Finding having 20 year old back home difficult-feel like a bad mum

[Scareofgettingthiswrong]

My dd is 21 in March. She is in a house share at Uni year-round, but isn’t getting on with a house-mate. She came home for a few days to let it blow over, but that has now been over 3 weeks, and she is now talking about not going back until late January.

I love seeing her, and she is kind and funny and nice to have around, but my God the mess!! She doesn’t lift a finger, and never cleans up after herself. I am happy for her to come home and relax for a few days as it is nice to be looked after, but if she is going to be staying for three months I want her to be doing her own washing up and laundry. Is it normal to feel exasperated by your adult children?

Was her lack of cleaning up after herself a factor in her falling out with her housemate?

I think you need some house rules OP. You will be doing her a favour in the long run although it will be tough at first.

Your sanity aside no one wants a housemate / partner / girlfriend who doesn't clean up her own mess or wash her own clothes.

My DS (just 23) is back at home full time at the moment. Graduated in the summer but hasn't managed to get a graduate job yet - looks like he's missed the boat this time round, and all opportunities are now for next September!! He has in the last month got a part time job in a pub, but is getting all the late shifts which means he is getting home at 1-2am and then setting about getting a meal etc. Then sleeping in until gone midday the next day.

His schedule is completely out of whack with 2 adults WFH. He is doing very little round the house - mainly because he is asleep when he should be doing it, and we don't want him doing laundry etc at 3am!! Getting him to apply for proper jobs is a nightmare - constant chasing. We're in South London so the chances of him getting a fill-in job until next September which pays enough for him to move out are slim, and as we don't know where he'll be in September it seems pretty pointless anyway.

DD will be home from uni for 6 weeks over Christmas as she has 4 weeks holiday and then 2 weeks of exams - her course doesn't have exams so no need to go back until end of Jan.

DH and I had a year of them both at uni..... You have my sympathies.

@LadyKenya it was. Dd has a job and is at uni. Her housemate WFH full time. Because dd is either at uni or at work she tends to leave the cleaning and tidying until she has a day off, which annoys the housemate as she is home 24/7 (and which I completely understand). Their personalities also clash (dd is very emotional and her housemate is very logical) and so they are living in different houses next year.

She doesn’t lift a finger, and never cleans up after herself.

So her flatmates won't put up with her but you will? Time for a bit of a chat about adulting. You might start by apologising by letting her grow up this way but that you realise belatedly that it hasn't done her any favours. Go from there

Why should you put up with mess everywhere just because you have offered her a solution to her accommodation issue. Send her back ready to apologise and be a bit nicer to people around here. She can make the rules when she has her own exclusive place

You have my sympathies. I have a similar aged DD at Uni and whenever she comes home I feel torn between a) trying to enjoy time with her whilst she's still willing and able to stay with me for weeks at a time and b) irritation at the mountain of dirty washing/mugs/plates/wrappers that she leaves everywhere she goes. Last time I spoke to her about this her response was that she comes home for a rest so shouldn't be asked to 'do jobs'.

However, OP, I think you really need to speak to to your DD about keeping her home clean and tidy at Uni even if you are prepared to accept it when she visits you. Even if the people she shares with next year do not WFH I think they're likely to get annoyed if a housemate leaves a mess in communal areas for days. She really needs to understand that whatever she does in her own room she needs to tidy as she goes along in communal areas or she risks falling out with housemates again. I'm sure that would be really upsetting for her.

My uni going DS 20 is at home and does all his own cooking and cleaning. If he has exams I shove in a load of laundry. Otherwise, not.
Insist on it.

My DD is also 20 and has decided to study from home (literally - fully online) and it’s been a nightmare for me as well. She’s always been very messy and it’s always been a battle so I was hoping that going to uni and house-sharing would force her to change her ways out of consideration for strangers (that’s what happened to my brother, who was also very messy and disorganised).

