As you know, I highly recommend putting together a contract with your adult kids who are moving home. I think this is so important that I provide a contract template in the toolkit available with my book.
A reporter from a major newspaper is writing a story on this topic and is hoping to speak with a parent who’s used a contract with their adult kids. If you’ve done so, and you’re interested in being interviewed for a story, send me an e-mail and I’ll connect you with the reporter.
Recently, I’ve seen some disturbing survey findings about what adult children and their parents think is appropriate in terms of parental help in the job hunt.
From research done by Gary Insch, Joyce Heames and Nancy McIntyre at the College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University:
- Nearly 70% of students found it “somewhat” or “very appropriate” to receive help from their parents when writing a resume or a cover letter.
- 20% thought it was fine to have their parents contact a prospective employer.
And according to a poll of employers by Michigan State University (this one is a bit dated, as it comes from 2007, but I suspect the trend is for parental involvement to be increasing rather than decreasing):
- 40% of employers had dealt with parents contacting the company to obtain information
- 31% had dealt with parents submitting resumes on behalf of their children
- 15% had dealt with parents complaining if the company did not hire their child
- 12% had dealt with parents trying to negotiate their children’s salary and benefits
- 4% had seen parents attend their children’s job interviews!
As part of the survey, one employer even felt compelled to offer the following advice to parents: “Please tell your student that you have submitted a resume to a company. We have called a student from our resume pool only to find they did not know anything about our company and were not interested in a position with us.”
A note from the report to those parents who think they are helping by being directly involved in their adult children’s job search: “Many [employers] responded that they take parental presence in the job search as a negative and would like to see less parental ‘interference.’”
If you’re looking for legitimately helpful ways to assist your adult children in the job hunt, check out my tips in the article How to Help Adult Children Living at Home Find a Job.
Tide has a new commercial showing the parents of adult triplets — who have all moved back home — doing those triplets’ laundry. I understand that Tide thought this was a cute play on their previous commercial that showed parents of baby triplets struggling to keep up with all the laundry they produced. But yikes! I have heard far too many times about parents (usually mothers, if we’re being honest) who start doing their children’s laundry when the kids move back in as adults. This is such a bad idea. Adult children living at home are adults and need to deal with basic adult functions like doing their own laundry. So, go ahead, watch the commercial below and chuckle (or cringe). But whatever you do, don’t take it as parenting advice!
I do a lot of reading about adult children living at home. In the last little while, I’ve seen more and more journalists referring to the phenomenon of adult kids living at home in their twenties and even early thirties as the “new normal.” Is it the new normal? This doesn’t quite site right with me for a couple of reasons.
First, while the numbers of adult children living at home are increasing, for all age groups over 25, they are still in the minority. Adult children over age 25 are living at home in increasing numbers, but that number is firmly in the minority category. Even for the 18- to 24-year-old age group, the number just squeaks into majority territory (52.8% of 18 to 24-year-olds live with their parents according to researchers at Columbia University in New York based on data from the U.S. Current Population Survey). Fifty-two percent is not a large enough number to say “everybody’s doing it.” In fact, it’s only just over half. Is this the new normal?
Second, when things become “normal,” that generally means we know how to deal with them as a society. But the trend of young adults moving back in with their parents is not yet something we are equipped to deal with in North American society. The rules about financial support are especially unclear. In societies where it really is normal (and expected) for adult children to live at home, there is also an expectation of reciprocal support. Adult children live with their parents and may receive financial support, but they have defined roles within the household that may include looking after younger siblings or cousins, or contributing to the household work and cooking. When parents are elderly, their children are expected to return the favor through financial and emotional support. It’s a balanced system that is not currently in place in the broader North American society.
And third, calling adult kids living at home the new normal minimizes the emotional and financial impact it can have on parents, both of which are very real — and very challenging.
Adult children living at home may be a growing trend, but it is not (yet) the new normal. Both parents and adult kids living in this situation need to plan for the emotional and financial challenges and work hard to make the situation function well for both generations.
Because the trend is so visible, we often end up focusing on boomerang kids — adult children who have moved away from their parents’ home and moved back in as adults, often after college, the loss of a job, or the end of a marriage or live-in relationship. But there’s another group of adult children living at home, of course — those who never left. Maybe they went to a local college, or lived at home while going through an apprenticeship or training program. Or maybe they’ve just become a bit stuck because they don’t quite know what to do with their lives, and they have a comfortable nest in which to linger. How do parents help these adult kids get on the path to independence?
In some ways this is harder that dealing with boomerang kids, since there is no clear moment at which to have a family meeting that sets out the rules/expectations for the adult child and develop a timeline for their stay at home. But in some ways it’s easier, since the relationship will have evolved slowly rather than been faced with the shock of an adult child returning home who has developed habits and become used to the patterns and behaviors associated with living independently.
Ideally the family should still have this kind of meeting — the challenge is figuring out when it is appropriate. For some families it may be as soon as the child graduates from high school, while for others it may be after college graduation. But other than the timing of the meeting, all the strategies stay the same: Figure out the adult child’s financial impact on the household, figure out ways to mitigate that, assign the child a financial responsibility, discuss acceptable behaviors and expectations, and determine an acceptable length of time for the adult child to stay at home. Then, work on developing a reasonable timeline with some meaningful goals and milestones along the way to help the adult child
achieve independence by that timeline.
