My younger niece, whom I will refer to here as Nancy, is 19 years old. After graduating from high school, she refused to do anything about college during the summer and finally started in the fall. She didn’t like her classes, so she dropped them. Then she missed her registration appointment for the next semester by five days and ended up having to take whatever she could get. Then she dropped those classes because she didn’t like them either. Now she’s supposed to go to culinary school, though I doubt she will last long since she can’t seem to finish anything, never cooked much to begin with, hates getting up early or being asked to do any hard physical labor.
Mostly, she likes yakking on the phone and chatting online. She often doesn't go to bed until 8am, and that's after several days of no sleep. She has also been known to be nasty to everyone in her house and only stopped because her mom told her she would kick her out if she didn't settle down. (I doubt she would have really kicked her out; SIL often says things but does not follow up.)
Over Thanksgiving, she casually informed us that she was going to marry her 19 year old BF, who lives in another state--she met him online--and whom she has met only once in person, when he flew out here to meet her several months ago. She does not know his family. He was kicked out of his house for reasons unknown and has a job stocking store shelves or something. Nancy has no job, as you can well imagine. She claims there are none, so she won't apply for any.
Their idea was to have him come out here and move into my place (not that I have any room, nor am I inclined to take in a strange guy, etc.) until he could get a job and then they would marry and move him into her folks' home until they could afford to move out. For now, the wedding plan is on hold and the young man says he will go into the Coast Guard.
I think back on Nancy's upbringing and recall all the times her parents gave into her rather than have her throw a fit, how they gave her all that she ever wanted, horseback riding lessons, a cat and a dog (which she failed to take care of), an iPod, and so on. They did so much for her that she is barely willing or capable to do for herself. They are also being very quiet about the whole marriage idea. My brother just wants a peaceful household, and my SIL claims she is going to put her foot down now and then but never follows through.
I have to wonder if there is any way to undo this mess at this point. She needs a cold hard dose of reality and the fact that bills must be paid and responsibilities met, and that marriage is not a thing to jump into just to rescue a BF (whom I suspect is manipulating her).
I also wonder if she might be bipolar and/or have ADD.
Any comments?
My friend has been enabling her son for almost 30 years now…frankly it’s a wonder he can wipe his own butt. He’s able-bodied, isn’t mentally handicapped or anything–just a screw up. I think she blames herself for all his problems, and I believe she’ll be doing it 'til the day she dies.
Unless the parent(s) has some kind of epiphany, I doubt the situation will change.
Indications are she would only qualify a a phone sex worker. She’s up all night and likes to talk on the phone. She’s not going to learn anything until life dumps her completely out in the cold. At that point she might decide to be responsible, but not necessarily. At least no more money is being wasted on her schooling.
Simply stopping would do wonders, any talk of “undoing” simply puts the onus back on the parents. They need to back off and let her sink or swim on her own now.
My sister is 24, married, works as a baby sitter and my parents still give her money. I think the only thing that will change the situation is her new husband is rather well off so she may just leach off of him instead of my parents but when they have problems or get divorced my parents will be back supporting her until they have nothing to give. I think that once a pattern is established it is pretty much impossible to get out of.
Do not let them move into your house under any circumstances.
More generally, severe enabling can be undone. The Tough Love approach can work on both teenagers and adults. However, there’s no way to force it to happen. Sometimes a person in a situation like your niece’s does ‘wake up’, have an epiphany, and realize that it’s up to her to put her life in order. However, it’s not something that you’d want to wager on.
The best odds are when there’s a radical change in situation. When a child is given a jolt of some sort, such as having their privileges stripped away, it can cause them to re-evaluate where they are in life and where they’re going. However, it doesn’t sound like these parents will make such a thing happen. In any case, this girl is 19, so legally speaking her parents can’t force her to do anything. Assuming that she avoids serious crime, she’s on her own. Maybe her free will can kick in at some point, maybe not.