I’ve started a rota that I hang up in the kitchen weekly. It’s really minimal and I plan to slowly increase it, but at least it’s something.

Maybe your DD needs to see the tasks laid out? I feel silly doing this for a 20 year but well.

Ds has just been offered a grad job locally starting in September - the training is for 3 years with exams and I am dreading it - I feel like I've gone backwards. I'm going to get a cleaner and he is going to have to contribute to the costs I know he'll do the bare minimum when he's studying and use that as an excuse and I will have to carry the load. We had two years where both our kids were at Uni and we miss having the house to ourselves - there's always a drama of some sort - it's exhausting.

I didn't expect to be doing this at this stage but the reality seems that quite a few kids do not move out and live in dumps like we used to do - we're too liberal now so living anywhere but with the parents isn't such a big thing anymore.

@Imissmypuppy I feel your pain. It's definitely worse after having a year or two of freedom!

Yes, it is oddly disruptive having an adult back in the house when youd just started to adjust to them being away. And I'm afraid your dd's description of her flat-share habits sounds a bit sanitised. I say this as a terrifyingly untidy person myself, but of course a normally tidy person doesn't want to live in a place that's full of someone else's mess until the messy one gets around to clearing it up - if they ever do.

I think you need to make things a significant chunk more uncomfortable for her. I'm sure the drudgery of nagging her to clean up, dumping piles of stuff back on her bed etc is the last thing you want to do, but you're going to have to. She'll either decide it's not quite as nice staying home as she thought and will change plans, or she'll shape up a bit. Possibly both.

Adult DD24 home for a week for Christmas. Lives in house share with her grad fiends. All professionals but comes home for a week as if she’s at uni. Have had to have words this morning as I feel like we’ve reverted to old habits. It’s my holiday too!!

Hey OP, I’m finding having my 20 yr old DD at home full time (deferring a year of uni) is driving me up the wall. No real advice just a bit of an ‘I feel your pain’!
My DD isn’t working, seems very resistant to the idea, sleeps ridiculous times, doesn’t seem to have a life and I’m between being very worried for her and being close to the edge myself! Wishing you all the best - I hope you find some solutions xx

Thank you all for your replies, they have really helped!!

Dd has been home now for 6 weeks, and keeps oscillating wildly between wanting to move back in to her old house and staying here permanently. Some days I literally want to scream-Christmas has been exhausting as I have spent the whole time cleaning up while dd and her 7 y/o sister sit and watch tv and then complain that they are bored. I asked her to pay for a (small top up) food shop for me a few days ago as the food shop has significantly increased since she came home, and she has resented me for it ever since. Apparently she pays bills at her house so finds it unfair that she should “be paying bills on two houses”. It is food, that she is the one eating (I am currently on long-term weight loss so am on a strict diet, and her sister only really eats pasta, plain yoghurt and salt and vinegar crisps (she has autism)), not the water bill! She also never turns lights off, so if she is the last one to go to bed every light in the house is on all night. We were going out the other day and she had left her bedroom light on, so I asked her to come upstairs and turn it off as I felt that if I didn’t she would never start turning lights off. She shouted up the stairs “you’re upstairs, you do it!”, so
I replied that it wasn’t me that had left it on. She has been fuming with me ever since. I’m just completely over it, and feel bad that I don’t like my daughter very much at the moment.

I feel for both of you. It would drive me utterly mad too, but also she's been used to a level of adult treatment and it's hard for a parent to treat their child like an adult and hard for a child in early adult life to treat their parent as a contemporary. Coming home from uni is often a massive flashpoint - I remember it from my own late teens too!
It's ok for you to sit here down and ask her about her plans. You can explain that if she's staying longer term you need to discuss things like bills, expectations etc. You have a 7yo in the house and you're working etf so you need there to be some rules about people staying over etc. It would be good for you to negotiate these together so she feels heard, and maybe for you to compromise too eg agreeing a day a week where you're all in for a family dinner etc.
Maybe you could agree days that you cook with her and days she's expected to have her own food sorted. Any agreement about laundry etc (don't do hers!)
She may have ideas/priorities you haven't considered.
If she's going back to her house share, maybe it's not worth the aggro as it's only a couple more weeks - but only you can make that call

Your 20 year old is behaving worse than a 7 year old and so I would pull the plug on the TV.
If you keep tolerating them not tidying up after themselves, fairly much as soon as they have created the mess, neither one of them will ever be able to live with a flat mate.

