As parents we know intellectually that taking on the world is a good thing. We raised a strong independent woman who’s not afraid of life. Yea, us!
But on the other hand, she’s all the way across the friggen country and I want to see her more often, damn it!
Find a way to reconcile those two simultaneous and opposing thought patterns and you’re home free!
My kids are little, so I can’t tell you how I’ll feel about their independance. I will tell you a little about my family.
I’m 40. I’ve spent the vast majority of my adult life living a 30 minute drive from my parents. We are close, but - like a lot of young adults - I spent more time in my own life and occationally spent months without seeing them. It wasn’t until I had kids eight years ago that my parents became really important to me again - and me having kids of my own changed the relationship.
My sister is 38. She’s always been the family glue. About five years ago she moved out of state to be closer to her husband’s family - primarily his mother. However, his mother has dementia bad enough that within six months being there became more for them than for her - she doesn’t recognize her own kids.
My other sister is 33. Always independant, she left for college without looking back. Even in college we didn’t see too much of her - Christmas spent skiing - summers working for the National Park Service. She didn’t even make it to my wedding. This isn’t because she doesn’t like us, or vice versa - its just her.
A little over a year ago we pulled the baby out of a very physically abusive relationship - her boyfriend had isolated her even further than she’d isolated herself. I got a phone call from the middle sister and in six hours we were on a plane, renting a car, and moving her out of the house - and taking her home with us for a bit. We ended up spending “family week at rehab” - perhaps the first time since I left for college that it was just my parents and sisters together. She’s doing much better.
A few weeks ago my middle sister had a masectomy - stage II breast cancer, found early in the year.
My parents are in their 60s - in fairly good shape with good genes (if alcoholism or suicide don’t get you - my family tends to live into their 80s) - but they are obviously getting older - not too many more “good” years.
There will be other summers - there will be fewer of them than you think and it will become harder and harder for them to be “like they were.” The dynamics change - you add a partner, maybe kids. Your parents know this - they watched the families they grew up in splinter off - they watched losing a sibling to inlaws, losing them to a cross country move - or losing one to tragedy. They watched their parents pain - and joy - as their children didn’t need them anymore. They know they have a limited amount of time left before you truly enter adulthood.
Today, I’d take that summer I didn’t spend at home over just about anything.
If you’re so eager to take on the world then start paying your own tuition and bills and quit asking your parents for money (even a little bit of money). It’s disingenuous (but typical for college kids) to keep trying to declare your own emancipation on the one hand and expecting your parents to foot your bills on the other.
Hmm, let’s see. You have parents who, like many these days, feel good about “helping” their child with their education. You even have a fairly crisp understanding that they’ll pay for your school and school-to-home travel expenses. And they’ve demonstrated some willingness to help out with living expenses too.
Your summer plans are none of those things, or at most they’re a giant stretch of the living expenses category.
Certainly your parents want to have you home again, and doing something for them is certainly a gesture worth considering, given what they’re doing for you.
But if you want to feel like an adult you have to respect the agreement you have with them about who pays for what. The dollar equivalence of the two scenarios doesn’t mean a damn, and you know it.
This is a classic growing up exercise for which there are many possible outcomes, but having your parents foot the bill for your summer of semi-real life is not one of the positive ones for your loserdom problem.
They probably found a nice young man (maybe even a doctor!) they want you to meet.
I’m close to your age (22) and I wish I could say I know how you feel, but I’m not sure I do. Why are you so comfortable with your parents paying for everything? I realize they’d only be paying for part of your start up costs this summer, but it’s a huge part.
For close to 2 years I’ve been on my own, but I’m not completely independent yet. They’re paying for my car (which was theirs first, but still) and I hate that I can’t afford to take over the costs yet. I was also terrible at managing money for awhile, and kept asking them for help, and I hated doing that. So, what did I do to solve that? I stopped taking their money. I stopped asking for money. Late last year I found myself in a situation where I didn’t have the money to pay my rent that month, but instead of coming to them for help, I grew up and found a solution (ended up pawning a lot of stuff, which wasn’t fun, but it worked).
I’ll be thrilled when I can manage my budget and expenses so I can take over the car costs, but I’ve stopped looking to them for help with other things.
I guess what it comes down to for me is: If you say you aren’t a kid anymore, and you want to be an adult, then you have to act like one. Until you do, you still owe your parents a lot. They’re forking over huge amounts of money for you, and they ought to have a say in how it’s spent.
Also, look at the added benefits for yourself here. If you go back home for one last summer, you can have a great chance to save up a fair bit of money before going back to school. It might also be a good chance to pay your parents back a little by helping out with expenses. Prove that you aren’t a kid anymore.
My folks haven’t agreed with everything I’ve done (and they’ve been right more than once), but their main concern was that I had a plan and thought everything through. They didn’t mind helping me if I needed it, but they just wanted me to be smart about things.
