18 yr old taking the p**s

Are they possibly ND?

I’m 60 with ASD, married with kids and have always lived with a floor robe and some degree of mess. I find it really hard to tidy up and organise my stuff and get overwhelmed by clutter quite easily.

However, I have other skills so I focus on making the most of them instead. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Is an 18 year old a child ? Surely they do their own washing by this age.Not long a go nurse training started at that age living in the nurses home taking responsibility for their lives.I don’t understand how they can reach this age and be so useless maybe not enough is expected of late teens now even though most mothers work full time and still treat them like small children.Howdo they cope at university? I would start by telling them they need to prepare for adult life .Good luck

All the 'theys' is quite funny when you are talking about one child, presumably a boy or girl. Not a child any more either, eighteen years of age, though all the huffing, puffing and crying does seem childish.

I don't think bad parenting has caused this, it's just how he or she is. I was like that, my son was the same. We outgrew it when we got our own places.

The least your son or daughter can do is fill a bin bag and sort out laundry.

Presumably you aren't neuro-diverse. Yes dd is that generation who has had everything done for her. It has helped her be stable and secure and didn't stop her taking a first from Cambridge and becoming a secondary teacher, described by Ofsted as inspirational. Moving schools in September to be SEN departmental lead at a lovely independent school. She was begged to stay at her old school and also has a thriving tutee network.

It was an uphill struggle at times and she was quite unwell from 15 to 17 but has a good career in which she is successful and a lovely boyfriend.

If I hadn't supported her and if I'd ever been so callous as to tell her not to bother to come home, it would have been catastrophic.

BTW I never cleaned at home in the 70s, my room was tidied behind me. I have brought up the children similarly but they are house trained because their lived experience has been a clean and tidy home.

How very dare you imply that families like mine result in a weakened work ethic and flakey young people.

the climate crisis will not dramatically worsen because you put a loo roll in the rubbish, and what you need is all rubbish in bags, not a two hour session of phone-scrolling because you picked up your phone to google whether or not a particular type of plastic wrap can be recycled.

@LauraMipsum i feel seem there 😁😁
Thats the sort of thing I’d do, and I’m as NT as it comes.

Parent of the year award goes to...
What an awful attitude, I can understand you are frustrated with the situation but their are other ways to deal with things as suggested up thread.
Guessing staying over with friend at their parents house, they won't want your kid lolling there too long either so you really need to talk to your kid about moving forward and apologise for the 'don't bother coming home' bit, it was the heat of the moment etc.
Whatever happens you need house rules in your own home and dh's family can butt out. If it was really down to bad parenting then they need to realise their darling son /brother needs to take soon of the so called blame not just you.

You're disowning your child and removing their access to their only home and family over a messy room?!
Parent of the year right there.

@Itsnotallaboutyoulikeyouthink the child is EIGHTEEN!

@RosesAndHellebores I really don't understand this sort of parenting. We are talking about an 18 year old not a toddler.

She absolutely needs to respect the homeowner (OP) and she even got an extension! What is being asked of the DC is nothing onerous.

She absolutely should not come home if she doesn't want to because the rules of being at home have been specified and she is flagrantly breaking them.

This is the generation of graduate employees I am struggling to manage at work because they have had everything done for them, have never been set boundaries or expectations and are allowed to get away with rude and disrespectful behaviour.

I would never ever even have considered doing this in my parents' house because they had strong boundaries, delivered consequences if I stepped out of line and because I love and respect them.

Why does your husband’s family know about this? Sounds you are giving out about your child to anyone who will listen.

Teenagers have messy rooms, if that is all you have to give out about maybe think yourself lucky. Stressing about a messy room when you could just close the door is just damaging your relationship for the sake of it.

I also remember a threat to throw me out as a teenager, I’ve never forgotten it.

I'm autistic (and possibly ADHD) and my room as a teen and in my 20s was an absolute state. Now trying to teach DD (AuDHD) some better strategies than I had, which was "wait until the shame overrides the executive dysfunction"

Here are some strategies that I use that are helpful, that you might like to try.

1. Use a checklist. Mine is to start with all books and clothes on the bed, any rubbish into rubbish bags, then put books on the bookshelf and clothes in the laundry or cupboard. What is left then looks a LOT more manageable. So books, clothes, rubbish, then sort everything else.
2. Get a doom box for the "everything else" - the odds and sods that don't really belong anywhere else.
3. Rubbish includes recycling - the climate crisis will not dramatically worsen because you put a loo roll in the rubbish, and what you need is all rubbish in bags, not a two hour session of phone-scrolling because you picked up your phone to google whether or not a particular type of plastic wrap can be recycled.
4. This sounds counter-intuitive but keep things 'out' or visible. I have four plastic boxes which are labelled and I can see into them. It is far easier to put things into the right visible box than it is to put things into a box that is then itself put in a cupboard, because once something can't be seen, it ceases to exist.
5. Put music on while tidying.
6. Try body doubling - personally I don't find it all that effective due to rejection sensitivity (see below) as I tend to feel supervised and criticised, but a body double works wonders for DD.
7. Look up rejection sensitivity (v common with ASD / ADHD). When my mum said "that room could really use a tidy," what I heard was "you are useless, lazy and revolting," which would make me even less able to deal with the mess. The best remedy for this is to know what it is so that you can recognise that what you are hearing and what is being said aren't always the same thing.
8. Try GoblinTools "magic to-do" which breaks tasks down into manageable steps.

