AIBU not to wake my 20-year-old for early shifts?

[itsmeitsyou]

DS 20 has a new job. It's full time in a factory and I am very happy for him as previous work has been mainly casual bar work.

He has struggled to get up for his shifts. He needs to be up by 5am to leave at 5.30am for public transport on a weekday for a 7am start. Weekend he starts at 6! Thankfully we have good transport links and he can get there.

Problem is one of us in the house is having to wake him. I don't want to get up at 4.30am on a weekend to get him up.

My sister (has no children) has called me selfish. As when she was asking about the new job I confessed I didn't know how he would manage the 6am starts on a Saturday. She said I need to get up and get him up, it's my duty as his parent!

YABU - help him get up on weekend
YANBU - he is 20 and needs to continue to learn natural consequences

You're not selfish and your sister needs to wind her neck in.

I wouldn’t be getting up at 4.30! I might buy him an additional alarm tho

tell your sister that millions of teenagers go to uni at 18 and manage to get themselves up for lectures at 9 despite being out in the clubs until past 2am. If I can do that then your son can get himself up- at least he will be paid for it!

I think this kind of thing is a much better idea - chat through with him why the current alarm system isn’t working and problem solve together. There’s a whole load of different alarms out there for people who struggle to wake up/get up.

Yes, YANBU. He's 20, no-one likes getting up that early, but unless you are also getting up at that time, he needs to wake himself. I resent having to get my daughter up (she's 16) as I feel like a human alarm clock reminding her every 10 minutes, and it's not even especially early as we live near the school. I feel she should be doing it herself. I certainly wouldn't be doing it that early on a weekend for a grown adult.

I would probably help him for a few weeks while he gets into the rhythm of the early wakeups but I think I would be fairly rigid about only doing so if he was willing to stick to a schedule that allowed him to get to bed early too. If he wanted to do late nights out with his friends and then wanted me also to disrupt my own sleep to wake him up, I would not be willing to do that. He needs to be at least as invested in his own life as you are invested in his life, if you see what I mean.

Hopefully his body clock will get on a schedule of being able to wake independently after a few weeks, or he can start looking at other strategies like the vibrating alarm or whatever.

Things are rough for young people right now so I would probably provide more of this sort of support than if the job market were good.

If he can't get into a regular rhythm of waking up early, even with some (limited) scaffolding by you, then maybe he just has a night owl chronotype and early jobs are not going to be his thing. I think it would be better if he has a few months of work history at his current job, showing an ability to meet expectations, build a good reference with his boss that he can use to help get another job (with a schedule more suited to him) before he jumps ship to a job with a later schedule. But if it doesn't work out and he has to quit this job earlier, so be it. It's his life, he needs to do the work for it.

How do you think millions of 18 year olds at university get themselves up at 7am for their morning lectures each day?! They don't have Mummy around to jostle them awake and make them a bacon sandwich. We are talking about an absolute basic minimum baseline level of competency here that people that age should be able to do.

No but getting up at 7am for a lecture is very different to getting up at 4.30 am for a long journey on public transport to do a full days work in a factory .

Please don’t do this. He’s an adult. In a few years time is he going to have a wife/husband who has to wake him up? If he was my partner I’d be so put off by that. Get him ready for the real world.

He signed up for it.

Nobody likes getting up at 4.30am but it was his choice to take the job.