Have also posted in relationships.
This might seem silly but I want to make sure I raise something sensitively with my parents, to avoid any bad feeling, and I need some help with how to do it! A bit of background info will be necessary so apologies for the long post.
We recently purchased a house for my parents to live in, which is about half an hour away from us (they currently live 3 hours away). We are financially very comfortable and it felt good to be able to help them in this way (they will sell their own house and invest the proceeds to generate an income for their retirement, while living in the new house rent free). We are over the moon to have them closer and have always been close. In turn, they help us with our 3 kids and multiple pets. They love the area and love the new house.
This is the hard bit: we want to make sure that certain boundaries are put in place, for the sake of everyone’s happiness. They are the sort of people who think nothing of walking into our house without knocking, at any time of the day or evening, to just say hello!! I’m fine with this as they’re my parents but I realise I wouldn’t want my in laws doing this, and DH wants to make sure that the new arrangement works without us feeling that we’ve sacrificed our privacy. How can I raise this with them without potentially sounding rude?? It’s pretty foreign to the way that they think. I definitely don’t want them to think we’re having second thoughts after they’ve been through the upheaval of leaving their lifelong home and town and all their friends. They are fully independent and physically fit so that’s not the problem, but they just don’t seem to realise that DH needs evenings alone sometimes... they generally don’t have a strong sense of privacy/ personal space and so I just want to avoid problems in future.
IABU - don’t raise this with parents as it could upset them
IANBU - you should talk to them (suggestions on how to raise it very welcome!)