When we decided to consider moving, we sat our kids down and asked them their plans. In our current house each kid has their own bedroom, but we don’t want to limit ourselves to houses that large if the kids are not going to be coming home for summers, or have no interest in living at home for any time after they graduate.
Tho we aren’t going to really do any looking until (and if) our current home sells, we anticipate downsizing considerably from our current 5 beds. What would be best is a house with some flexibility as to space. Maybe a “bonus room” or office, or perhaps an unfinished basement where we could rough out a cave for a kid.
When my eldest (now a junior) went to college we let her 3-year younger sister move into her room. Just over the past weekend we learned she still bore some bad feelings over that. Struck us as weird. What - were we supposed to retain the largest of the kids’ bedrooms as a shrine to her?
I think when I went to college, I expected (not thought I was owed, but figured it was likely) to be able to move back into my own room for the summer after my freshman year, and after that it would be up for grabs. In reality, my parents agreed with this but my sister appropriated my room as her second bedroom. Sigh.
My bedroom has now* become the de facto guest room when I’m not here, but it hasn’t been redecorated. But the upstairs is supposed to be renovated by the end of the summer, and I expect that after removing the carpet and painting the walls, none of my stuff will get put back up. I’m getting so I’m ok with it- I don’t expect to be here again for anything longer than a Christmas break.
I moved from my dad’s house to live with my mom when I was 16, and it wasn’t long before my bedroom there had been turned into an office for my stepmom. I didn’t mind (I was happy to be gone at the time). My mom has pretty much kept my room the way it was, although she’s pushed the bed against the wall and moved a big desk in. I came home for summers for two years and it was nice to have the place to stay. After that, I stayed there for a week or so after graduation in between a road trip and moving to Santa Barbara.
I wouldn’t have felt kicked out if she had changed it earlier. I would have just slept on the futon in the den (which is where I sleep now when I visit because my childhood bed is too small for me and my girlfriend) or something. But, then, I’ve never been very attached to living spaces.
A few of the people who think it’s heartless not to keep space for grown kids are quoting Cat’s in the Cradle and saying the parents shouldn’t be invited to the kid’s wedding.
Here’s an extreme case for you: my husband is the oldest of four children, 3 boys and one girl. The year **before ** my husband graduated high school, his parents bought a 2 bedroom house. His parents had one bedroom, his little sister (12)had the other and the 3 boys (ages 14, 15 and 17) slept on couches or the floor of the living room. His dad said that the boys would be leaving soon so a bigger house didn’t make sense.
I didn’t keep my kids’ rooms as shrines, but they know they can visit anytime and live here if they need to.
I’m currently or will be in 3 weeks a senior in college. My room has been gone since the minute I left for college and I must admit I’m incredibly bitter about it. My sister moved from her smaller room into my room which is much larger…which I agree with… I do not agree with that all of my things got thrown out rather than moved into the smaller room. The smaller room (my sisters old room) is now little sister room #2.
As for what my parents are planning to do… as a family we are somewhat deciding what is happening in the next few years. Economically they are going to need to downsize (three kids simultaneously in college) But as for myself, I am somewhat selfish, think I need a relatively free place to live so I can save up some money so I can move out. Right now I’m working dead end job for minimum wage and going to school and could not afford to pay rent anywhere. So I don’t expect them to keep my room or whatever, but I’ve been told I have until about 22 to live at home, after that I better have my own means or its the streets.
I recently visited my Mom and stayed in “my” room. Still has my 17th place track trophy on the shelf and not because I am attached to it. This was 35 years after leaving home. It’s nice to have a place you can count on but after a few years parents need to clean out the junk. That said, I wouldn’t have minded if they sold or rented out my room but it was nice to have that storage space for all these years.
Yeah, that’s the rough part, the visit where they say as you leave “please take your boxes or they’re going in the trash”. They have a house, I have an apartment, I think they can hold onto my boxes for a little longer.
I would have been thrilled, because it meant they didn’t expect me to come home that often. When I first left for school they acted hurt anytime I didn’t come home for the weekend (I was about 90 minutes away), and it took them a while to realize that I had really moved out and made a life elsewhere.
Fourteen years later, they still refer to it as “Jonathan’s room”, though Mom did finally redecorate it several years ago.
My first thought was that they don’t have an obligation to keep a space, but I might have been a little sad if they hadn’t. Then it occurred to me that I lived in the dorms all four years of undergrad. I would have had no where to go in the summers if they downsized.
