DD return from University

[user1465822474]

Only DD returned from Uni last week, skint. No sign of any summer job on the horizon (hinting will have the opposite effect to encouragement I fear), expecting free board and lodging for the summer (fine) and to be fed as well (not fine). AIBU to ask her to pay for her own food? She's got an extremely healthy appetite and certainly hasn't starved when at Uni- her diet has been way better than ours actually. Me and husband are both really hard up at the moment because both self employed and owed money so we really can't afford this- or any luxuries. My only one is a quarterly trip to the hygienist for a tooth polish but now I'm feeling guilty about that as DD says she's in real need of one too but can't afford it. Can feel resentment building up at same rate as bank account getting depleted (and we have until October of this, potentially). Don't want to upset her but not sure how best to approach the conversation we'll need to have pretty soon.

My parents could easily afford to feed and keep us over the uni holidays and always gave the impression they were happy to BUT I stayed in my uni town one long summer break to work as there were jobs in a motorway service area and it was near impossible to get to any potential summer job from my parent's home as public transport was so terrible.

I don't remember anyone going home just to sit on their bottom all summer- people either did paid work or internships or travelled (interrailing etc) or did other study (language school in Spain etc) if they didn't need to earn money.

Just going home to do nothing for 3-4 months was not really something anyone in my peer group did and I wouldn't be thrilled with my kids doing absolutely nothing regardless of finances - travel, work or tangentially related study... do something though, unless health is fragile nobody spends 3 months just sitting at home doing uni work / staring at the wall in the long summer holidays.

maths what is hot bedding or is that an auto correct mistake?

Lots of people from my uni did summer camp or au Pair work in the USA in the summer, and some sold aerial photos there door to door (there was always a recruitment drive from a boarder line dodgy company who paid their air fares to go and do that- they got free board in a shared house but didn't make the money they were lead to believe they could of course... still life experiences and all that).

Work abroad needs arranging months in advance of course - maybe the op (who hasn't been back ) 's dd should be planning to work away next summer between 2nd and 3rd year though.

Hot bedding could be people working shifts sharing beds in rotation. So a house will have 8 people living in it but only 4 beds.

Can't imagine not feeding my dcs, but I draw the line at paying for them to go out and have fun using my money. Would obviously pay for takeaway if we were having it (rare). They do their own laundry! If they came away with us I'd pay but their travel is paid for by them. They are my children and I love having them home.

Dd1 found work hard to find after 1st year - she was rejected from Tesco about 17 times!! She had only previously done bits of pub work - so volunteered at Oxfam. Gave her retail experience and a referee. Office Angels provided work for both my girls after that.

Ds took a bit longer - we pointed out that we wouldn't be paying for petrol, evenings out etc until he got his finger out. Made him move pretty quickly! His attitude is so much better now, he has more self respect and a lot more money. Now to get him to save more of it...

Hot bedding is when you share who uses a bed when. It can also mean the whole room/ washing facilities, rather than only the bed.
Very common for people on low wages. One works days, the other nights, set times when it's 'your' bed/room.

Blimey. Hot bedding sounds unlikely to be legal for landlords (can it be?) and not very pleasant. .. but not as dodgy as I thought

Every sympathy for money being tight and your dd is old enough to understand. But personally I would rather not eat myself than not feed my kids, even when they're bloody working adults! If they come to my house they are fed, same as anyone else who stays. I have actually never heard anything like it. is this a parallel world or something on MN?

Well she can hardly not eat for four months just to feed her daughter.

It's not a parallel world. It's called poverty.

Some people are giving the OP a hard time. I wonder if she'd worded her post differently and instead said that having her DD at home caused a £30 pw shortfall in her weekly budget due to extra costs and that she wanted to ask her DD to cover the shortfall by paying board/keep/whatever you want to call it and that she would need to work to earn this, the responses would have been different?

The reality is that the majority of the extra cost is food, with also a little extra for utilities, petrol if they are giving her lifts. I'm sure that the OP doesn't want to see her DD starve, but its just that food is obvious as where the majority of the extra cost falls.

Agree wholeheartedly with OurBlanche and that vomit-inducing 'coddling' quote from the other thread is mawkish in the extreme. It serves no purpose other than to make mothers who don't appear to need to worry about money, pander to their adult/nearly-adult children and infantilise them. I get that it makes the mother feel good but WTF? ... and it's certainly misplaced on a thread like this, it just makes posters in a dire situation feel so much worse.

