Just wondering how much would you charge your 18 year old for rent

[mumofoneadult]

So my dad is 18 I told her she should be paying 300 per month. She did for two months and then said it was too high and can she reduce to 200 I agreed and said but she needs to do some cleaning round the house.

Dd is very lazy and doesn’t think she should have to hoover or clean the bathroom or any cleaning as I’m the mum. So for the last month she paid 200 and did not help atall. The only thing she does is wash her dishes after she cooks, but never wipes the sides or the kitchen sink.

I have told her she will need to pay the 300 as she won’t help, she point blank refuses.

her bedroom is an absolute tip and I’m always telling her to clean it but now she says as she pauses rent she can have her room joe she likes )it has always been a mess even before she paid anything).

so while refusing to pay the amount I set as it’s extortionate, she has also booked to get a tattoo that cost 500.

I just feel like she is being unreasonable but she thinks I am.

I still pay for all her toiletries and food and buy items of food for her that I don’t eat, I don’t think she has any idea how those things mount up.

so just wondering what others dcs of this age pay and what is reasonable.

I think I am also more bothered about her attitude of not doing any house work and expecting me to do it all and then refusing to pay what I said. Even if she didn’t pay any rent but was helpful and didnt cause me to do extra cleaning I would be happier.

@CharSiu

I have told her how much the bills are but she doesn’t care coz I’m the mum.

the thing is with the room it actually looks like a bomb has hit it and the floor is covered with stuff. Sometimes I let it go and sometimes it just gets too much. And she won’t help with cleaning the rest of the house

How are you going to make her leave? All those people that say this - are you going to change the locks? or physically drag her out onto the streets? Could you cope with the worry of where she went?

All your options are hard.

What you could do - which might be unpleasant for you is to go entirely on strike in the house - clean your own room, but not the shared spaces. Eat your meals outside the house or shop only for yourself entirely - day by day if needed so there is no food available, certainly no toiletries.

It would require a real determination and a bit of suffering on your part and if at all possible communication would be better - but that doesn't seem to be working.

Will her new career mean leaving home? If so, I would probably put up with it as a short term issue.

I am a fully functioning adult, with a paid off mortgage and savings! I never paid anything when I lived at home!

@Slightlyheady

when she was 9 probably no consequences as such, but I think as she was younger I expected it less from her.

as she has got older I expected more help around the house which she wouldn’t do apart from helping with the dishes and then it would be things like take away her phone etc.

she has always been very lazy and I’ve never really known how to fix it

I mean with both. You can’t force her to do the chores or pay you money so giving her the ultimatum to do what a functioning working adult should do or she leaves is the only way forward. The time for talking is over.

I still think setting up big absolute barriers and going straight there makes things worse. Tbh I wouldn’t have stopped washing ds’s clothes completely at 16 though I can see how you felt driven into a corner - but as a result she has locked herself into aggressive messiness and got stuck there. I can remember having that sort of reaction at 18 - well if you won’t do THAT then I’m not going to do THIS.

Do you get any time apart from her? Any fun time for yourself? Also any time just chatting together, are you always at odds or is theee anything you enjoy together out of the house?

@Womblingmerrily

This is the conversation we had yesterday, I said you need to pay the 300 or leave, she said well she has no where else to go so she’s not leaving, so I said fine, I will change the locks. And no I couldn’t cope I would feel awful.

I also said fine you won’t clean the bathroom that you use everyday and I won’t either she she laughed and said it would bother me more than her (as she knows I like everything to be clean) she doesn’t care and would shower in a dirty bath and she is right, I wouldn’t be able to do that.

and on the toiletries side, I still provide everything apart from her hair products which she buys. Things like razor blades and toothbrush heads, even pads all these things are very expensive now and if I lived alone they would last double the time.

no it doesn’t work as she is very unreasonable and cannot see it and just excepts me to run the house as normal even though she is now technically an adult and should be contributing

her new career will not require her to mine but she will then be on about 40k per year and said she will move out. But we don’t know when the job will start and she says she will move out but will she?

I would be honest with her. You love her but you really need her to contribute now she's 18. Show her the cost of your bills. Fish out a gas, electric, water rates and council tax bill. Tell her now she is 18 you can no longer get 25 percent off your council tax so it's shot up. If there are just the 2 of you work out what half of all bills costs, tell her that is her minimum contribution. Then she buys her own toiletries. She either buys her own food or adds £40 to total.

@topcat2026

the thing is even if she agrees she won’t do the chores.

like I said I agreed her rent could be 200 as she didn’t have much money and she would have to help around the house. She hasn’t done one thing in a whole month.

That all makes good sense.

I would encourage her to work full time until she can enter her career path. Money in the pocket and additional entries on the CV are always a good thing.

You mentioned in another response that you need the cash injection - tell her that. If you set it at £200 quid, which should be fair at approx £1k income, let her know that the cash helps you balance the books and that you can't factor in cleaning, as you are a person in your own right too. There are ground rules in the house that she must follow.

