You couldn’t have paid me to stay with my family. Only tuition bribes made me come home on college holidays. They were nice people and I like them, but I was more than ready to be on my own and go be gay somewhere less claustrophobic.
This is a pretty compelling observation.
There’s a theme I think is running through this thread: the child really should be self motivating and it’s the parent’s job to make them that way. Which means it’s not that the parent is supposed to take care of every little thing, but, rather, the parent is supposed to somehow build for the child an inner motivation that drives the child to take care of themselves.
Our two kids have both swung between these two poles, and while there are plot details all along the way that provide short term explanations or context, the grand picture of the two doesn’t really make any kind of sense. They’re both in their 40s now and pretty independent (which is an odd way of describing 40-somethings).
When I think of my own growth to independence, I think in terms of how good or bad a job of it I did. How much do any of us here blame our parents for whatever lack of progress we made ourselves?
It’s making me think a polite “it’s time to move out”, followed by respectful and cordial distance, is really the only way in most circumstances.
Weighing in here with a slightly different angle. It took my eldest son until he was 23 to 25 to become totally independant. It was a gradual process that included financials but really was more about him making a few mistakes while establishing his own very discrete and very separate identity from the rest of the family and less about motivation to be independant. He wanted it, only he wanted to do it his way, which mostly didn’t include many of the traditional means of achieving independence from parents (thus a few of those mistakes).
He is now married, I have a new granddaughter I’ve not met yet as he lives on the other side of the state, and he calls me from time to time for advice or sends pics of the baby.