You have some fairly pie-in-the-sky ideas about staying out there in Santa Fe for the summer and you want your parents to pay for them. They’ve suggested a back-up plan which would be less expensive for both of you, and you’re whining about it? Doesn’t sound all that grown up to me. You don’t yet know if you will have the campus job you want, nor do you actually know if you can get a job in town, and if you can’t you won’t be able to pay your share of the rent in the shared apartment. A suggestion that you might want to apply for some jobs at home, so you wouldn’t have to worry about that expense, seems like a practical idea. And I know you keep saying the expense wouldn’t really be all that different, but have you figured out what a summer’s room and board (or first month and deposit on an apartment) would be, as opposed to buying groceries for one more person in the house? Besides, as people have mentioned, if you live in their house rent free you might be able to accumulate enough money that they won’t have to keep slipping you those fifties when you leave. Then you’ll be taking steps toward real independence.
BTW, I have a question about the involuntarily on the five year degree path. Are you taking five years worth of college PLUS the year off for Europe - to total six years between high school and a B.A., or are you counting the year in Europe - in which case how is this involuntary? And you are a sophmore - which gives you at least two years after this - with no guarentees of not having the “senior surprise” of scheduling issues keeping you around an extra semester.
Because if my kids took five years to finish school, and in the middle of their five years, took a year off, I’d be pretty pissy about the whole thing. Eventually, you have to start living a grown up life, and it sounds like - one way or the other - you are putting yours off - and I’m suspecting by two years. You think not moving home is the “grown up” thing - your parents think you’ve already pissed away two extra years - for which they are footing at least part of the bill - and for which you aren’t doing them the courtesy of coming home for the summer. It occurs to me that your parents may have thought they signed on four years ago to be done now, and you are only halfway finished - with, from their point of view, no guarentees on future delays.
If that is what is going on, the compromise may be “stay in Santa Fe, but take a half load of courses while working full time.”
(Sorry it took me so long to get back to this)
The five years are including the year in Europe: four years of classes plus the year off. The year off happened because, very long story short, I go to an odd school where A) all classes are mandatory (no electives), B) all classes are seminar-style, all discussion, no lectures, and C) I had some emotional/anxiety issues that were keeping me from really participating. So I essentially got kicked out and told I could try again in a year or two if I got my head straightened out. So I moved home for a couple of months and went back into therapy again. The Europe thing happened mostly because it was something I’d originally wanted to do before college, but didn’t mostly because I was way to scared to do so, and even buying that plane ticket on my own was a huge step for me in terms of “getting the hell over things that I’m irrationally anxious about”).
I know that there will be no “senior surprise” extension because of the above point about my school being all-mandatory. You enroll as a freshmen, you take these classes freshman year, these sophomore year, and so on. There’s no choice in it, so I can’t screw up in terms of not getting credits I need. Additionally, there are no summer classes. (If you want a slightly better explanation, click).
However - I had a long talk with my parents this weekend. We seem to have worked some things out - I guess neither of us had really seen where the other was coming from, and we got a bit of that straightened out. They’re still not thrilled with the idea (I’ve yet to get them to stop thinking of me as their “little girl”). But if nothing else, my dad said: “Well, both your mother and I also went to school far away, and we both really moved out of our parent’s houses around sophomore year, with financial help from our parents, so…I guess I do understand what you’re saying.”
So it looks like they’ll be willing to help, under two conditions: They can come and visit me at some point (which I’m absolutely fine with), and I use some of my vacation time to go visit my sister in California (which is a whole other issue that I won’t go into, but will probably be able to sneak out of.)
They had to negotiate the right to VISIT you?
I thought the OP might actually read the responses in this thread and make a mature, self-aware decision. I guess I was wrong. Hell, she’s indicating that she doesn’t even intend to honor the terms of the near worthless concessions she did make.
You aren’t coming off like a grownup, Ninja. You’re coming off like a bit of a spoiled kid. Being an adult has nothing to with partying with your friends on your parents’ dime.
Uh, no, it was something we both agreed would be nice. Sorry if I was unclear.
Could you please explain how I’m being a spoiled brat? Or how “I have friends in place x but not place y, therefore would rather spend three months in place y” translates to “I will be doing nothing but partying and will not pay for it myself”? The primary reason I probably won’t visit my sister is that she doesn’t want me to visit. She and I don’t get along all that well. We speak to each other - I actually just talked to her on Thursday - but spend more than a day or two together and we simply run out of things to say to each other. My parents are the only ones who have a problem with that.
I asked for some advice and opinions on a situation. I received advice and opinions, with no clear consensus. Then I found a solution to the situation in which all involved parties are satisfied, and thought I would keep those who’d been helpful informed, as a basic courtesy. But I appreciate the personal attack, especially since you so clearly understand every nuance of my family.
