not available to everyone.