Damn right
Well if they respected them less they’re always free to move out and support themselves, aren’t they?
Forgot to mention, like Sam Stone said, you don’t always get to pick and choose the rules you’re going to follow out in the real world. Parent’s who don’t teach their kids this when they live at home aren’t doing them any favors.
I’m not kicking anyone. I’ve already said twice that she has every right to do what she did.
And if it is breaking her heart, maybe she shouldn’t have done it. She has free-will, right?
Being a parent means sometimes having to do things that break your heart, if you think it’s in the best interests of your child.
I hate punishing my daughter. I hate to see her little bottom lip quiver when I have to reprimand her. I would much rather see her laughing and smiling. But sometimes you have to to the hard thing.
BTW, being able to do the hard thing when it is the right thing to do is a character trait of a quality person.
Why do I get the feeling that the people championing ‘self expression’ in this thread are probably a lot younger than those of us who are on the side of setting limits and sticking to them?
I don’t get it either. What kind of family abandons each other when its socially appropriate? Maybe 40+ years ago when you didn’t need a college education surviving at 18 was plausible. But now people have to juggle an education with hours that shift every 4 months and a minimum wage job. The days of joining a factory at 16 are over. I can understand kicking a kid out if he has a long term method of financial security. I wouldn’t approve of it but i can at least understand it. Kicking them out at 18 only causes them to run up $100k in student loans and to enter the ‘real world’ with a 6 figure debt hanging over their head. But at least its socially appropriate.
I wonder how all the people on this thread & in real life, when they are 70 and need an operation and can’t afford it react when their kids tell them to fuck off because they want to buy a new(er) benz. Should be funny.
Could you please point to someone who said that they would kick their kid out because it wasn’t ‘socially appropriate’?
What people have been saying is that sometimes a kid NEEDS to learn what it’s like to be on their own.
I have a friend with an 18 year old daughter. She’s verbally abusive to her mother, she doesn’t work, she leaves a mess behind her wherever she goes in the house, and she’s demanding - one time her mother was visiting, and her kid phoned her to tell her that she was out of cigarettes, and her mother needed to go to the store RIGHT NOW and buy her some. When her mother said she was busy at a friend’s, and she’d pick them up on her way home, we could hear the kid say, “I want my cigarettes NOW, you stupid bitch!”
The mom apologized to us sheepishly, and left to go buy her little Princess some cigarettes.
That young lady needs to learn NOW that the world doesn’t revolve around her. But her mom is weak, and will let her push her around for a few more years until some lucky guy sweeps her off her feet. Then she’ll be 30 years old, divorced, on welfare, probably with a couple of kids that she’ll abuse.
Mommy isn’t doing her any favors by letting her stay at home.
Interesting thread. I moved out at 18 and went to college on scholarship. When I realized I was going to lose my scholarship because of too much partying I left and joined the Army. I moved back in with my Mom for a year or after the service as a convenience to both of us. But the thing was my Mom taught me responsibility by example, and I hope to do the same for my sons.
Now I have an 18 y/o stepson (from my previous marriage) living with me. He just graduated. He’s applying at colleges and looking for a summer job to help defer some of his expenses for his first year, for which I’m going to help him. However I too have what you might call stupid rules. In my community males like to walk around with their pants half off their ass. They also like to have their hair in corn-rolls and baby dreads (a hair style that’s actually little bits of hair rolled up). In my house I accept but don’t like the latter, but absolutely forbid the first. Stupid maybe, but I don’t want anyone walking around my house showing his or her underwear.
Anyway he’s known since he came to live with me two years ago that those are the rules. Pull up your pants, go to school and summer jobs from 16 on. He follows those rules and as far as I’m concerned he can stay for as long as he likes. Otherwise there is the front door, go out and make rules of your own. I don’t see a problem with this, I see whining.
Well thats a different scenario. And i wasn’t really referring to anyone in particular in this thread just the mentality that making someone leave at 18 is the appropriate thing to do. I think you’re missing the point, i wasn’t referring to children with problems or lack of responsibility, but parents who feel its ‘spoiled’ for kids to live at home after 18, even if it fucks their ability to get an education or forces them to get by on 3 hours of sleep a night because they have to work and go to school at the same time.
Well, fair enough. But how common is that? I think the vast majority of cases are the result of, 1) the kid wanting to move out, 2) Going away to school, or 3) behaviour problems.
