Older teens home for the summer - household regime

[Lokilure]

Shortly we'll be getting our eldest back home after her first year at uni, and our youngest at 17 will be finishing Y12.

I'm conscious that it's important to adapt as they grow up, not treat them so much as children and also not sleepwalk into becoming (staying?) their skivvy. How does your household run when your older teens are back home from uni &. college? What are your expectations, do they chip in more with the housework, cooking etc?

Of course the standard answer will be that they should have been cooking a meal for everyone weekly from their 5th birthday but life is complicated and we have some additional needs going on. But I'm interested in what is normal in other families as well as AuDHD families like ours too.

Single, knackered mum. Eldest will be working most days over the summer, youngest is probably operating on about a 12/13 year old level. Both nice polite young people but easily overwhelmed. I know, I know, the failure of modern parenting etc etc. We started well but stumbled through teen years with mental health difficulties, exams etc, and vacuuming was not the right hill to die on. But what can I do gently to improve things over the summer?

You are terribly hard on yourself. None of us get everything right and you sound like you’ve done a good job. Perhaps choose a couple of tasks - washing up, bins, cook dinner - and chat about the best way you can all pitch in. Have a good summer 🙂

The way we did this when I was at home and mum was trying to train me is she left me a list every day. So put the washing out or clean the conservatory windows or whatever. I would suggest you add to that "look around the kitchen at 4pm and make sure all food is closed/away, surfaces cleared and cupboards closed". It's a bit faffy but should get the job done and it helped me a lot in learning what was required to keep the house running.

DS17 is also Autistic/ADHD and just finishing yr12. I tell him he’s part of a team effort to keep the house running, and if he wants lifts to the gym and his football club then he needs to muck in with jobs when asked.

I find it works well to text him a list of jobs for each day, then he’s good at just working through them. I tell him X and Y jobs must be done before lunchtime, A and B jobs before dinner etc to help him manage his time as he’s not great at it.

I’m trying to get him to “see job, do it now” and wipe up spills on the worktop instantly, or see dishwasher needs emptying and do it straight away - but that’s a work in progress!

Im very laid back about what he does in his spare time and I want him to relax, but he knows that the times I do ask him to help with something, I mean it, and he doesn’t argue and just gets on with it.

Yes, we talk about it as a team effort, we are all adults, we all need to do our share, we started on this line of explanation when they were becoming adults, we never gave money for chores when they were young, just saying they had to do their share, which has grown as they have got older. And I don't take "later" for an answer because I know it won't happen, I say "no, now" which means in practice it had better be done in the next half hour.

Thank you all, so many really specific ideas which is exactly what I needed, and a load of understanding too.

I love the idea of a 4pm check and a 15 mins before dinner thing.

Parenting is so very much a journey. "Old me" (when kids were both managing school) would have been all over this with checklists. But we've been of necessity in a low demand place (for them!) for a while now and that ends up putting all the demand on me. I'm tired.

They did chip in and got the washing in last night while I was cooking. This morning I spotted 2 neat little piles of pegs lying out on the counter. Work in progress hey. I will instigate a general tidy up later and they can deal with those then.

My current "thing" is to get them all (and this includes DH) to just put things away instead of sitting them down on the nearest surface. I don't mind thing on surfaces short term so long as they are put away in a reasonable timeframe, but they all just put things down and leave them indefinitely, particularly when coming into the house. I am trying to drill into them that anything you bring into the house you put away before you move on to doing something else, it's a habit for me and it helps a lot with finding things again as well as tidiness. But while we might all say take off a hoody and put it over the back of a kitchen chair, I will go and hang mine up the next time I leave the kitchen, or certainly later that day, they will all leave them till they need them again and then wonder where they left them because by them someone else has dumped another one on top. It is a work in progress.

Yes, i hear you on the low demand parenting, which is why I also have a 18 and 17 year old who do mo households chores. They did when they were young, charts and stickers went a long way! Now, with mental health, adhd, asd, school load, Ive had to pick my battles. As a single parent I'm getting exhausted. I tried to call a meeting last night and we got as far as agreeing that 6-7 pm is dinner time. Leave your bedroom and come to the table. We have a long way to go yet( and a long summer)!