Are my friends ungrateful and spoilt or am I unreasonable?

[secretgoose]

I’m 32 years old and obviously my friends are a similar age.

I absolutely love all my friends but I often find the way they treat their parents really cringey. My parents aren’t in my life, which is my choice. I’m aware that my perspective could be warped which is why I’ve come here.

Things they do that have annoyed me. One of them booked a holiday, paid a £50 deposit but then didn’t read the payment terms and realised she couldn’t gather enough money to pay the final balance in time. Her parents have paid it for her. She’s 34 years old and talks about wanting to try for kids soon and I wonder how that will work.

Another friend lives at home with her parents, only child. She entered a group chat to say her Mum has been annoying her and her Mum kicked off because she always cooks dinner and does everything. And i empathised with her mum thinking well she’s got a 32 woman child at home, and a husband, both not pulling their weight. I simply asked my friend how often she cooks at home and she said she doesn’t but when she lived with her last romantic partner she didn’t cook then either. I just find it wild how you can take your mum for granted like that.

Another friends car got a warning light. Her Dad came and got her, drove the car home. He’s then inspected the car, ordered the parts, will fit the parts and has paid for the parts. He isn’t even a mechanic. Her response was to complain about how much he moans whilst doing it! I said let him moan and take the saint out for dinner for goodness sake.

I just find it wild. I am also HUGELY jealous. I would love to have parents like theirs. They don’t know their bread is buttered.

I would expect friend 1 to pay her parent back as soon as she can. After all, surely when she booked it she expected to pay for it before she actually got on the plane? Not paying it back indicates she basically pressured the parent to give her a free holiday, that’s different to a parent making a free choice to treat their child. It’s not clear from the OP whether her friend did pay it back or not.

I’m the same with my adult kids and adult grandchildren. I like helping them for ‘extra’ stuff. They don’t ask. I offer,

In return they support me in other ways, as I’m a widow, abd struggle doing done stuff.

It’s what families do, I thought. 🤷‍♀️

See, that’s the difference. Your Mum freely decided to help you out without you putting pressure on her, and you are grateful. I’m sure if your Mum ever needs help you will be right there. It’s the sense of ungratefulness and entitlement of OP’s friends that is the problem. They expect everything done for them as of right but never do anything to help their parents in return or seem appreciative. No problem with adults living with parents as long as they behave like adults and take equal responsibility for the household. When they act like grabby toddlers it is a problem.

That’s great, give and take is the key. It’s what makes the world go around.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone living at home at 34, paying for adult child's holiday or a dad fixing a car.

Adult living at home needs to grow up and do things around the house.

Holiday friend, yes they should learn how to manage money but I wouldn’t say they are ungrateful, just lucky to have parents like that.

Car friend, she probably is grateful and loves her dad, but she can still also find him annoying for moaning.

Maybe the parents offered! Maybe they are well off and thinking it's better to give money now than later and potentially pay inheritance tax etc. Who knows.

You are not being at all unreasonable BUT it is up to the parents to step back and let their kids adult and that gets harder to do the more entrenched things are. Standing back and letting your kids face the consequences of their own decisions is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you know you could easily make everything nice for them. I wonder if seeing this makes you feel sad about what you didn't get? If so, I get that - it must be painful to see your friends take for granted something that you never had.

I'll be honest, my half brother lived at home with my Dad and stepmother until he was 38. They did everything for him and he resented their level of control, they moaned if he was out of work andcontrolled aspects of his lie. They paid for his car insurance repairs (the car was their old one when they upgraded) he lived for next to nothing.
I left home at 18 and never went back, I can say hand on heart that I never envied him at all- I thought the level of support was unfair, because I got none, but I never ever wanted to be in that situation .
The difference may be that I am 13 years older than my brother and family situations shifted in those years.

The thing about threads like this is you get people who genuinely do not get it and also don't get that they don't get it.

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You’re not wrong OP!! I moved out when I was 20 and since then I’ve paid for absolutely everything myself.

My sister however is 10 years older than me and my parents only stopped paying for her car and phone and god knows whatever else extra when I moved out at 20. She had been married with kids for years.

In fact I do recall one Christmas receiving my Christmas money from parents and buying a TV licence with the money. Sister had a tantrum that she would have to use her Christmas money to cover the cost of a repair for a scrape she put on her car herself and Dad paid for that for her.