However, keep the focus on her career and getting into full time work in the interim as the routine and discipline at work will go a long way to fix your home life issues.

@PermanentTemporary

i stopped because I felt mad that I would spend time and money washing and drying her clothes to find them on the floor. Since then she lets her clothes build up and doesn’t wash them once she left it so long that she ran out of underwear!

yes it’s like she things we are in a war and she wants to rebel by being unclean and she knows that I am house proud and I will do it.

yes I have time apart from her and lots of fun time.

and this is the weird thing, we get on really well as long as I don’t ask her to do cleaning, apart from that we have a good relationship but that side of things she just completely takes the p*ss

My two are also autistic so there have always been battles. But I'm afraid that I took the approach that my own mum did when younger. When their rooms got too bad then I got a black bin bag, gathered everything up and put it in the garage/shed. They then had a set amount of time to sort it before it went to the tip. I took that approach with their toys when younger and their other stuff when older.

Both are incredibly untidy and I didn't mind that in their own rooms as long as it was clean. I also found that being specific, tidy your room was too vague for them, I had to give specific tasks.

I charge £50pw, which covers their share of bills. They buy and cook their own food (dfferent preferences and working hours) and toiletries. I buy cleaning materials. They are responsible for their own laundry. We share some chores. Their rooms are messy, I deal with this by not going in or thinking about them. By doing it this way they have learned to budget better.

It sounds to me that you are stuck in a parent/small child relationship where you are telling her to do things and she is ignoring you because that's what she's done her whole life and there's never been any consequences.

How would it look as if you treated her like an adult? Sit down and tell her that you love her but that you need some ground rule for living in the house together. That your bills are such and such and you've lost things like child benefit and council tax reduction since she was 18. That some jobs need doing.

See what she suggests. If she doesn't have the maturity to work out that this means she needs to pay at least some rent and pitch in with the cleaning (and I'd suggest starting with minimum standards, then I don't fancy her chances of getting the job she's set her heart on.

@caringcarer

I have told her told her all of this. I have told her how much the bills are, half of all bills would be more than the 300 I have told her to pay and she won’t pay that, so she definitely won’t pay half of everything.

her attitude is I’m her mum and she is only just becoming an adult so I should continue to pay and clean

I have always done laundry as it's more energy efficient to have full loads by combining everyone's laundry but they were both responsible for putting their dirty clothes in the wash basket.

@Comefromaway

i have also bagged dds things and took them away before when she wouldn’t sort the room, and recently my dad saw her room and said I would dump it all. He would have thrown me out of home if I lived like she is.

it’s just so frustrating the whole situation, honestly you can hardly walk in her room.

but it’s more her making mess in the bathroom and kitchen that bother me and I can’t seem to find a way to make her clean up

@redskyAtNigh

there have been conqsequences but that would be things like taking away her phone and that’s not going to work now.

I have explained bills and about child benefit etc and she says things like oh you just don’t want me here coz your not getting money for me now. And I’ve explained no she is an adult and needs to contraband I don’t feel l should have to clean up after another adult.

She is acting like a brat. I'd repeat I love her veryuch but I don't like her behaviour. Her behaviour is not tolerable. She needs to clean up kitchen and bathroom after herself or move to a shared house and live in a room. No one would care how untidy her own room was but she'd soon be called out of leaving kitchen and bathroom in a mess. Maybe that's what she needs to make her grow up.

What career is she starting straight from school at £40K?! And when...
I would leave her room - it's her space and up to her what state it is in. She is an adult so you shouldn't be going in there anyway, so just shut the door.

I think it's difficult to know what to ask her to pay towards the house, if you don't really know what she is earning. So perhaps, stop buying stuff for her - all toiletries, phone, and may be food (definitely lunches). Change the passwords for subscriptions etc so that she doesn't have access.

For me, I would have to charge around £300, but that is because of not being able to afford to run the house without it - I would be losing around £700 a month in income myself. Otherwise, it wouldn't be about money, but about progressing in life - I wouldn't be happy with an 18 year old without a plan, or intention to carry on studying. It doesn't do them any favours. Getting a part time job and being happy to sit around the rest of the time wouldn't be an option in my house.

For sure. My kids know that I have expectations in the house and will do everything I can for them, but they also know that once they get to eighteen and are adults, all bets are off.

The OPs daughter is obviously working or else the OP wouldn’t be asking for rent. She seems unhappy with the rental contract and so perhaps it’s time for her to grow the fuck up and realise how lucky she is try living somewhere else with adults she isn’t related to.

My instinct is there is some leverage somewhere which is why she thinks is okay to treat the house and her mother like cray.

Why are you enabling her? She knows you don't follow through and just moan...

Follow through and get rid of her, kick her out.

Going into a £40k job at 18? is she joining the police/forces?
Start by changing wifi password, do NOT wash her clothes, only buy food for yourself, remove all crockery , keep one of each for yourself, remove all toiletries, maybe once she realises what things cost she’ll wake up.
She sounds appalling, selfish and disrespectful.