For the small percentage of selfish parents who kick kids out of the home before they can complete their schooling, just because they turned 18, I offer a hearty extended middle finger.
I have two sons rapidly approaching the 18-year mark. They can stay here for as long as they like, provided they’re in school, working, or job-hunting. If they choose work instead of school, I’ll expect them to pay rent and be saving for their eventual move-out.
As long as they live here, I have house rules. They don’t have the freedom that they would if they lived in their own apartments–but they don’t have the responsibilities, either.
I don’t have any rules about piercings (simply because I like them), but they will have to hold off on tattoos until they’re at least 18. However, I think Adoptamom and Sam are right on target: Parents set the house rules; kids have to live with the house rules; any kid has the right to move out when s/he is able to support himself.
My kids don’t like all of my (very few, actually) rules, but you know, I don’t like all the rules I have to follow in my life either. A few years of coming home by curfew and getting their homework done on time is not going to hurt either of my boys, any more than doing without an nosering is going to hurt Adoptamom’s kids. There are millions of ways to express one’s individuality; having to find a more creative way would not be that much of a hardship.
The few kids I’ve known who have been kicked out have either been of the stealing/lying/firesetting variety, or really decent kids who had parents who were just…well, really horrible parents. Those kids were welcome in my home just like my own kids are, and my boys both know that their friends, if caught in a situation like that, are welcome here too.
Got an interesting twist for you…
My husband was kicked out of his mother’s house when he was 18, as he returned from his first year of college.
At that time his mother was a social worker in child protective services. My husband, valedictorian of his HS class and a straight-A college student, had committed the grand crime of deciding he wanted to switch colleges so that he and I could be together (the college he’d attended was 250 miles away) (and he also couldn’t afford it). So his mom gave him the boot.
We got an apartment together and he took a year off from school to work & fill out his applications. We married, moved, and I supported him while he earned his degrees.
Fast-forward 15 years…we’re still married & happily so, Hubby has his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology & is an Environmental Microbiologist doing remediation work…and his mother is homeless as far as we know. We’ve bailed her out twice in the last 7 years, taken her into our home & given her money, clothes, etc; we finally got her into a program for homeless women, from which she was recently expelled.
So ya just never know.
I don’t know on the whole rule thing. Parents are given the task of creating good adults, not controllable children. Rules should be aimed toward that goal, not “I think XX is icky, so it is not allowed.” There are house rules that are accpetable, and ones that are not. Body piercing of people over legal age is a grey area.
My parents made clear thier opinions on piercing and tatoos, but so far nothing has come to any sort of conflict. (If you have to be 18 to get it on your own, you get to wait. I’m the only one over 18 so far and I’m a wuss. I’ll express myself with glitter, thanks.) But if it came right down to it, the parental rules are limited to eliminating things that are morally or physically harmful. The parental opinions range far and wide, but actual rules are only made on limited topics. A philosophy that I thank my parents dearly for. (And allowed my little sister to dye her hair blue. It made her happy.)
Eyelid piercing? Morally or physically harmful? Stupid, I’ll grant you. I’ll allow that my interpretation of such “personal expression” is “I’m an idiot! I like to set off metal detectors with what on everyone else is a soft fleshy bit!”. But idiocy is not morally or physically harmful under controlled circumstances, and I’m very uncomfortable with parents who insist on being that controlling.
After I left the military I spent a year in a run-down PG county town (outside of Washington DC) driving a trash truck. Lots of good stories.
The day after HS graduation my truck picked up no less than three tenaged bedroom’s worth of stuff.
In some places this is what is done.
I do not agree. So, my parents had a rule about me being off the phone by 10 p.m. when I was in high school. It wasn’t physically or morally harmful, so I guess my parent’s had no right to put down that rule, huh? I mean, it’s not like it’s their house or anything. They were just being too controlling.
I think it’s that kind of thinking that is resulting in the recent trend of undisiplined hellions we’ve been seeing so many pit threads about lately. Sometimes rules are just rules and children need to learn to follow them, regardless of whether or not they agree with them.
And gex, seeings how this isn’t the Pit, I’m going not going to bother commenting on your post.
:rolleyes:
Uh huh. As if teaching your children how to be independent, thinking adults is exactly equivalent to allowing them to completely free license and doing whatever the hell they want.
