To think we spend too long ‘parenting’ now, and it’s turned young adults into eternal children?

@Nescafeneeded how old are your DC?

What’s the difference between making packed lunch or making lunch/dinner? Do you expect 14yo to cook all their own meals too? Not often I need a packed lunch but DH has one most days if not WFH. He will make mine the same time he makes his.

The division of chores in our house partly depends on who has the most time available on each day and what each person is doing.

Do you like the bit where you move your parents into your own home when they get dothery?

@MotherofPufflings but why is it either or though?

On the odd occasion I or DH make a packed lunch why does it mean I am serving my dc? A lot of it is just time management & what's convenient.

No, about 630k in January this year, which is around 5%. Just under 20% of children in the UK have identified SEN, so around 75% of children with SEN do not have an EHCP. Not saying that's right or wrong, but the issues around it are due to the terrible provision of SEN in the UK and issues with funding and support for SEN kids, not that children with SEN have the EHCP in the first place (in my opinion anyway). Anyway, I've digressed from the OP a little!

I left home at 18 many decades ago cos it was expected of me but It was very hard! I too like the extended family model of many cultures. Think it’s hard to strike a happy balance, being there for your kids and promoting independence at the same time.

Nowhere near a million, it’s under 650,000. I’m not sure where you’ve got a million from, maybe that’s the estimated number who should have them in which case we’re falling 450,000 short and so there are definitely a lot more who need them!

I don't think it's to do with parenting but to do with the cost of living/housing, people are waiting longer than ever to get married, buy a house and have babies largely for financial reasons. If you live at home with your parents while saving to buy a house you will still behave as their child to a certain extent no matter how grown up you are. Coupled with the societal norms to settle down later and later, it's a society thing not a difference in parenting.

Forgetting the packed lunch, I just wanted to say I feel sad for the young you at just 18. Maybe your lack of support means you want to deprive others.

The fact is life is much harder these days in every respect. You will be hard pressed to even find somewhere to live without a huge deposit and references etc. it’s not the same as it was any longer.

I get what you’re saying. I think saying about rent etc in your OP has caused the chat to go off at a tangent.
yes, I believe, that some parents are too soft or baby their children. To a degree, I did too. I found it very hard to share the house work, cooking etc when they lived at home. I just got on and did it. Partly because it was easier, my standards were different to theirs and if I’m honest I enjoyed caring for them. It really isn’t that simple to change or go into another mode. Sometimes when we know how hard it was for us it makes us want to protect and not see that happen to our own. Life is different now though. So we do need to look at it through new lenses. The internet, influencers, less jobs, poor pay in comparison to 40 years ago. It’s not that black and white.

Whilst I agree that the job of parents is to raise people who become functioning adults, that doesn’t mean that support is cut off at 18 and people go through mental health challenges in order to get there which is what the first few posts seem to be advocating for.

At age 11 I was expected to get the dinner cooked/finished off that my mum had started as we were left alone for an hour while she went to work and we waited for dad to get home.I was made to walk the mile to junior school on my own from age 8, we got the bus into town aged 11 and hung out at the shops or the lido all day in the summer.

My dcs school only allowed them to walk home from yr 5.

My parents are immigrants, my mum first left home at 14 & went abroad to live & work at 17. They were glad I had other choices.

I voted UABU because I was born in the 80s and have an adult brother at parent’s home waited on hand and foot and lots of my similarly aged friends (funnily enough the child free ones) save up to go on Disney cruises every year.

I was the financial crash and the low-wage, zero hour economy, coupled with the boom in buy to let landlords that created this situation not changing parenting styles.

The Gen-Zs have their own problems caused by constant access to social media (creating a constant bar of comparison and the mental load of trawling through an information sewer of beheading videos and porn 24/7) The pandemic has also massively impacted those who were under 18 at the time. (If you look at how adults have become distanced from their wider communities and how manners and empathy have fallen by the wayside then imagine the impact on developing children) It’s no surprise that mental health problems have risen.

All of these issues need to be tackled by governments joining up support services and being more targeted to the specific problems.

There should be something similar to prevent tackling young men being groomed into these cults of misogyny (eg Andrew Tate) as these make it impossible for them to make meaningful adult relationships and thus cause them to never fly the nest.

