Would you let your kids stay at home indefinitely?

[lazarou]

The thread on putting your parents in a nursing home just got me thinking about this.

Will you allow your children to live with you for as long as they want to or will you encourage them to leave home as soon as you think they are ready?

my brother has just left home, he is TWENTY NINE!!!. He is bloody useless at everything, cant cook, do washing anything! he has only moved out of my mum and dads because he has found a girlfriend daft enough to take my mums place!

I get on excellently well with my parents, but I did need to leave home when I was 18. I knew if things went really seriously wrong I could always come back and that they were there for me at the other end of the phone line, but I needed to feel that they weren't there in the first instance, that I had to try and sort things out for myself and experience a little bit of hardship without anyone rescuing me.

That is what I would like for dc's too. I don't want them to worry about money all there lives, and certainly not when bringing up children, but a little bit of living-in-a-garret experience while you are young and resilient does no harm IME and it can help to give you confidence.

My Mum lived at home until several years into her marriage (we lodged with my grandparents), and it hit her terribly hard the day she found herself on her own. I like to think that I'm that little bit tougher, having lived and worked abroad in my late teens/early twenties.

I won't turf dc's out, but I am already talking as if moving from home is just a natural progression that I am sure they will go through.

This is particularly important to me as dd is disabled, so I think it is even more vital that I let her find her own independence and work out for herself how she can handle her physical problems when Mummy isn't there.

My older two have said they are going to live with me forver. DS1 wants to be a Dad so I will have a houseful.

bil still lives at home at 34 , i dont think its helped in his failure to get a partner tbh. Where do you live? with Mum.

DS3 will almost certainly be with us for ever, i'd like him to go into suported housing but dh won't have that. I can see his point- our experience of services for ds3 has taught us self reliance, iyswim.

DS1 is a conundrum, he won't need care but I don't think will ever cope alone either. I hope he meets a tlerant girly or boyfriend, if not I will encourage gim to live close by, so he has independence but I can check he is eating / less than 3ft deep in hoarded crap.

DS2 I hope will go to Uni, and I would encourage him to be independent after that, I think growing up with 2 sn brothers teaches you independence anyway.

ds4? who knows, time will tell.

it has to be based on them as individuals

when my ex had been home from uni 6 months without a job, his mum put him in the car and dropped him at a boarding house (she'd paid deposit) 10 miles away.

she drove straight back home and he was there asleep on the sofa! nobody ever found out how the little toad did it

but after living with him for several years I knew why- laziest creature alive.

Depends on the individual child. But I doubt I will be turfing them out on principle. After all, I didn't move out of my parents house until I was 30. I didn't pay rent - and I would never expect my children to pay me rent - but I contributed to the household in other ways, financial and participatory.