This is a great story with the right kind of ending. Great community. 
My bro is going to be 41 this month. He’s still living at home.
I am hoping to raise my girls to understand that a) they will always have a home with me as long as I live but b) it would be better if they lived on their own. At the same time, I hope my girls always need me. I hope to be part of their lives as long as I’m breathing. Part of me is thinking that a two family where granny me helps watch the grandbabies and helps provide a huge chunk of the downpayment on the houe isn’t a bad idea. Housing and childcare are so expensive in this area (Northern NJ) that I think having help from a parent is probably beneficial for all concerned.
This thread has been stuck in my head. I believe strongly that families should make their own rules, short of abuse, verbal or physical.
However, I cannot agree with denying one’s offspring food and shelter; if one brings someone into this world, one has a lifetime obligation to, at at minimum, keep him or her from dying of want.
Well, unless s/he is a threat to the family’s safety. And I believe the same responsibilities extend to the people who brought one into the world, with the same caveats.
Obviously, your mother enjoyed your company, and trusted you to not take advantage of the young lady.
I think it’s kind of sweet that her interpretation of observing the proprieties was to hand you some extra linen and, no doubt, turn up the volume on her radio.
Has he transitioned from having his laundry done to doing home maintenance? Has he expanded his responsibilities from yard work and maintenance to shopping and laundry?
It wasn’t uncommon in some (sub) cultures for the youngest, or final unmarried, child to stay with the parents; the specific responsibilities might vary based on gender, but the primary goal, to protect the parents during their decline, was the same.
Not to my knowledge. He’s just a lazy, arrogant fuck with subpar mental capacities who works a menial job and pretends he’s king of the world. I rarely speak to him or my dad because they’re two sexist jerks living together. At one point, after my mom died, dad told me he wished I lived closer. I said that’s nice. He said, yeah you could help me out. By “help him out,” he meant clean his fucking house for free. When I broached the subject of having bro do it because you know BRO FUCKING LIVES WITH HIM paying only a token rent, I was told that’s basically women’s work and he’s retired so why should he have to do it and besides bro’s you know busy.
Whereas I am raising two kids, working full time and trying to create a writing career. But I’m a woman so that doesn’t fucking count. Bro’s not all that bright (special ed for most of his academic life) which sucks but he’s also lazy. My parents did little to inculcate a work ethic to make up for the lazy part so he’s 40, works a menial job and really has no options. My mom did not live to see him move out. I doubt my elderly father will manage it.
It isn’t cultural. He’s not just not very bright and he doesn’t want to work hard to make up for it. When dad dies, I’m expecting him to show up at my door demanding I provide him with a roof over his head, meals and maid service. Ugh.
I wanted to summarize my feelings on responsibilities to siblings in #63, but there are so many variables … it’s (abuse + annoyance)/ability - affection …
But no, it’s not that complicated; since I was 12, I have not expected anyone to cook my food, wash my clothes, clean up after me, or give me spending money.
OTOH, I have always assumed I would never starve to death in a ditch.
Or it’s 1970 and your kid can move next door like Keith Partridge.
I’m part of the “expect you to” set. My sisters and I all went to college, and none of us ever lived with Mom and Dad for longer than Summer break again. This is really astounding when I think that I moved into a dorm at 17.
And frankly, I don’t know anyone my age who didn’t have that expectation. My husband left for college, his brother, a year younger than he did, didn’t, but their mother sold the house and moved in with her long term boyfriend right after he graduated, and there wasn’t a bedroom for him. Most people I know either went to college, and never lived with their parents again except maybe for a few months during the Summer, or got jobs and moved into crappy apartments with their friends. Even the nice parents - almost none of my friends wanted to LIVE with their parents. The shame…the restrictions…
I have to agree with you and it wasn’t that long ago. Once I had my driver’s license on my 15th birthday (God Bless Louisiana, the state motto really should be “we grow them up young”), I was free to get a job and then buy my own vehicle. As soon as that was done, I could work as much as I wished. It certainly didn’t pay a lot but it was more than enough to become financially independent and therefore completely independent of my parents at a young age. My newly rewedded mother chose someone who was going through bankruptcy at the time so I was technically the wealthiest person in the entire house throughout high school (both of them have done much, much better since earning a doctorates and going on to really successful careers later in life but it was not a fun way to be a teenager if you were the type to depend on your parents for any money whatsoever). They had negative money so I just had to provide for myself no matter what I had to do or where it came from.
There was absolutely no question that I was going to college and they were not going to pay for it so I got some full scholarships, took out some modest loans and worked to provide all discretionary expenses. I was bitter about it in some ways but I also got some really high paying jobs in college that had unadvertised benefits and I am really good with managing money no matter how much or how little to this day.
My younger brother had a different experience. He refused to leave the house after graduating high school so my mother told him he had to do something. He went to welding school which can pay a decent amount in the right area and he was good at it but he refused to take his tests even though he could have passed them easily.
My mother responded by setting him up with a Marine recruiter who was very persuasive so my little brother eventually signed on the doted line with a date to report to basic training. He decided that he didn’t want to do that anymore after that so he asked for a deferral which they will generally give in peace-time so he got one. When that deferral was up, he said he wasn’t going and asked for another one. He was granted that one too. A few months later, the Marines called my mother and explained that there was not going to be anymore screwing around and my brother WAS GOING TO BOOT CAMP OR STRAIGHT INTO MILITARY PRISON.