I think the current priorities when bringing up children is leaving them ill equipped for the real world. This focus on being kind and having boundaries and advocati g for yourself is great in theory, but workplaces, utility providers, landlords don't work like this.

They get the odd tiktokker gloating about how they manage work better than boomers or millennials encouraging the idea that this approach is right, whereas in reality it doesn't work.

Young folk enter the workplace and find it so different to the environments theyve been educated in. Where views may be censored, they can advocate for their needs; then they are just expected to knuckle under.

Some do and do well, some fight it because it's not right and they struggle.

I think most children after the age of about 7 should be capable of making a packed lunch. My youngest was doing his at 5 (he insisted because he could see his older siblings doing theirs and wanted to be a big boy). It seems that most parents these days make them all through primary and often secondary too.

I don't think that it's a massive deal one way or another really because most children will develop the skills to make a much more complex meal regardless of whether their mum made their packed lunch. But I do think the idea that parents "should" be making them is indicative of the attitude that parents are there to serve their children and also that people generally have really low expectations of children's abilities to learn practical life skills from a young age.

I don't think the problem is over parenting, I actually think it's under parenting.

So many kids think they'll go to uni get a degree and walk into job with no idea how hard it is out there to get a job - much harder than back 20, 30 years ago IMO because the competition is huge. And nobody is telling them that they need to be thinking about that job pretty much as soon as they start university - and asking what they are going to have to put on a CV and talk about at interview beyond their degree.

I would imagine a lot of the kids you're talking about are probably diagnosed/undiagnosed ND and really struggle with interviews and again need a lot of help and support from parents with that aspect.

The whole chuck 'em out in the big wide world and let them sink or swim is just awful IMO, you might have ended up managing to swim but how many didn't/wouldn't? You can't base your theories on the anecdotal evidence of one person - you.

DS is what you would describe as 'over parented' he's autistic and was helped, encouraged and supported with everything from his A-level revision, to his CV to how to answer interview questions and even his extra curriculars (he wouldn't had done any if not). As a result of all this support he's now doing a degree apprenticeship, working hard, living away and managing to save some money as well.

So I don't think the issue is over parenting, it's just parents are not helping their kids in the right ways and making sure they know what they need to doing to be able to land a job after uni.

I think making a packed lunch for a 14 year old is ridiculous, sorry

@Nescafeneeded

I don't have a 14 yr old?

But I sometimes make my DH or my parents a sandwich, don't worry people they can do it themselves.

Op do you think it was the best thing for you to be thrown out at 18 with £600 in your pocket, or do you think that the opportunity to move out under your own steam might have been better - maybe to consider pursuing further education, to feel like.. You know, you parents cared at all about you launching in the best way possible for you? You could have had options. You didn't HAVE to go get a flatshare and a crappy job, your parents forced you to do that. Do you feel like maybe they did you wrong a little bit?

It seems to me like you're trying to convince yourself that your parents did the right thing and that it didn't do you any harm but here you are on Mumsnet getting worked up over 22 year olds you don't know, not being forced out of their parents homes.

P7 is aged 11. No parent should be making a packed lunch for a child of that age.

I occasionally make packed lunches for my 11 yr old. Why not? He usually has school dinners but sometimes I will decant some leftovers or if I'm making one of my amazing sandwiches I will do one for him & (clutches pearls) DH 😱

My younger dc prefer blander sandwiches, philistines!

I made packed lunches for my child right up until they left sixth form. I had to make one for myself anyway, so why wouldn't I just make them both at the same time? Seems pointless having two people taking up space in a small kitchen, both trying to do the same thing!

It might also just make sense in their household if a parent is making their own.

As long as the child can make their own etc

Funnily enough, I was thinking the same this morning @Nescafeneeded . It's a generation of Peter Pans - never want to grow up. Living at home while working, contributing to the household by doing your fair share of housework, cooking etc, living like a young adult with independence is worlds apart from being a perpetual child who does nothing in the house, keeps their room a tip, demands to be fed, doesn't contribute even a token amount to their upkeep and sleeps all day and games etc all night.

They don't understand money comes from work and at times doing work you hate but still have to do as it is paying the bills. They expect to immediately have the same level of income and lifestyle as their parents, ignoring the fact their parents have worked the last twenty plus years to get where they are. Plus the number who think unless they love their job they're not going to it, it's mind boggling.

It's part of being a caring parent.