Yes it is hard to know- I agree. I am talking about parents who are in agreement that it is fine for their kids to wait as long as necessary to get a " perfect" job with a " top" company in their chosen field. One mother just told me that if it takes two years it’s fine. She went on to say that her kid won’t learn anything in a " lesser" company ( shocking I know). In the meantime these kids do not earn any spending money while parents pay for shopping, visiting friends in other cities, dinners, car, etc. I am talking about those that are " extreme enablers."
Twogirls- these parents need to realize that while their kid is sitting at home enjoying their post-grad lifestyle, another year’s worth of college graduates are hitting the job market. If I’m interviewing two candidates- one paid their dues for a year after graduating college with a “lesser” job (but a job) while the other one saw friends, went to parties, used mom’s car but had nothing substantial to show for a year post grad- I’m not hiring the couch surfer.
Two years? Her kid is competing with THREE years worth of new grads for a job? No thanks!
@blossom I agree with you 100%.
Just last night my S got a job offer. Not what he really wants, but is in his field so he’s going to take it and continue his job search / grad school applications. His problem is that it is campaign related and may not “convert” into a full time job, so he doesn’t want to wind up where he is now again (he had a year-long job that didn’t convert into a full time job as he had hoped). I just drove him to the train station to head downtown for some other interviews/networking. He is hustling with all his energy, working all his connections, and that to me makes any “coddling” ok.
@Pizzagirl I totally agree with you. Good luck to your son!
I have D13 as a senior in college now, and D17 and D19 in HS. I have shared my story with them (dozens of times they will swear, and they are right) of what I did after college. I never looked for a job, never used the career center. I just came home and worked at my father’s store for a year. They did not charge me rent so after I had saved 10K, back in 1981, I took off halfway across the country, worked a bit, lived off the money I had saved. Eight months later I returned to home state for grad school, in field unrelated to major. I have said to my girls again and again what a loser’s path it was to get a degree and come home.
Thanks to all the posters above. I wonder if I have set up too rigid a launch plan? That they may feel they can never come home? My wife and I are fully paying for their undergrad degrees, as my parents did for me. And we have told them, if you quit college, you are on your own. When that would be the time they’d need us the most.
Thanks again for an unusually helpful and informative thread.
I wouldn’t think they would feel this way especially in a “healthy” family. A kid would need to do alot of inaccurate projecting to feel this way. If you say to your kids “we’re here for you if you need us, but you need to ask” that opens the door for them if they are in need of help and advice, but helps them understand that they are also all grown up and that you aren’t going to forge the path for them. Alot of that groundwork starts in high school, though. In my opinion what you want to hear from your kids in high school is them saying “let me handle this myself” about something you, as the parent, might typically jump into and do “for them” and then it goes from there. Or in high school you start saying “do you want me to do this for you or do you want to handle it”. Unless you are culturally a family where the kids do come home and live in the family unit until marriage, the heart of it isn’t really about will you allow them to come home or not, the real point is why do they need to come home and moreso for them to understand they don’t need to come home because they are mature and capable of standing on their own in my opinion. Short junctures between jobs, because of a divorce, all those sorts of things, rare is the family that wouldn’t support their adult kids as best they can. It is immensely more difficult if the kid comes home because they don’t know what to do or how to do it.
Thanks, @momofthreeboys. I don’t really feel they’d feel they couldn’t come home. Perhaps we just need to reassure them it’s always an option, if unexpected events happen. I think we have laid the foundation. College, with us paying the expenses but not a giveaway, as they must do the work. Then find a job, and don’t necessarily expect that first job to be your dream job. Or,if grad school, we can help with that as well.
Our kids were both employed at college graduation (thank you, God); I don’t consider the temporary time between the actual graduation and when their jobs started in the summer “coming home” at all. They were both employed, in their own apts, paying rent, utilities, etc. I know for S it feels devastating that he’s back at home but we reassure him it’s just a bump in the road and just keep plugging. It’ll work out. He’s young and hungry.