It is a very rare rule indeed that does not have an exception. If one can make the case that a rule is a poor one, then one should be able to reasonably challenge its raison d’etre in some manner, even if the one affected is a child. If the adult does not have the patience to entertain rational inquiries, that is a failure on the part of the parent, not the child.
Certainly it is true that if a child doesn’t like the rules of a particular household, that child does have the option of leaving. And in some cases, the child might very well be simply stupid and rebellious on a particular issue. However, parents are not created equal, some make stupidly stifling, needlessly oppressive rules, and the option of jumping from the nest too early is less than ideal–the child with supportive parents is far more likely to avoid the pitfalls of young adulthood than the child left to fend for himself.
A parent needs to be consistent, and reasonable rules obviously need to be enforced… but the inflexible parent is no better than the wishy-washy one. It is much the same with the child… one that does not respect authority at all is potentially too reckless, while one that respects it unquestioningly is not only a sheep, but a potentially dangerous peon–the kind that “was just following orders” when he massacred women and children–or maybe he just went along with shredding documents when the whistle should have been blown.
Do not be so fast to criticize the instillation of independence and critical thinking skills in children. Life is filled with rules… and some of those rules end up being mutually exclusive. These questions are not merely hypothetical, nor are they always so simple. Some of humanity’s greatest heroes are those that knew the rules and wisely chose to break them.
You really think that your parents should have kicked you out of your house if you had happened to use the phone too late?
I mean, I suppose it is their right to do so, especially if you are 18 and have finished high school (in Minnesota, IIRC, parents are still required to take care of their 18-year-olds if they are still enrolled in high school–if you turn 18 in November of your senior year, your parents still have to house you until June), but kicking a kid out of the house does seem like quite a draconian punishment to me, and, IMO, should be reserved for extreme circumstances.
Yeah, if your parents kicked you out of the house for using the phone too late, I’d say that was pretty extreme and controlling. I’m not quite sure where I’d stand on the piercing issue…I suppose that if the parents had made that rule and its punishment clear beforehand, then the kid knew what he was doing and should face the consequences. I don’t think that it’s a rule I would have made, though.
I think that part of the reason that my friend was thrown out of his house is that his father really, really wanted him to join the Marines–and he threw my friend out after HS in order to force his hand (the Marines would have given him a place to sleep, after all.) Do you think that a parent should do this? IMO, something like that goes far beyond “house rules”.
I know a man who at 24 still lives with his parents. He dropped out of school a few years ago to get a better job so he could pay for his truck and cool computer gear. To my knowledge, he doesn’t help with rent, utilities or food. He’s extremely immature for his age, probably because he’s never had to deal with basic responsibilities. This is so positively ridiculous that it blows my mind.
Like FairyChatMom, my parents made jokes about kicking us out at 18 to get us in the mindset that we were expected to find a place on our own and be big girls and boys. Of course they didn’t just kick us out. All of us started by living in dorms. I went home one summer (and hated the restrictions on my movements), but by the next one, I was married. I wouldn’t have even gone home that first summer if I could’ve found a job that guaranteed me enough hours to pay rent. My siblings ended up moving into apartments with friends soon after tiring of dorm living. To my knowledge, neither of my siblings moved back with my parents for more than a summer or two.
Living with our parents as adults was simply an idea that never occured to us. Oh, and they didn’t pay for our college either. We were expected to make our own way in the world. I learned more from my parents’ actions than I learned in four years of university.
I don’t agree with the parent on the first page that kicked her kid out for getting a piercing, though it is her right as the homeowner. (In other words, I think the rule was stupid to begin with, but since it’s her rule, I understand why she followed through on it). I definitely don’t agree with kicking out a kid at 18 who hadn’t even graduated high school (obvious exceptions made for those kids who are dangerous/hopeless). How cruel is that? How can someone who hasn’t even had the opportunity to get a high school diploma be expected to make a livable wage? You’re just asking for someone to be forced into dropping out of school.
That’s not analogous with the piericing issue, though. A better one would be ‘should your parents have kicked you out of the house if you used the phone after 10 pm every night even after being told that you’d be kicked out of the house for it’. Note that the peircing kid had the option of just letting the piercing heal over instead of leaving the house.
I don’t consider kicking out a freeloader who’s getting their rent and food for free (plus cleaning services) to be draconian at all. Once you’re an adult, you get to do what you want to do but no one has to pay your way either; sure, you can get piercings that disgust the person giving you thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per yer. Just don’t be suprised if they decide to stop handing you money!