I hope you read my reply, because I immediately knew where your daughter is coming from, and I hope you don’t make the mistake my own mother did.
I’m the eldest child of my parents and I was made to get a job at 14 (part time) and started paying half my wage (it was $80, back in the day of no minimum wage for kids!) to make sure I “understood the value of money” and as my hours and pay increased over the years, my parents scaled my rent with my wages.
I graduated high school having just turned 17 (I skipped a grade/year level) and so when I started university (college for u americans) I was also 17, and moved to the North Island (from New Zealand’s south island, where I lived most of my life) and the capital city, Wellington, into a hall of residence. I was again made to get a job to pay the difference my student loans gave me, and if there was still shortfall my parents said they would only match what I earned from my part time job.
Unfortunately I had been diagnosed with Graves’ disease at the end of my last school year and that few months between diagnosis and starting the university year (uni and schools run matching the calendar year as June-Aug is winter, Dec to march-ish is summer), this was not sufficient/enough time to recover. City-destroying earthquakes in that same year, aka early 2011 (feb 22 2011 was the quake that killed about 188 people and injured some 5000, which occured in the middle of my first lecture) also happened and I was greatly affected by being away from my city/family/church as I was 17, yes, but quite immature (due to undiagnosed autistm spectrum disorder) and I ended up flunking out by mid year, too depressed and sick and lonely to leave my dorm room. I came home to live with my parents after it became clear I couldn’t complete semester 2.
At that time I had just turned eighteen and whilst my parents had always told me how expensive I was, especially as a teen, my mum ramped up waaay more when I moved home due to being sick and depressed. My rent quadrupled. And she took great pains to remind me I was here only under sufferance, because “adult children shouldn’t live with their parents, they need to leave the nest”…. hence why your phrasing hit me with its similarities.
I think I lived there for another 7 months whilst I recovered, but I searched until I found a part time job, and another and another and worked three jobs until I could work a single, full time job, then moved out and, after a few years, eventually moved away back to Wellington… until covid hit.
My flat wasn’t renewed, so I had little choice but to move back to Christchurch and it was so last minute that I had no other choice but to move back into my parents’ house temporarily whilst searching for a flat of my own, during which I was also going thru a kind of soft bankruptcy due to the debts I’d accrued previously due to unavoidably specialised healthcare and operations, so I had very limited $$ means.
What didn’t help is that I was, despite being almost 30, constantly treated like a child and reminded multiple times a day that I wasn’t welcome to stay, and that I was a burden as an adult living with my parents, and was made sure to know, multiple times a day, that I was only there under sufferance. My mum has always said “I’m not your friend, I’m your mother” and used it as an excuse to treat me like sh1t (I love her, but our relationship is complicated), and this greatly magnified in those few weeks I was there. I was desperate to move out, like my mum was too, despite my increasingly poor health and that I was not only facing bankruptcy but also losing my job too, as I was too sick and depressed to work properly. I had hoped she would be kinder, given the circumstances, and that 60% of children between 25 amd 35 now still live with their parents in the USA (and similar stats in NZ) but nope.
Anyway, I finally did find a place, and it was one that I have no doubt was heaven-sent (it’s close to everything I needed, with a lovely back flat neighbour, and a great landlord, and I’m still there now). I did, however, make one rule. It was a rule that, after I had moved in, my mother was not allowed to step foot into MY house… …
…unless she would both apologise for treating me as an unwelcome guest in her house AND only if she then also shut her mouth whilst in my house with regards to making comments about my “junk” (books I enjoy collecting and the organised wool, fabric and crafting supplies that I have a lot of, sure, but that I use in my various active creative hobbies… which she also looks down on, like me knitting all the time).
So far she has done neither, and is therefore not allowed in my house. She moans about it, but when I bring up how unwelcome I was in her house she gets incredibly mad, but can do nothing about it as she refuses to apologise. I can tell it galls her, but I took a stand for my own mental health. I remind her that it didn’t have to be like this, but she has traumatised me by me being made to feel like I had no secure home for almost 15 years now, and now that I made my own secure home, I am choosing to not invite her inside, as is my right, to preserve this safety…
…just like it was her “right” to kick me out for being “too old” to live in her house. It created lasting trauma, no matter my age, where I suddenly felt unloved and unwelcome, just due to becoming a teenager. I was also undiagnosed as being on the spectrum like I said, so I am more immature than others my age, yes I admit, but still!! It any of you want your children to feel unsafe, unvalued and unloved, go ahead and kick out your vulnerably-aged “adult” children.
But if you want to show them you care, explain to them why you struggle with them in the house, and help them move out slowly, making sure they know you’re not trying to get rid of them so much as you are helping them progress in life, and make sure they know they always have a place at home, if they need it. They might be adults, but they are still YOUR children. That never goes away, and if you shed your role as a parent, don’t expect them to want to remain your children.