I can never get all the criticism of people who opt to remain at home with their parents into their 30s and even 40s. It is their choice, so if it suits all concerned, what is the matter with it? I lived at home well into my 40s - loved every (nearly) minute of it, whilst still leading a perfectly normal life outside, with jobs and boyfriends, etc. It was a far nicer home than anything I could have afforded. My parents were wonderful, and no, they didn't give me money just because I asked. Yes, my father did buy me a new car, but I had to pay him back every month until it was paid for (and quite right too!).

Yes, i know a couple of people who lived with their parents until their 40s/50s when parents died. The parents probably did a lot for them when they were younger but by the time the adult children were in their 40s it was the other way around if anything.

That doesn’t mean your parents have to bail you out of every predicament. There’s a point where adult children should be able to manage independent of their parents. There’s idea that people into their 30s still expect parents to help them financially, provide childcare, help sort their cars etc is infantilising. At what point do you stand on your own two feet (you meaning generically not you specifically).

Isn't it the parents fault for babying their adult kids.

I have friends- aged in their forties!! - who still depend on the bank of mum and dad on a monthly basis. Fucking ridiculous.

Those that think adult children should never receive money from their parents do you not think that happens a lot nowadays? Not everyone talks about it but many receive financial help to buy a house etc. It doesn't mean they aren't independent adults.

Financial help to buy a house is one thing; monthly assistance to pay bills though? The thing is the sense of entitlement. One friend in particular moans about her parents not offering childcare whilst at the same time taking their money every month.

I don’t know why you don’t get it

I suspect some of themes from this discussion will be very prominent in another trending topic today, which is NEET (Not in Employment, Education or training). From my own anecdotal experience, I know of 3 friends/acquaintances who have teenagers, in one case, a grown man living at home, who do absolutely nothing. They don't work, are not in college. They don't even sign on (presumably because that would require them to look for work). The parents in these cases just support them, seemingly ask nothing from them, occasionally get annoyed that they get up late, stay up late, make mess and do nothing around the himself. I can't get my head around it. Nationally, I see fro. The data that the majority of NEETS are boys. What's going on with parents of boys do we think? My experience is that boys seem to have fewer demands made of them by their parents (for what reason I don't know, maybe parents fear thry will be pressuring them?), and a lot respond to this by doing absolutely nothing and sponging off them.

As someone also with a shitty parent, I know exactly what you mean. It’s people with wonderful parents who take them for granted, it’s the attitude of the DC not the actual acts of support.

An in-law in particular drives me insane - doesn’t she know how wonderful her parents are?? How could she treat them like that?? When you’ve had parents that don’t love you, the rejection of perfectly decent parents is a big trigger 😂

But that’s exactly what it is, it’s a trigger and it’s my issue (and yours in this case). I remind myself how lucky my in law is to not ever have to learn the lesson that I did or have that aspect of my life experience. And for me, how lucky I am to have these in laws 🫶🏻

I don't see the difference between a regular monthly amount and a one off large sum. I am sure it happens a lot. Most people aren't going to talk about it.

Ok then.

They'll probably look after their parents in their old age whereas you won't have to

It's laughable how many on this thread are claiming to be completely independent, but then concede that they're married! There's nothing independent about being intertwined with a spouse.

You are not being unreasonable. You are absolutely right. There is ungratefulness overall in our society. Nobody is grateful to have clean drinking water, OK, let us forget about it, but nobody is grateful to have abundant running hot water and flushing toilets - 10 years ago on the Isle of Bute we viewed a house for sale with an outdoor toilet and it drove it home how ungrateful we are for what we have. On the same Isle there was an abandoned cottage with a glass house where we used to sneak in as children (we always shut the door behind us when we left) and we saw that there was no shower, not hot running water there, they must have washed in the sink.

We are an ungrateful society overall - children don't have to work (think of the third world), libraries provide free access to books and free internet, etc. etc. It is no wonder we take more and more for granted, including our parents. Your friends are pathetic, you are not being unreasonable. And your desire for loving, caring parents is not unreasonable either. And neither your thought 'If I had parents like that, I would have never treated them so shoddily', is not unreasonable either.
Modern adult children are often disgusting - my friend who brought up her child single-handedly and went without, recently decided to surprise her only child, on a hospital university placement in hospital accommodation 1.5 hours away from my friend (she has no car), by public transport. She brought the child's favourite takeaway (child was saying on the phone of no time to cook, etc.) from a chain of takeaways, by public transport, to her accommodation. I asked my friend what the reaction was, the 'child' must have been surely delighted by the food and the unprompted thought behind it? She said, the reaction was 'you forgot the sauce'.