Reply to At what point is a teen "spoiling the nest" (before college) going too far?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We are living this right now as well.
Rules we have put in place.
If she can't  pick up sibling such that I need to do it, there is no using the car that day.  
If clothes are not put away, we do not "give back" clean clothes that somehow found the way into the hall hamper.
We sat down and spoke about financial expectations - my DD decided not to work this summer - fine - we are not providing spending $ beyond the small allowance that she has always had. Not giving money for gifts for friends birthday gifts, starbucks habit etc.  
When she decided not to get a job, I wrote on a piece of paper the agreement and she signed it.  Is is taped up on the wall so we are all on the same page.[/quote]

She has a job at the country club and saves every cent. She has a lot of money for her age in the bank. And she constantly picks up shifts to make more money. It's also a convenient excuse for everything. I can't do ___, gotta work. Sorry I didn't do ___, so tired from work.

If we consider punishing her, we get guilt tripped that she had good grades and has a job and we don't know how lucky we are. Other parents often tell us this. Can't win.[/quote]

So she loses her job because you take her car or she buys her own. It’s very simple, you just make it hard.[/quote]

You got to move out of the "punishing" mindset. Technically she's now an adult, your fiscal responsibilities to her are over and she is equally free to move out on her own and never listen or talk to you again.   Everything now is on different terms than when she was a child. You've got to figure out together what her role in your household is going to be--have a discussion about that--what are you going to provide (and lay on the table all that you are providing--food, shelter, utilities, college, any services like cooking, cleaning, etc.)  and what is she going to contribute.   If you are relying on her to pick up her siblings, she can't pick up an extra shift at work during that time.  If she does, she calls and pays for an uber for them.  At the same time if her job is dependent on working certain hours, it may be unreasonable to expect her to pick them up.  The point isn't to punish--the point is to get her to see she's now an adult with responsibilities and you aren't her doormat in perpetuity.  Write this all down.

You aren't "lucky" that she's saving up money for herself or getting good grades--those are for herself, not you.   None of this has anything to do with your love of her, your pride for her, your happiness in her successes, your concern for her well-being, your excitement for her future etc.  All those can --and should--be continually expressed while still insisting on a respectful, reciprocal relationship from another adult--albeit--your newly adult child-- in your home.   [/quote]

This (minus the asking them to pay for an Uber for a sibling). You should sit down and talk with her. It's time to reframe your relationship. Our oldest is a rising sophomore and I teed up a similar conversation last summer by telling him that the time for his dad and I to parent him in the traditional sense was over - but by living in our home, he had responsibilties and we had expectation of him as a part of our family.

At the minimum you pick up after yourself in any common area, be a considerate and respectful housemate, and shoot us a text if you're staying out all night (DH and I would never do that to our kids or one another) but we sort of had a soft curfew last summer that we dropped once he came back for winter break.

Has it been perfect, no, but we were able to lean on that conversation as a bench mark for how "adults" behave. 
[/quote]

But hadn’t you already been requiring him to be a considerate housemate? That’s what confuses me. Granted my kid is only 12, but I have a very low tolerance for behavior that disturbs the household (making a lot of noise at night, making messes, not helping with chores when asked, speaking rudely.) He’s far from perfect but my end goal is for him to understand he’s part of a household, so he takes that with him when he’s an adult. [/quote]

DP here, come back in 6 years :)
Seriously, it is a normal phase.  Young adults are establishing independence and no longer want to follow childhood rules.  What they don't understand is that if they are not financially independent and living on their own, they don't get to do whatever they want if it disrupts the running of the household. 
And that adults living at home absolutely need to help out.[/quote]

But they need to do those things in any household, not just because they are financially dependent. That’s the point. [/quote]

It's very possible that you have parented your 12 year old so well that when they are 18 you won't be going through this.  Or maybe not. Time will tell.[/quote]

The problem is these threads get clueless people who don't have kids or parents who have young tweens who think their advice is applicable to 18 year old adult kids. You can't control an 18 year old who seeks to do what they want.[/quote]

I’m the one who has a 12 year old. The point is I don’t think or aim to control him. The end goal is to teach him how to be a civilized person living in society. [/quote]

Well, sure, but many teens have different desires and conceptions than you on that that are also generally in flux and subject to a wide range of influences. In my experience, 10-12 year olds are often at  the golden age of reasonableness--competent enough to function fairly independently with common sense, yet relatively amenable to their parents' conceptions of the world.  And it's like they have been steadily growing toward this over the years so you think it's just going to keep on going that way.  But parenting of teens takes a new kind of deftness in the skills it sounds like you have already acquired.  Try to control too much and it backfires and they become secretive and sneaky and get into trouble or become stunted in their development out of fear; be too loose and they treat you like a doormat and get into trouble because you haven't set enough boundaries.  My kids and their friends were all "good kids," but all of us parents were still doing much more of a dance between our teens' conceptions/desires for independence and our ideas about what it means to be a decent, civilized person--all of this in a changing social world where teens have the perspectives of godzillions of others on the internet to counter your worldview.  You have to figure out a way to still achieve your goal of parenting a decent human, but it's not as straightforward as when they were younger--and maybe not as straightforward as pre-internet/mobile devices when parents' decisions on where to live, school, outside activities, media access in the home all exerted more natural boundaries on the perspectives your kids would be interacting with.  [/quote]

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