I have a niece who is not nearly this bad, but her parents did tend to coddle her and shield her from the Big Bad World. At 18 she was about as ready to face the world as a 14 year old would be. Now, at 20, having had to live in a dorm and get a job, she’s finally starting to grow. She’s still a bit naive, but the changes in her are reassuring.
If I were you, I would be polite but distant to your niece. In no way shape or form would I take in or support this boyfriend of hers. You don’t know him. Simply say you don’t know this person enough to let him live in your house, and stay firm on that point. You have no way of knowing whether he will actually join the Coast Guard, get a decent job, or just sponge. This is the way to hell on earth if you give in. This girl’s problems are all the cause of her folks giving in to her, so don’t you start doing it.
Yup. I have a sister-in-law in her late 40s who as of five years ago was still being enabled by her parents and some of her siblings. My husband and I wouldn’t budge on helping her but most everyone else would, so she just knew who else to sponge off of.
My parents-in-law tried a guilt trip tactic on my husband and I when we wouldn’t let her move into our basement when she was about to be evicted from her apartment. Wait, make that “our unfinished, unheated, bug-infested basement in a rental house that we had no permission to take another resident into”. They claimed it’d “teach her a lesson” and said that if we didn’t, we might as well just “give her a gun” because she’d obviously have no other solution than to off herself. Right. Here’s a suggestion, why not teach her a lesson by stopping bailing her out (sometimes literally, i.e. from jail when she gets busted on disturbing the peace) every time she gets into a jam? That time IIRC they ended up covering some rent payments going forward, and getting the management to transfer her into a cheaper apartment elsewhere.
Perhaps fortunately for her, she’s now on state disability due to an on-the-job injury and has a lot of stuff covered. So far, she seems to have her life more or less in order.
You’re going to come off as “mean” but she really needs to deal with this for herself, for once. Consider assuring her that if she really gets into a dangerous situation, if her BF turns out to be bad news, etc., you’ll back her up in some fashion, but that she needs to otherwise be mature and deal with life.
I agree with this. The problem is when the little darling has kids of her own and shows that she is as bad a mother as she is at everything else in her life. A very tough situation for everyone involved, and I’m not sure I have the answer.
When I was little, my grandparents’ solution to this was taking my brothers and me in and raising us for the next 10 years. But they were saints.
Little Miss Nancy would be a finer person today if her parents had turned the little brat over their knees and worn her butt out early and often.
Hell no, her loser boyfriend shouldn’t be moving into the OP’s house, or the brat’s parent’s home either. If you are not self supporting, you are not old/mature enough to get married.
At 19, having already wasted two semesters worth of tuition, books, etc, she needs to grow the hell up. Start by getting a job, then her own place. No bailouts. No begging mom for rent money. No borrowing from dad to keep the utilities on. One sharp kick in the ass to get her started, and then let her sink or swim. Being a cynic, I suspect she’ll sink. Hopefully she won’t reproduce first.
None of my four kitchenmates had ever cooked a single meal, washed a dish or scooped up spilled rice.
Three are in the process of learning (mind you, the uni offers catering, so it was their choice not to get it); the other one just doesn’t seem to grok such notions as “when you borrow someone else’s pots, return them clean ASAP” or “no yelling at 3 freakin’ a. m.”
I don’t think it’s within your power to pack the niece off to some place where she’d have to take care of herself, just don’t enable her but don’t expect other people to stop doing it. Being an enabler is like any other destructive behavior, it won’t change unless the person doing it wants to change.
It sounds like her only “disorder” is what is known as “big fat spoiled brat syndrome.” I think we’re going to see an epidemic of this condition in the near future as children raised as the centre of the universe start reaching their majority. In my opinion, all you can do is protect yourself from them and their self-centred, grasping, thoughtless, thankless ways.