You’ve gotten some firm responses here, NinjaChick, but I have a compliment for ya. I think it’s great that you want to strike out on your own. Yeah, you don’t have the necessary ingredients for independence laid out yet, but at least you have the desire for it. I know that can’t be easy for someone with anxiety issues.
What are you doing right now? Is it possible for you to secure that campus job now? That would be the very smart thing for you to do. Start hunting now. Good summer jobs get snapped up fairly early. Also, think about combining a part-time campus job with a part-time off-campus job (or another part-time campus job). It doubles the experiences you acquire and makes your summer more exciting.
Also, while it’s nice your parents have agreed to help with your accomodations, I think it would really demonstrate your “non-little-girlness” if you were to repay their assistance. Your parents, IMHO, are going above and beyond what parents with college-aged dependents normally do (or should have to do, to be honest). Most parents expect a break during the summer. You may think that year off counts as a break, but it doesn’t.
Consider getting a part-time job for the next school year. Many college kids do it, so you can too.
Good luck.
(Living at home during the summer for a college kid does not make for loserdom, by the way.)
Your parents sound pretty decent to me.
Since you cut off to Europe for a year, they are probably not worried about you being able to look after yourself, so the only reason I can see is that they want you around.
Letting them think that you are ‘rejecting’ them would be pretty cruel, and also a bad move.
It would be interesting to know more about your sister in California, I assume she is a fair bit older than you. It was only when I was about 25 that I became friends with my youngest brother - the age gap diminishes exponentially.
Whew!
It was at this point I was sure you were going to type: “I got a job as a stripper at a local bar…”
Your post turned out a lot better as I’m glad to see.
I actually have a job interview this afternoon (yes, on Easter Sunday - I’m not going to question that, just show up and try to sound smart). They know that I’ve been working on getting that and accommodation figured out, but I didn’t want to push too hard unless they were OK with it. Had they not come around I would have ended up going home for the summer - after all, my intent was never to insult them and they are paying for my tuition. (Which, before anyone starts in on, would be impossible for me to pay fully. I’d have to either get married, join the military, or drop out and work until I turned 22 [I think] for federal financial aid to recognize that I’m not a dependent.)
Other miscellaneous wrap-up stuff: I’ve been unemployed this semester for the first time since high school because I came back mid-year. My school doesn’t do semesters, all courses are year-long, so I was picking up again midway through. I’d been in shaky academic standing when I left, and I very briefly did have a job, but was getting way to stressed out. All involved parties agreed that academics were my first priority, and it would be better to quit the job for the sake of my mental health. I will be working full-time over the summer, and part-time during the coming school year.
I fully plan on trying to repay my parents for what help they give me this summer. The issue is whether or not they’ll accept it. Last time I borrowed money the refused to take repayment, so I ended up buying them much more expensive gifts then I usually do.
I’m not really happy with needing to borrow money from them, but I’m more comfortable doing that than, say, getting another credit card and earning more debt. They’re more comfortable with our current situation than I am.
My sister is only three years older than I am, but our relationship is…complicated, and a really long story. Basically we’ve both made decisions that the other finds unforgivably idiotic, and there’s just no safe conversation topics beyond the weather.
Hah, SHAKES I don’t quite have the figure to be a successful stripper, even if I wanted to go that route 
NinjaChick I’m glad you found a solution with your parents. It’ll never be an ideal solution when someone is helping you with money, but at least it sounds like you’re heading the right direction.
I can relate pretty well to your last post. The age for being considered independent was 23 last time I looked at financial aid, so I’m waiting 'til I turn 23 and I’ll start applying for grants and such.
My mom also would love for me and my brother to be buddies, but it’s complicated. We haven’t even spoken for 3 or 4 years, though mom keeps us both updated on how the other is doing. She won’t take my money, either. I end up taking her out to lunch periodically as a small “thank you!”. It’s not much, but it’s 'bout all she’s okay with.
Ninja, my stepson graduated from the “companion school” in Maryland. I know that it is a tough school and very hard to get into. You’ve got some smarts. Just focusing on the reading requirements is enough for anyone!
I understand your need to be as independent as possible at your age. I’m glad that you were able to negotiate something with your parents. The reason that you had a negative response from some of us is that you were dishonest in your negotiations. You have no intention of carrying through on all of your end of the bargain. It doesn’t matter what the reason is. Your parents are under the impression that this is a done deal.
It’s a matter of integrity. Have you no conscience? You plan to take their money under false pretenses.
To be fair, if her sister doesn’t want her as a guest, there isn’t much she can do about that.
If she knows that it’s a promise that she cannot keep – for whatever reason – she should not mislead her parents.