Many parents are finding themselves dealing with a serious problem, which is supporting their adult children. While you want to love your children, you should never need to support them as adults. There are about 54 percent of adult children living with their parents. How do you tell your adult children when it is time to move out? Unfortunately there are many parents that have actually taken on loans and additional debt to aid in supporting their adult children, which can cause them to delay their own retirement.
The way in which you raised your children will have an impact on them as adults. Did you teach them how to work and to earn money? Did they understand that in order to drive a car, they needed to pay for the fuel along with the costs of paying for insurance? Teaching children how to work for things will prevent them from feeling entitled to things and can hopefully prevent your children from taking advantage of you when they are adults.
As a parent you can prevent your children from staying in the home longer by pushing them to work and pushing them to become successful. Get them involved in extracurricular activities along with helping them to find a job so they know how to work and to become self-sufficient. The right age to help your kids become adults that are self-reliant is when they are between the ages of 18 to 22. Here are some tips that can help you figure out how to make your adult children move out and to become self-sufficient:
- Make it uncomfortable for your child to live at home. When you set a lot of rules and you do not provide them with money, food, and other needs you can get them to look into moving out as they don’t want to stick around where they are not treated like an adult.
- If you have an adult child living at home, ask them to contribute to the mortgage payment. This teaches them that nothing is free and a rent payment is due if they plan on living there.
- Make sure they contribute money to the groceries along with helping out with the household chores.
- If they do not have a job, force them to find one. You need to push them and to take away any luxuries from them if they are just living off your income. Slowly increase the rent payment you ask for along with adding additional rules on them to help them see that its nicer to move out on their own.
It’s not an easy process by any means to learn how to cut the cord but it will be a huge favor to your children and to yourself! You both need the independence from each other to have a healthier relationship.