A few years ago, I would have agreed that @PetulaClark’s kids would not feel they couldn’t come home. We always told our kids that they needed to be on their own after they finished college. S took that very literally, and it turns out he was scared to death that we would put him out on the street. Believe me, H and I are very open & honest with our kids … not sure why he would think we’d be such hard-a**es … and not be able to bring up his fears with us. Once he opened up about his fear of us kicking him out, we had a great conversation about the fact that we will always be here for him, but that we have to balance that with the expectation that he will become a self-supporting adult. That conversation led to him opening up about anxiety issues that had plagued him for some time, and he agreed to go for therapy. After 4 months, he was finally able to launch out on his own. As always, keeping the lines of communication open is key to making sure it all works out.
There seems to be an assumption among some posters that kids in general need to be eased or shoved out of the family home because otherwise they’ll stay forever. I couldn’t have kept my kids here if I’d wanted to; they were ready to go and they went. No pushing necessary.
Exactly. I guess kids are different, but while I think it could be a prudent choice for my writer kid to move back home after college if she is trying to write something at that point, both my kids are looking forward to living independently.
I’m interested in whether the Asian parents on here (and others who come from a cultural tradition of multigenerational households) are worrying so much about these issues or would ever contemplate charging their kids rent. I couldn’t imagine charging rent to my kids, unless something radically changed and they were just lazing around expecting a free ride for years. Use of their bedroom isn’t costing you anything significant unless you were planning to rent it out.
My HS kids actually are saying they can’t wait to move out, mainly to move out of our small town and go to college outside the South. D13 has lived in her university’s city every summer since freshman year, working part-time and taking summer classes. Nice she is 40 minutes away and can pop in anytime! She lives with 2 other females and twice as many cats as allowed by lease (like 6?) and their house is a mess and it is so nice that’s not my problem.
@kelsmom Thanks for sharing that about your son. It reminds me how sometimes the message is perceived differently than intended, and how important is it to keep lines of communication open. I’m talking with our girls tonight, reassure them door is always open…
I don’t know if we should even be calling it a launch plan. Maybe a “life plan” is better, that way if they don’t end up graduating from college, their fallback isn’t a couch in the basement.
I’m assuming both of our kids will go to and graduate from college, and then have jobs or graduate school lined up afterwards. This is the optimal track.
However, I think there also needs to be a track option that does not include graduating from college, but does include establishing themselves as independent adults. It’s certainly do-able (I did it, and went to school at night), but I really had a plan and was focused about it.
If kids just see college or failure, then it can be hard to visualize a life without a degree. I don’t think telling kids they can’t come home if they screw up college is a good way to make them do well at college. I just think it makes them hate life because everything becomes a burden and an obligation.
And the best advice I think I’ve ever given is that it’s MUCH easier to get a job when you HAVE a job. Any job. When I was hiring, if someone came in and had big gaps on their resume, I was really iffy about hiring them. If they’d been working at Starbucks for the last six months, I knew they were capable of hard work and weren’t going to be elitist about the job they were interviewing for. I definitely put those people in the “keep” stack.
I agree with thtat MotherofDragons. Both my kids held onto their menial jobs that they picked up in college moving to full time when they graduated and “working” those jobs while hunting for what we called the J-O-B. They went into their post graduate job hunting with a resume reflecting existing jobs since they were 16 and yes, both experienced interviews where the hiring manage spent part of the interview discussing previous jobs. Every job has a basic skill set that is applicable to a job with more responsibility. A first job is a first job whether it is a $10 per hour job or you are attempting to get a first job at $38,000 a year or whatever starting pay is for non-engineering jobs, it’s easier to find your second job and your third job etc. You are right the idea is not this or bust…the idea is to raise kids who are capable of being independent even if they need temporary support to make it all work…something Pizza is alluding to.
My kids had no interest in returning to suburbia without a car and no friends. One kid stayed with us for a few months after graduation. She worked as a gymnastics coach and kept applying for her jobs in her field. She got one fairly quickly and moved into an apartment with two friends. The other did a post-grad program