The Terrible 20’s

Dear Dr. Darcy:

My 23-year old daughter is ruining my life.  First of all, she lives with me, and she does absolutely nothing around the house.  But it’s the mess that drives me crazy.  Dishes in her room, you can’t even see the color of her carpet because she has so much clothing on the floor.  And she comes in at all hours of the night.  She walks in at 4:00 a.m. sometimes and the dogs bark and wake me up and then I’m up for the night and then I go to work on literally no sleep.  She keeps talking of moving out because all we do is fight, but she keeps getting fired from jobs, and it just happened again last week.  What can I do about this?  Obviously the solution is for her to move out, but if she doesn’t have a job, I can’t let her go homeless! Can I?

ANSWER

I’m thinking that right about now, you’d prefer being homeless to living with your daughter.  And as easy as it would be for me to jump on your bandwagon and point fingers at your daughter who admittedly, is very self-absorbed and is taking advantage of you, the problem is you, not her.

Your daughter is just doing what you’ve taught her to do, which is to do nothing.  Screaming and carrying on, as you’ve seen, is ineffective in changing behaviors.  Parenting needs to come from a place of calm leadership.  You wouldn’t handle a problem with a colleague by fighting, and you need to use the same strategy at home.

Take your daughter out for dinner or coffee to discuss the new rules of the home.  Being out in public will render you both more likely to behave appropriately thus increasing the likelihood that you’ll have a different outcome than you’ve historically gotten.  Then tell her the following:

1.  Sunday – Thursday, the front door will be locked from the inside by 11:00 p.m. Friday and Saturday, the door will be locked from the inside by midnight.  If she wants to stay out later, she needs to sleep somewhere else.

2.  Effective immediately, she needs to contribute $100 weekly towards food and, most importantly, a cleaning service. Get a cleaning service in your house at least once weekly.  And she’s going to complain that she can’t afford that amount (or any amount) and it’s all bullshit.  If you give her free room and board, why on earth would she manage to remain gainfully employed?  More importantly, why would she ever move out? She’ll do the math herself and decide that for just a little more, she can get her own place and that’s when she’ll move out.  Not a minute before then.

3.  She’s got to get reasonable about remaining employed.  She can’t control when she gets fired (unless it’s due to her behaviors and that’s another blog for another day) but she can control what she does after she gets fired.  She needs to waitress or bartend or flip burgers… Whatever.  She needs to earn money and you need to hold her accountable for giving you money every week regardless of what’s going on in her life.

Here’s the bottom line:  You’re not going to want to have these discussions with her, but you need to.  You can feel uncomfortable or guilty and do the right thing anyway.  None of this is going to feel good when you’re doing it. It’s a new muscle that you haven’t yet developed.  But if you don’t do this I can promise you that these behaviors, as ugly as they look at 23, will become much uglier at 33.

Writer’s stats: Female, Straight.