Katemiddleton this isn't the thread to push that tripe down the OP's throat on. She really can't afford to have her daughter bringing nothing in.

timelytess - the child is an adult
sorry, you are incorrect. the child is not an adult until she is finished with full time education.

Schwabischeweihnachtskanne how grim it gets depends who you have to do it with and what work you both do. Lots of people in London have little choice. People with standards soon find each other and swap around for better conditions, but many are far too tired to give a dam.
One of my friends gave up complaining that he'd come out of the shower to find his sharer already snoring in the bed because he was too exhausted to wait, because he could never catch him awake and their was a language issue. It's common to barely know each others names.

Legality depends on many things, for instance 24/7 carers will hot bed in a client’s house, and it’s all above board and legal, and usually space for you both to have your own over sheets and separate pillows and floor rug. Some people have their own accommodation as well, others don’t. It’s common for those that do, to be renting out their own bed/room when they're on shift.

In non work connected hot bedded rooms, the deal is usually if EH turns up, then whoever’s there at the time claims to be the official tenant.
If it’s an immigration raid generally the landlord will claim not to have known his tenants where doing this, to cover themselves, and only the terminally stupid say otherwise.

Eh tess? So if they do a 6 year UG course, followed by a full time Masters, then 3 years full time PhD, so finally 28 when they finish, they're to be regarded as a child throughout?

They're an adult legally at 18. There is an expectation that parents WHO CAN AFFORD IT financially help their kids during term time. That's it.

Whilst I'd never say a student should work during term time - unless they are certain their studies won't be affected, there's no reason why at least some of the four month summer holidays shouldn't be spent earning some cash. Doesn't have to be a 50 hour week, but even 15 hours a week on minimum wage brings in over £100 a week which should be enough to cover board if the family are struggling financially, and give the student a bit of spare.

Schwabischeweihnachtskanne how grim it gets depends who you have to do it with and what work you both do.
Lots of people in London have little choice. People with standards find each other and swap around for better quality of life, but some are too tired to care about anything than dropping into bed exhausted, up shower and out again.
A friend wanted to complain about his sharer getting into the bed while he was still in the shower, so he couldn't sit on the bed to dress, but the other guy was always out cold and gone by the time friend ended shift, and didn't speak English.

Legality depends on many things, for instance 24/7 carers will hot bed in a client’s house, and it’s usually above board and legal, and often space for you both to have your own over sheets and separate pillows and floor rug.
Some people do have their own accommodation as well, others don’t. But it’s common for those that do, to be renting out their own bed/room when they're on shift as you're charged for the carers room and pay doesn't cover having your own place empty.

In non work connected hot bedded rooms, it's usually a grey area or illegal. The deal is usually if EH turns up, then whoever’s there at the time claims to be the official tenant.
If it’s an immigration raid generally the landlord will claim not to have known his tenants where doing this, to cover themselves, and only the terminally stupid say otherwise.

Sorry for the accidental double post!

I think there may be a huge variety in both the way in which young people approach their degree courses and in their parents' perception.

Perhaps if people aren't very academic and their children have just sort of drifted into university because it's regarded as some sort of social/job market necessity, it gets regarded as a kind of expensive skive?

I know that over the last year- her first at university - my daughter has regularly been up into the small hours of the morning studying and writing essays. She will also have a reading list for the courses she is doing in the autumn. This summer she will be spending a month working in another country. I'm not going to be pressing her to look for other paid work, because I think she does need some time to recharge after a year of enormous change and challenge - and before another one starts.

The situation would be different if we were living on the threshold of poverty. Even then, I hope I wouldn't feel resentment at sharing food with my own child - even if the practicalities of budgeting needed careful thought.

MessedUpWheelieBin does each person have their own sheets and strip the bed when they get out of it, put their own sheets back on when they get back into bed?

I lived in house shares with shared kitchen and bath rooms of course, and a slightly grotty bed-sit and for a very short while sofa surfed in my early working years temping in London, and knew people who rented and shared a room (with two beds) with a friend in a house of multiple occupancy, but actually for the rent they paid they could have just lived in a cheaper area of London even without extra travel costs just by living 10 mins walk from a bus route instead of 2 minutes from a tube stop, and had a room of their own!

I'd never heard of hot bedding (without hearing the name of course I've heard of houses where many unconnected adults who don't even know each other live) except in houses where illegal workers people were being exploited - living and working illegally and paid below minimum wage because dodgy employers were paying them cash in hand...)

