Reply to 33 year old son living at home, but doesn’t help out

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]When my son moved back in, I set up specific guidelines. Here’s our requirements:

Clean up after yourself always 
Public portions of the house must always be put back the way you found them when you’re done using them
If you eat dinner with us, you’re on clean up duty
You are required to maintain the yard (not my gardens, but everything else) - that means mowing, snow removal, mulching and whatever else needs to be done
You are required to care for the dogs if we are away or are going to get home late and he’s there
On request you need to pick up groceries, go to the pharmacy and drive younger sibling 
Other things in request
And we don’t do your laundry

Thing about all of this is that it’s specific as To time, place and requirement and not open to judgment - unlike “helping with dinner”which is vague. 
[/quote]

+1 this is a good answer. He is gonna be really screwed when he moves out if he lets his self-sufficiency skills wane/atrophy over time, both in terms of his own independence and in terms of his ability to be a good partner to someone else later.

I say this with genuine compassion and understanding because I lived with my parents for a little while after college and they let me get away with a lot, and my learning curve once I moved out was STEEP, hah! Quite a shock when I lost those safety nets and had to do everything myself. I did figure things out, eventually. But it's quite a different thing to manage adult life (balancing work, fun, relationships etc.) when you are also dealing with the realistic necessities of what it takes to maintain day-to-day functionality (chores, feeding and cleaning, etc.).[/quote]

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