Good luck.

Just close the door. What goes on in their room is theirs to deal with. If it starts getting infested then everything sealed in binbags and put in the back garden or in a shed to be sorted through outside and only non infested items are allowed back in the house.

Friend has given up the upstairs of her house to her 3 teen age children. She equipped them with their own hoover, all the cleaning equipment they need in a big landing cupboard and it’s up to them what they do in their rooms and the 2 bathrooms.
They only have to keep the stairs clean and hoovered and to keep the noise to an acceptable level. Friend and dh have converted garage and dining room into a bedroom, en-suite and dressing room. She has only once ventured up the stairs and was met with the site of her dd1 bedroom. It was so horrific she said she wasn’t ever going upstairs again till they had all moved out permanently

It has become too overwhelming for them so they can’t start. Also, you can’t give them a long time frame to do it, they’ll just keep putting it off.

You are much better saying… “ok, at 1pm we are going to go upstairs and start tackling your room. We will begin by bringing all the rubbish and dirty dishes downstairs. Then whilst I clean the dishes, you are going to go back up and gather all your laundry and separate it into darks/lights etc.

I have a similarly messy daughter and the trick is to tackle huge messes together and then stay on top of them to maintain a tidy room. I have a deal with her that if she maintains a tidy room then I will go in in the mornings and make her bed etc so it doesn’t get out of hand. This works… sometimes!

I initially gave the weekend to clean/remove all rubbish/tidy the room. This I reluctantly extended to the Tuesday.

That passed, so I said you have until the weekend to get it done or you swap rooms with your sibling. Saturday came and is still not done. That was 7 days.

They went to a friends for 2 nights yesterday so I sent a message last night saying to be home by 12 today or not to bother coming back.*

You sound as though you just keep moving the goal posts for them.

By the age of 18 they shouldn't need telling that their room is a pit it's obviously something that you've let slide instead of getting onto years ago.

They know full well you don't mean a word you say, proven by you extending the deadlines.
All they hear is "oh go on then, do it when you're ready and if not don't worry I'll see to it for you"

Don’t come home over an untidy room? It’s obvs overwhelming why not just help them do it for a while and after a while it will become second nature .

Put everything that’s on the floor into a black bin bag and throw it away - at this point I’d give them at most an afternoon then do it. When they no longer have many clothes and their belongings are going then it’ll hit them where it hurts.

Presumably the room of messy teen is the better one, otherwise what would be the point

So what is your advice then?

My mother told me to not come home if I didn’t do something I didn’t want to do. So I didnt

Only spoke to her once since that day when she thought she would collect me and I would be begging to come home.

I never did as the peace from her nagging and telling me off about some minor misdemeanour every single day was wonderful.

Not worth the argument, what does the sibling feel like having to move?

If the smell is really bad, tell them it stinks, and they need to wash their clothes and bedding.

Ignore the mess, he's the one living in it. If you really need to go in, just clear a path through the mess, and get out as soon as possible.

When mine were little, a friend showed me her teenager's room, 4 inches deep in clothes, to prepare me for this stage.

Please don't expect moving rooms will transform him into a tidy person. This argument will arise again, next time just let him sort his own room out, and get on with the important things in life. Don't let this ruin your family life.

Bin bag it all up and put it in her new room. If you don’t follow through on that threat of room change, she’ll know she can get away with the behaviour.

That’s the thing with dealing with people who are ND. Whatever you threaten and action will be taken with a pinch of salt.

You think they will care if you take away Netflix etc
Agree to a NT child with a brain that goes quiet and needs outside input to function it probably is a huge threat

To someone with ADHD who has several programmes, a few bands playing and noise in their head constantly
Netflix etc is just another noise

You basically kicked them out of the house?!

Because they're messy (really not that unusual for teens) and stropped a bit about cleaning and having to swap bedrooms with their sibling. I can't imagine many teens would swap rooms with good grace, it's a bit of an upheaval.

Anyway, you can stop paying for things and doing their laundry. But you can't say 'don't bother coming back'. Where do you think they'll live?! If you're serious you need to write a note to the council saying so and he can then claim homelessness.

Not a bite of food or a Penny would go to someone in my house that went on like that. WiFi password would be changed, Netflix password would be changed. They would get zero!

Well you've made it clear that you'll just keep giving endless chances and extending the goal posts. That needs to end immediately.