Remember: The parents’ main job in parenting any adult child is to help the adult child get to the point where he or she doesn’t need to depend on the parents any more and can live
independently.
The video below talks about dealing with adult kids moving home after college, but I’ve set it to start part-way through so you can get straight to some tips that also apply to setting expectations for adult kids who have never left the nest.
If you’ve got new college grads moving back home this summer, you might want to check out the quick tips in this video to make sure you’re prepared for this new living arrangement.
The following list of “rules” is often attributed to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and tends to circulate by e-mail or through social networking sites. It’s actually 11 of the 50 rules from the book 50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education
Rule 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it
Rule 2: The world won’t care as much as your school does about your self-esteem. It’ll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself
Rule 3: Sorry, you won’t make $60,000 a year right out of high school. And you won’t be a vice-president or have a company car. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn’t have a designer label.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He won’t have tenure, so he’ll tend to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he’s not going to ask you how you FEEL about it.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity
Rule 6: It’s not your parents’ fault. If you screw up, you are responsible.
Rule 7: Your parents weren’t as boring before you were born as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, driving you around, saving for your education, cleaning up your room, and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. And you don’t get summers off.
Rule 10: Television is not real life.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.
And here’s another one of the 50 rules that doesn’t appear in the list that circulates on the Internet: Someday you will have to grow up and actually move out of your parents’ house.
I tend to get asked the same questions over and over by both parents and reporters, so this week, I’m posting answers to these common questions here on the blog. I hope you find these Q&As helpful. If you have your own question you’d like to see answered on the blog, please leave it in the comments or send me a note at christina@adultchildrenlivingathome.com.
Today’s question: How does the situation affect family relationships?
Answer: It can have a huge impact, especially if the parents are not on the same page about the situation. Often one parent will want to provide more support, while the other wants to encourage the child to reach independence sooner, and this can cause major tension. It is even worse if one of the parents is a step-parent, who may not have the same kind of bond with the adult child and may feel displaced in their own home as their partner shifts their attention to the adult child.
If everyone is open and honest, it can be a wonderful time when parents and adult children get to interact with each other on a daily basis in a way that is not common in our culture, which can become the basis of a much stronger relationship in years to come. But if communication is not good, and expectations are not aligned, the experience can be a disaster that damages relationships for the long term. So keep the lines of communication open, be honest with each other, and respect each other. In particular, the adult child should respect that their parents are giving them a pretty major boost by allowing them to live at home.
The key to making it work that everyone needs to have their expectations aligned in terms of reason for the adult child’s stay, length of the stay, their behavior in the house, their financial contribution, and so on. The best way to make this happen is for the family to sign a contract outlining the expectations before the adult child moves home (you get access to a contract template when you purchase my book).
Want to learn more about this question? Download my free report from the right column of this page, or check out my book, The Hands-On Guide to Surviving Adult Children Living at Home.
I tend to get asked the same questions over and over by both parents and reporters, so this week, I’m posting answers to these common questions here on the blog. I hope you find these Q&As helpful. If you have your own question you’d like to see answered on the blog, please leave it in the comments or send me a note at christina@adultchildrenlivingathome.com.
Today’s question: Should adult children living at home pay rent?
Answer: Every family will need to work out a budget to determine how much the child should pay, but I definitely encourage parents to charge rent of some sort. It will not likely be market rent, as the adult child is probably living at home to save money. But there should be some sort of financial contribution for a couple of reasons. First, it realistically costs money to have the adult child live at home in terms of added heat, electricity, food, and so on. Second, it helps the adult child get into the pattern of having a monthly bill to pay, which they will when they eventually manage to move out. And third, it’s actually helpful to the child’s self-esteem to make a financial contribution to the household. Make sure to put a budget together so the adult child can understand their financial impact on the household, or they may end up under the mistaken impression that it’s free for the parents to have them live there.
Here’s a video of me discussing this topic.
Want to learn more about this question? Download my free report from the right column of this page, or check out my book, The Hands-On Guide to Surviving Adult Children Living at Home.
I tend to get asked the same questions over and over by both parents and reporters, so over the next week, I thought I would post answers to these common questions here on the blog. I hope you find these Q&As helpful. If you have your own question you’d like to see answered on the blog, please leave it in the comments or send me a note at christina@adultchildrenlivingathome.com.
Today’s question: How is parenting adult children different from parenting kids?
Answer: This is a very big question, but here’s the short answer. Parents need to remember that their adult children are adults, so parenting them in the same way they did when they were little is not going to work. Parents do need to establish some rules for their adult children, but those rules will be based on the fact that the parents have a right to set some rules for anyone living in their home, rather than the, “I’m your Mom and I said so” logic from childhood. The parents can set house rules, but not rules for the adult child’s life outside the home.
Want to learn more about this question? Download my free report from the right column of this page, or check out my book, The Hands-On Guide to Surviving Adult Children Living at Home.