"My 20something is my roommate," and other things I never thought I'd say

Is it time for a new conversation about adult kids and INTERdependence?

Today’s bonus includes an ad-free sneak preview of a podcast interview with Laurence Steinberg, Ph.D. and author of You And Your Adult Child: How To Grow Together In Challenging Times. Become a paid subscriber to access this entire post including that bonus conversation.

When I look back at the road I walked as a young parent, it is (predictably) littered with statements I made about things I would “never” do, then later abandoned.

One of those things? Allow any of my kids to live with me past high-school graduation. Barring extreme circumstances like extreme illness, I vowed, they’d be on their own after that - or at the very least, paying rent and living by my rules.

My stance seemed reasonable at the time. After all, I’d moved out of my parents’ home at 18, and never went back. I’d fought through those early challenges on my own, and had come through the other side. It was character-building. It helped me grow.

My kids, I figured, would have the same experience.

Photo by Michal Balog on Unsplash

But now, seven years after my oldest graduated high school, to say I went back on those early over-statements would be the understatement of a lifetime.

My adult kids have yo-yo-ed in and out of my house, sometimes for a few weeks at a time, sometimes for months, sometimes for a duration of more than a year.

And while I’m not getting bellowed at for meatloaf, e.g. silk bathrobe-wearing, 30something lay-about Will Ferrell in Wedding Crashers, I’m going to be honest: my house often contains young men wearing bathrobes.

From time to time, I even make them meatloaf.

So why the change of heart?

I’m so not sure it actually looked like a sudden, overnight change of heart, actually. It was more that - as they do when they are babies and toddlers and preschoolers and young school-aged kids and older school-aged kids and middle-schoolers and high-schoolers - each of my offspring have gradually shown me, at every single stage, that they not only aren’t exactly the same as one another, but that none of them are exactly like I was at their age. And that maybe, actually, that’s not such a bad thing.

Whoa. What?