I know somebody who does live in care where I live now (she came here from Poland for the job), but she has her own room in the house - the person who does days lives out. She seems to have to do 7 nights a week though, which possibly is also not/ should not be that legal! Her charge is a coma patient so she does get to sleep while on duty with an alarm set at defined times... Perhaps that is somehow different from working 7 nights per week... I have no idea what happens if she takes leave though...

I've done low wage work in holidays but never come across anyone hot bedding! For students in the summer I guess it isn't so terrible, but its sad to think there are people doing that long term with no end in sight, unless they are doing it in order to save most of their wage...

A lot of student contracts on non uni accommodation (shared houses) used to force students to pay 12 months rent, meaning you might as well stay in your student accommodation and work from there over the summer, as you had to pay for it anyway, if your parents lived somewhere it was hard to find or get to summer jobs. Is that no longer the case?

I'm low income self employed. I have a student ds, and in autumn I'm going to become a student too.

We're used to living on shoe strings, but it's going to be 'interesting times', as I'm visibly disabled and struggle to get enough work every week as it is, and he's already failed an important exam through having to do more paid work than revision at exactly the wrong moment.
It's the reality of trying to over reach ourselves and there's no resentment. We all in it together here and I can't imagine not sharing out the baked beans between us frankly.

Of course you're NBU to expect DD to pay for food, but depending where you live if she now can’t find work, then something has to give, as you're also responsible for letting this situation unfold the way it has.

It sounds like the immediate problem is dd hasn't grown up knowing the family’s finances, or been expected to take more responsibility for herself earlier, aware of how precarious the balance is, and how to pre plan, squeeze something from nothing etc.

That skill gap has to be partly down to her parent/s even if it was well meant as protection. You can't go protecting them from the truth, but still expect them to recognise it anyway. That's not fair.

I think you should stop worrying about upsetting her, and sit down and explain it all to her, apologise if it's come as a bit of a shock, as you no more meant to cause her a sudden problem than she did you, and go from there.

If you're self employed, you must be used to trying to find opportunities, new customers, cost cutting, and scrabbling around a bit, surely? If you haven't already given her these skills, you should be sharing them with her now.

There is work out there if you want it, most employment agencies have something for students, it may not be work that they want to do!
The Op missed a trick when DD said she needed the dentist she should have told her that she needed to get a job to afford it.
All of mine have had a work ethic instilled in them at a young age, we couldn't afford pocket money so the did paper rounds and then graduated to Saturday jobs.
If the OP cannot afford the extra drain on her finances she should spell it out very clearly and forcefully, it is not unreasonable when times are tough to pitch in and help , she is an adult after all.

ElinorRigby I assumed that it was the other way around, and that people who hadn't been to uni were treating the first generation to go to uni with kid gloves and seeing it as a continuation of school...

My dad felt strongly about us not working in term time due to his own parents treatment of him (they supported him through one degree but then he decided to do medicine after completing a science degree, and they refused to support him through another degree so he then struggled doing a more intensive medical degree and trying to work) but he also felt strongly that we should "learn the value of money" and not be given more money than we absolutely needed and not given cash in the holidays - means tested grants still existed them but we didn't qualify so he gave us exactly the same as the grant, to the penny (meaning we had less than peers who got full grants and then small allowances or ad hoc hand outs from parents). He never told us to work in the holidays but took it as a given we would work if not doing an extra structured course of study during the holidays.

Its perfectly feasible to do your holiday reading and work full time over the summer - at least it used to be unless courses have changed. I got a first in an academic subject doing so.

To pay for her food but no accommodation or bills and no social life I guess the OP's daughter would only need to do one eight hour minimum wage shift... Then she could do one more for spending money and still have 5 full days free a week - if she can find and get to the work it is not unreasonable at all and will get her out of the house if nothing else (with no spending money at all to pay train or coach fares to visit friends or go out for a drink/ pizza or see the odd film at the cinema, let alone go to music festival or something, and no job she will have a rubbish summer even if she doesn't have to pay for food).

I suspect the OP hasn't actually given her DD a chance to understand how dire their current financial straits are... She really should have briefed her DD earlier so she could find a job, either in her uni town or live in or in her parent's area.

If you are self employed but living in poverty, would you not be better off taking state benefits while looking for a different job? Or is it the case that if you voluntarily give up a business, you couldn't claim anything?

I second oracs quote

You can still

Well you must be supremely smug then, Roystonv. Best of luck to you - hope you never find yourself in OP's position then, eh?

No excuse whatsoever for posting that on this thread. Only somebody with the reading skills of a traffic light or the empathy of a slug would do it.