I still don’t think my parents had an obligation to keep a room for me, but I do think a kid in that situation should be told as soon as the parents are even toying with the idea. It would have been really tough for me to have made arrangements for the summer even with a couple of months’ notice.
Ultimately, I think the parents should ensure that the kids know what to expect. In most circumstances, there will be a natural understanding. If the kid has the wrong idea, though, the parents should clarify right away.
Isn’t it possible that your mother had as strong an emotional attachment to the house as you did? I suspect your reactions just gave her an excuse to not do something she really wasn’t ready to do, especially with her little chicks so far away.
Still, cherish your guilt, so that when she is ready to sell you can pay to have the house all scrubbed and manicured so she’ll get a nice fat price for it.
One of my siblings might be forced to down-size during the youngest child’s first year at college; the first thing I said when I heard was, “You can have my office as a bedroom for the week-ends.” (He’ll be in school about 25 miles from me).
My parents both died in house I “left home” from, so I never had the heart-ache of the family home being sold out from under me. But, every home I have ever owned has had a bedroom for the child we did not have primary custody of. For 16 years we kept a room for him, for every other week-end and a month in the summer.
Now that he’s out of school and in the service, and married, we are finishing the attic. They have no plans to live with us, but if they hit rough times there will be room in more than just our hearts for them.
When I was still in the dorms and might have no option but to come home over a break or over the summer, I would have minded.
Once I had my own apartment, though, I wouldn’t even let them designate a room in their new house as “my room” when they wanted to do it. From that point on, I would have only moved back in with my parents if the alternative were literally living in a cardboard box on the streets. My parents and I started getting along a lot better once I wasn’t living in their house.
Mr. Neville’s parents still have a room in their house that is “his”, though we don’t always stay in that room when we visit them. If we have the choice, we stay in his brother’s room, which is bigger and has its own bathroom.
Much like someone before me, I noticed very close to the point that I moved out that the house was feeling less and less like my home and more and more like my parents’ house. It helped then that when I moved from Colorado to Florida alone, they sold the house and relocated to a (bigger) house, which was also not my home!
I would never expect my parents to make a housing decision based on me, but they have said that the door is always open if I ever needed to come back. I hope that doesn’t have to happen.
Mine moved between my freshman and sophomore years of college. It wasn’t a big deal; it wasn’t like I was coming back there for more than holidays anyway.
I have so far managed to mostly avoid this by being much less sentimental about such things than my parents are. I can just say “OK”, and the next time I visit, the boxes are still there. Every Christmas my stepmom asks me if I want the boxes of “my” ornaments that they’ve been saving for me since I was a little kid, and every year I point out that I don’t have a tree, and don’t really celebrate Christmas except to come visit them and make my offering to the shrines of Visa and Mastercard.
The only time I failed was when my mom was planning on moving out of her house, and really did make me take or trash things.I was all ready to trash most of it, too, but my mom and my girlfriend (whom I used to trust) insisted that I absolutely must not dispose of the thousands of grade-school worksheets I had put in the “trash” pile, and boxed them up for me to take, then oversaw my selection process to make sure that no other priceless memories were carelessly disposed of.
Those boxes have sat, unopened, taking up space in my room since then. And I’m moving this weekend, so they will be dutifully carted up a flight of stairs to the new place, where they will remain until the next move. I should just throw them away, except that there’s stuff I wanted to save mixed in with the junk.
Well, when I am home from college, I share a room with my brother. So I’m safe in that regard. But if for some reason, it wasn’t possible for me to spend an extended amount of time at home, that would just prod me to spend my summers up at college. The reason I even come home is because I know how much my family misses me and I want them to be happy. If I no longer had a room at my parent’s house it would tell me that they didn’t need me to come home for them. So I wouldn’t be too upset, but it would definitely be one of those life markers showing the end of my adolescence and the beginning of my adulthood.
By Junior year of college I don’t think I would have cared, but I would have been displeased if it had happened earlier. It was awful nice to go home during my first couple years of college. Having “my” room is the difference between going home and going to my parents house.
Shortly after I went to college, my parents sold their 5 bedroom house and move into a 1 bedroom apartment. It didn’t bother me at all because I knew I was always welcome to crash on the couch if I needed to. I never felt like that was a sign that they were through with me. That would have upset me.