Except that she doesn’t appear to even have the basic coping skills to swim. Even joining a service in the hope that she’ll improve is pretty questionable. A d.i. will take the soppy clay of an immature young person and mold and kiln fire him or her into a soldier or Marine, but there has to be actual clay to star with. If all he has to work with is Silly Putty, they’ll drum her out.
Culinary school seems to be a sort of dream for people whose entire exposure to commercial food preparation is limited to watching Food Network shows. Cooking is actually damned hard work (although fast moving) and there is no leeway giving to a cook who can’t show up on time or keep his shit together in terms of job performance. I’ve known a lot of cooks who were complete losers in most ways (drug users, felons, general lying scumbags) but none of the ones who lasted any time at all could be accused of being lazy. I’ve never been to culinary school or in the Marine Corps boot camp, but I met one guy who’d done both, and he swore that he’d rather go back to boot than culinary school again. Apparently d.i.s at Recruit Training were less critical of him than his instructors at CIA.
My grandmother is a hard-core enabler, particularly of her two youngest kids. One of them she enabled right through dropping out of high school, jail, two kids with two teenaged mothers, and a heroine addiction.
I am very close to my grandma. The only fight I have ever had with her was about this. She exhibited pathological levels of denial about the kind of person my uncle was (he wasn’t even a sympathetic mooch; on the contrary, he was rude and hostile to almost everyone.) Since she is disabled and increasingly more physically ill, I told her, ‘‘Taking care of them is going to kill you. They don’t appreciate anything you do for them! They aren’t making any changes. They don’t respect you. This isn’t helping them.’’
And she said, ‘‘I don’t care. I’m a mother and that’s what I do. I’m not throwing them out on the street. I can’t do that. This is my purpose in life.’’
I watched her for years, expecting her to drop dead at any moment, but I never in my life imagined that my uncle would die. He died when he was 30, still living in her house and unemployed, of an apparently intentional drug overdose. She took custody of his oldest son and the cycle of enabling continues.
There is nothing you can do about it. The child’s parents know damn well what they are doing. It’s a choice they’ve made, for whatever reason.
And the niece can’t be absolved of responsibility for her own choices, either – that’s what got her into this mess. Your only responsibility is to make it clear you’re disappointed in her actions, and set a good example yourself.
I don’t disagree with you, but you can’t really expect someone who has only known, “ask for thing/receive thing” her whole life to live life any differently. At 19, all she knows is getting taken care of by her parents; her parents had a responsibility to use age-appropriate parenting to wean her off of parental dependence to make a fully realized adult child, and they neglected their responsibility. Now she’s the one who is crippled by their negligence. At some point she does have to realize that she’s only going to get as far in life as she’s willing to push herself, but she’s going to have a long, hard battle to catch up on her growing up (if she ever does).
It sounds like she has a good enough relationship with you to invite her boyfriend to move in with you. Read her the riot act.
Explain that Mommy and Daddy are eventually going to retire and/or die. And its going to happen a LOT sooner than she can imagine at her age. And that there WON’T be enough money left for her to support herself. So its time she became a grownup and started making definite plans about how to support herself.
Point out that Mr. Coast Guard may or may not stick around for the rest of her life, and if he leaves her - by choice or because he gets shot by drug runners, what does she intend to do to survive.
Tell her you will help her with as much advice as you can give, but you aren’t letting men you don’t know move into your place, you aren’t giving her money, and if her parents grow a backbone and kick her out, she isn’t sleeping on your couch.
My parents raised three girls - none of them ever lived at home for more than a summer once we left for college - and although the youngest was a screw up (alcoholic) and we’ve all had lots of help from our mother (I currently pay her to clean my house, but I had to talk her into paying her), a cardboard box or moving home would be a hard choice. Not because my parents aren’t loving supportive folks - they are - but because INDEPENDENCE is absolutely expected by my father. There was always an element of “I’m looking to have my life back when you guys leave the house” and “I’m not planning on being able to afford to support you and still golf in retirement - and I like to golf.”