My mother didn’t want to be there when it happened but she did arrange the timing of it so that nobody would get hurt. The military police showed up at our house bright and early one morning with arms at hand. My youngest brother (who was 13 at the time and always terrorized by the middle brother in question) said “Come right in - he is sleeping in his room”. Middle brother had exactly 5 minutes to get dressed, pick out his personal belongings and be in the back of military vehicle under armed escort to be on a plane to San Diego to report to Marine boot camp that day. That is what people mean when they say “a real wake-up call”.
Middle brother ended up in San Diego, South Carolina, Okinawa Japan and possibly Kosovo (he claims the latter but nobody is sure). What is sure is that he became very proud to be a Marine very quickly. Just 18 months after he was forced out of his bed, he was married in his Marine dress uniform and went on to serve admirably and then start a family with an ethic I never thought he had in him.
About half of children are males, but this conflicts with the demographic needs of polygamy. It is said that young Mormon men were often evicted at an early age. In the early 1900’s my own close Mormon relative was cast out in his teens with a gun and $5.
I left at 16 in 1973 to a boarding school and never returned. When I was 19 my mother moved away and I never had a key for her new home. Since I was a bit of a late bloomer, I think of my adolescence as something that occurred in my independent adulthood.
My stepchildren, on the other hand, lived with us on and off through age 28, or thereabouts. And it took a fair bit to get them independent.
For me, I graduated from high school in 1984.
And I’m thinking back on those first apartments for the people that didn’t go into a dorm. Four people in a one bedroom - using the “dining” room as a bedroom. Two in a studio. No cable (no internet or cell phones of course). Lots of cockroaches. Neighbors who might be selling drugs (and certainly neighbors who were using - “don’t step on the syringe” was a common statement walking out my back door for about eighteen months in my last college apartment) I’m trying to remember how many of my friends had a TV - it was rare enough - particularly with a VCR - that renting a movie and going to someone’s apartment for movie night was an event. I was popular because I had a car. We ate lots of off brand Mac n Cheese and pasta with “tomato sauce.” It wasn’t like we got out and got good factory jobs - you went to college or you delivered pizzas, worked in a coffee shop or telemarketed your way into paying rent.
But, by God, you DIDN’T live with your parents. Mine had a six bedroom house that was beautiful with plenty of room - but it would have had to have been bad before I crawled back home to Mom and Dad. And my parents are wonderful.
I waited until I was 19, and didn’t so much get kicked out as my father died and I was on my own.
You do what you have to do.
Going from your parents’ house to a residential college setting is vastly different from going from your parents’ house directly to independent living. Residential colleges have RAs, cafeterias and a whole support structure designed to transition young people to independent living. And from what I understand of the movies, joining the military also involves a whole support structure (barracks living, mess hall dining and so forth).
And some people’s parents prepared them well to live on their own from the time they turned eighteen. The horror stories are the ones like Aangelica described, of someone just suddenly forced to live as an independent adult. Because the stereotypical American childhood is so sheltered that most kids, typically, aren’t ready to live on their own at eighteen.
I wonder if parents today feel different about sending their kids–the ones they’ve “helicoptered” for 18 years–off to live in dumpy apartments with nefarious elements.
After two years in the dorms, my sister and I moved into a dumpy studio apartment surrounded by vacant lots populated by homeless guys and stoner skateboarder dudes. We were too pumped to be living in our own place to be scared. And our parents kept their fears to themselves, if they had them at all.
I don’t think it is just the current economic situation that makes parents more reluctant to kick out their grown children. I also think people are more aware of all the things that can go wrong and they don’t want to take any chances. Also, 18-year-olds still seem like children to most people. If 50 is the new 30, 18 is the new 15.
You mean like my brother in law, who I mentioned. Who turned eighteen and his mother said “I’m moving in with my boyfriend and there isn’t a bedroom for you, find a place to live?” Yeah, I’m familiar with that. Or one of my acquaintances, who was emancipated at 16 from a sexual abusive stepparent, but they didn’t have room for her in foster care, so she started living on her own at 16. Yep. Aware of that.
What I’m saying is that it was the norm to move out of your parents place after high school and never move back. Those like me were lucky, we moved into dorms (although that only lasted a year or two before most of us were in crappy apartments). Those like my brother in law - or most of my friends - left shortly after high school graduation - it simply wasn’t acceptable to live with your parents.
It’s an interesting American cultural paradigm ( man I hate that word! ), especially as it might now be a slowly dieing one with the newer economy. I know we have these discussions before on the board. But I can’t recall if we ever pinned down just when we went from a norm of multi-generational households, a la much of the rest of the world, to the 18-and-out model. Post WW II when the industrial economy was booming and the USA entered its economic Golden Age?
I’m not sure if its the “newer economy” or the standard of living. My kids think high speed internet at $100 a month is a necessity. Cable is a necessity. Cell phones and large data plans are a necessity. A car (with insurance). Their own bedrooms are a necessity. Living with your parents is less of a hardship than not having a Keurig. (And they are probably right about the cell phone and internet).
Living alone at 18 for us was sharing a bedroom, not having cable TV, and feeding yourself off a very minimum grocery bill. The only people that had cars were the ones where Mom and Dad bought the car and insurance (like me). We didn’t have cell phones or internet to buy, much less miss.
But it does seem to be changing to a model where you live at home much longer.
Prior to 1940, there we a lot more family farms.
People raised their own workers and those inherited and round we go again.
Used to be pride and fulfillment in that family business, etc., then the world opened up. WWII was a big factor and then came mass media and now we are in the mess we are in because there is no pride left, only, “I deserve this or that.”
"What do mean I have to work to get it, I thought the government gave me that at 18-21… "
We raised them to be that way so the blame goes to the people in the mirror. IMO 