Top.. as I write this, I certainly hope you are not enjoying the view from the couch...lol....
There is no doubt in my mind that this is a VERY serious issue between couples and their children... It is so big in fact that we parents are being called "The Boomerang Generation"... According to the US Census, "25 per cent of people between the ages of 18 to 34 live at home with their parents, a statistic that resonates equally in Canada, the UK and Australia". We are also being called the "Sandwich Generation" because it is quite possible to find our parent or parents in one of our bedrooms down the hall and our adult children occupying the others... Without limits, we can easily find other people's lives passing before our eyes as we die because we have never been able to live our own lives as we choose to...
When I was a kid growing up, I couldn't wait to embrace the "freedom" of adulthood... especially my own independence so I admit, I have difficulty relating to the dependent adult child's perspective... I was also raised to be aware that it was my parent's hard-earned money we were all living on... It was just a given that there were limits as to what we could expect our parents to give up for us and how long we could expect it... It was unheard of for any of us to think that our parents owed us more than 19 years of their financial support... To me then, there has to be a very good reason for adult children to be living at home...
The issue is not just one of money.... If that were the case, then one could understand that it's a tough world out there for adult children with no work experience. At one time, there were jobs we could take that didn't require certificates and diplomas but that is not the case any more... It's even tougher if the adult child has gone ahead and had children before acquiring their education or the skills necessary to support their own children... However...
There is an issue of "privacy" that I think is a critically important factor between married people... We give up our privacy when we choose to have kids.. God knows, most of us feel blessed to find ourselves able to have half an hour in the bathroom alone after our children are born... But as the years go on and our children hopefully become more and more independent, our original privacy slowly gets restored... When they move out, we are once again able to be vocal, active lovers who are free to move about in our own homes without fear of "getting caught"... This is a normal and natural desire for most of us... to be able to cook breakfast naked... to be able to wake up and make love without someone banging on the door... to have control of the movies we watch.... to know that the special groceries we bought for that special dinner will still be there when we go to cook them.. to be able to take a bath together without everyone being able to hear everything... When our kids move back in or fail to leave to begin with, all of this natural return to who we started out to be.. gets delayed or completely lost...
I know some of my girlfriends who have adult children have confided to me that they don't want their kids to move out because their marriages are lonely and their kids keep them company... In some cases, these women have no desire to suddenly be alone with the husband they no longer know or perhaps even love... Like it or not, sometimes, the kids are kept around so that one or the other partners does not have to work outside the home... There are so many reasons I can't count them... And all of them, relate to the kind of relationship two married people have developed over time... and how each of them feel about that relationship...
For a brief period of time, I think it's wonderful and loving for parents to help their adult children out of a bind and let them return home... But right from the get-go, there needs to be a move-out date set so that the adult child has no illusions about their own need to live off of their own earnings and make their own way in the world... Anything else is, in my view, not only detrimental to the relationship of the parents but to the child's own ability to know that they MUST find a way to make it in the world regardless of the obstacles... Enabling is NOT loving... It's convincing the child that even his or her own parents don't believe they can make it... It is also not loving to allow the child to contribute to the possible divorce of their parents.
Even tho' adult children may return home, eventually, they WILL move on... They will find spouses or partners, move out and begin to weave the fabric of their own futures... If, at that point, their parents' marriage has dissolved because there has been too much sacrifice of time, privacy, coupleship, romance and growth between the parents, the adult child then gets to visit their lonely parents... While the kid's now doing fine, the parent's marriage and lives are shot... Is the guilt a child might feel over that a gift? I don't think so...
I would hate like hell to think that my imposition as an adult on my parents caused them to fight and eventually divorce... I would shudder at the idea of my parents each ending up alone in life because they had helped me at the expense of their own relationship... As a matter of fact, I don't think I could live with the guilt...
Ultimately, despite the hardships of today's economy, I think it is a very negative experience for both the adult child and the parents to have the adult child living at home for anything but a "help over the hump" time... Sometimes, "helping" is not helping at all...
Just my 2 cents...
Silken
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