Asking because I just sat through a family feud within earshot at a local coffee joint. Parents giving advice to son, who looked 30ish, all quite civil, full of the ‘can I speak for a minute’, ‘your minute is up’ and so on, with some ‘when we were your age’ and ‘you must/ will learn’ etc. Mum ended with ‘i don’t have to justify anything to you’.
My dad stopped once I got out of high school, but mum seems to chime in from time to time. I’m well into my middle age.
When should parents stop parenting and just let the kid fail/ thrive on their own? I just feel sometimes the parents are the problem, regardless of good intentions.
Thanks for your well written input and perspective. I was sent away from an early age (13) for education. I went through the cycle of emotions, and while I had a guardian nearby, I gradually learned to be independent and now wouldn’t trade the experience for anything in the world.
After that, college and moving out seemed like a easy, natural thing to do. Now I sometimes meet people in their mid 40s who have literally no life skills to speak of, can’t manage finances or keep a home tidy, and are looking at marriage as a ‘get out of jail free’ card for the rest of their lives. I treasure my independence, but can’t understand why people would prefer to be so cloistered and coddled. No, scratch that, it’s obviously ‘so much easier’.
I’ve definitely met people who were not raised to be independent of their parents. It sadly seems to often be the rule rather than the exception.
I think that is a side effect of living at home with your parents for longer, something that is becoming more and more common with the unsustainable cost of living.
In my experience, it doesn’t have anything to do with kids living at home longer.
It’s more related to the issues of the parents. Control issues, lack of purpose, lack of independence on the part of the parents.
Some parents just fail to prepare their kids for life. All of my kids had roommates in college who didn’t know how to do laundry, or cook food, or clean up after themselves.
Other parents go out of their way to keep their children dependent on them. I think that is usually because the parents don’t know what to do with their lives if their kids move on.
To be fair, some parents see their kids as an excuse to be irresponsible themselves, e.g so they don’t have to plan for retirement. I come from a religiously conservative country, and it’s common to have families with incomes of below $8k/ year having 5 or more kids. The result is a whole bunch of voting adults with no functional education. Youth delinquency is a thing here.