You need boundaries and rules.
Use the time at home to retrain your 20 year old how to clean up as she cooks, how to undress and throw clothes into her dirty wash basket, how to fold the washing as she collects it from the line, how to put a load of washing on at night and hang it out before breakfast, how to pack shopping away, put clothes into her drawers, put out the bins.

Give her a deadline of two weeks to drastically improve or move out. You could teach the 7 year old at the same time. Appoint each also the chief cleaner of one room - the bathroom or the sitting room and twice per week it should look sparkly. The tidiest girl each week wins two points and the first to ten gets a ticket to the cinema and a meal out.

We have had two very difficult weeks - ds has improved but took two weeks off work and decided he needs a break and did nothing, whenever he was asked to clean up he threw a tantrum.

Nothing seems to work - he makes promises to improve and that works for a few days then he slides back into doing nothing. I don't want to be the household manager - I don't want to have to check and follow up on jobs not done continually (and get a load of grief for doing so). I told him I don't want to live with him when things are like this and if it continues he'll have to move out and rent because I can't put up with it. I got more promises, more begging - he's exhausted after working a 35-hour week and he's so depressed he can't get off the sofa - he's not so depressed that he wants his boyfriend to stay and go out to the pub to see his friends - he finds his way off the sofa to do that. Dh and I have decided that we will be withdrawing privileges on an escalating scale, level 9 is eviction.

In a moment of reflection he says that he struggles to behave like an adult when he's at home - in his uni flat he was the one who cleaned and looked after the house - at home he assumes his former role of being the child and he just can't seem to transition out of this role whilst he remains at home. I know it's often the case that parents can't stop treating their adult kids as proper adults - I'm probably letting him away with too much but I hate living in an adversarial atmosphere.

I know he needs to move out but we live in London and rent is extortionate, so it's never going to be the first option we go for but moving out is the inevitable destination, I fear the journey to it will be quite bruising on us all.

Her poor housemate, she sounds utterly entitled and selfish. No wonder she doesnt get on with her!

This is what nobody warns you about - once they go to uni or live outside the home, when they come back they are different people.
My youngest was hoping after finishing uni to rent an apartment in the city where he’d studied, well obviously rental prices were at a premium and the offer he had fell through although he had an excellent graduate job to begin - so he had to come home !! I was so happy , I bought him a new duvet set,Nutella and all the things he likes, said his girlfriend was welcome and I thought I was very positive.
it was a total nightmare.
He didn’t want to be at home, he liked his freedom, his domestic habits had changed (for the worse may I add) and within days (hours really) we began to try and work something out. - long story short we realised he’d have to pay more rent and a larger deposit if he were to be moving any time soon - so we were very helpful in commiserating on his travel time from home and when he said the larger rents were stopping him - we helped him !!! (Obviously for his own good not because of his grumpiness) - over lunch he got a telephone call to say a new tenancy was agreed and almost immediately without even finishing his lunch my partner was offering to help load up his van with their stuff to ‘make a start’ - he went, took the Nutella and the new duvet and lived happily ever since and has repaid some of the loan …..I learnt a very valuable lesson here, in being careful what you wish for !!

YES, it's completely normal!
It's hard when they go, but it it's hard when they come back too! My sisters advice qas always to make a.clear distinction between the "then" (i.e.before uni) and now. New rules to be stated/agreed. She's been living on her own so clearly capable
However, didn't generally manage it myself!😂