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I really have already stated my dilemma as is in the topic title.

When does a technically adult child get thrown out of the house? What do they finally need to do to cross the line?

I just had the police over here. This is maybe the fourth time in the past two years that I have had to resort to this tactic.

I have a nineteen year old who refuses, absolutely refuses to abide by some very simple house rules. (Take care of your own clothes, take care of your own cat, do not steal things in the house, no boyfriends spend the night, respect others. Clean up your own mess, and stop clogging up all the drains by such stupid things as rinsing hair from brushes and combs down the sink, cleaning out a cat litter box in the sink, throwing leftover food down a drain without using a garbage disposal, which we have, etc.)

Said child also is seeing a 24 year old pathetic wannabe who absolutely refuses to abide by same house rules, in fact, this person has already been barred from my house before for their own antics. Both child and "friend" have also threatened the grandparents when they have been asked to intervene.

I have talked to the police, I have talked to the county, and all they can tell me is to throw this child out the door and then call them if same child causes problems with me or my property.

It sounds harsh, but, this is the point that I have gotten to. When one is woken up at 11:30 p.m. by an adult child spraying your face with Windex cleaner because the curtains were taken out of child's room and washed, and then told that I was violating their privacy and that I had also stolen things from said child's closet, I have just had enough. (I have taken nothing from the room, except the filthy curtains.)

This child works at a pretty good job, pays zilch for room or board, and has flaunted everything into my face for the past five years.

So, I am kicking the brat out. Please let me know if I am out of line here. I am so pissed off right now that I may even go and get a restraining order against both of them. (Child and adult idiot "other".) It is also now 2:00 a.m. here, and I will get no sleep any longer. So, maybe I am a bit hot under the collar right now, but what would all of you do, especially those that are younger and might argue the other side?

I am not an irrational person, but I am at my wit's end. And, do not suggest talking, it does not work, this child has zero respect for my stance on anything, and the father of said child will not do anything, this is not his residence, and he also is in no position to take this child in himself.

Edit to add, when "child and idiot friend" heard me on the phone with the police, they left before the police arrived. So, all I was able to do was to make a record of the incident, no charges can be filed.

My father threw my half-sister out of the house at 14 for similar reasons to you. She didn’t take any massive ill-effect, although she turned out to be a not particularly effective parent (given that her only child killed himself last year).

Personally, I have often wonder how you cope as a single parent of teenage children, Watcher. I really couldn’t imagine anything harder. It makes me sad to hear things like that but I can’t think of an alternative.

I might comment more later, but I have to go.

Oh Beth I don't know what to say. I can't imagine how tough this must be for you, since I don't have children, and remember being a "troubled" teen myself (but I hope I wasn't as offensive as your child!).

I think throwing them out of the house is the right thing to do. At the very least, it will be a sobering wake-up call for them. After all, they have a good job and someone they can stay over at, so you're not forcing them to sleep rough or anything like that. It may make them reconsider and change their attitude. I hope. If not - well - sometimes you have to be selfish and it does sound like they were making your life hell...

If the police have suggested doing that, at least you know that you have the law on your side. That doesn't help with your feelings, though. I can imagine that you're feeling used, abused... at the very least What I can't begin to comprehend (even if I try to imagine it) is how betrayed you must feel, that your own child is behaving like this.

I was an only child and lived alone with my mum, another only child, for nearly 20 years. It was hell for both of us. Our relationship only improved when I moved to the UK and put a couple thousand miles between us. We still bicker, but it was only when I had a place of my own, that I could appreciate her as a fellow adult human being, and begin to understand and respect her. When we lived together, I was an adult trying to reassert my independence, which is very hard to do when you're not earning money and living under your parent's roof. However, your child has the means to survive, so you're only pushing them out of the nest. Hopefully, they will eventually understand that it was the best, probably the only solution left to you.

my friend.

The Watcher, I'm sorry for your situation. My kids are not at that stage and I myself was not a rebel child (although my mother did 'lock me out' of the house for a week because she felt I was not coming home early enough for her comfort when I was also about 19) so my advice is probably not worth much.

But still, here is my view:

You are entitled to being treated civilly in your own house - as is anyone else who is part of the household. If one member of the household ie your daughter is unwilling to extend that right to you, then you are entitled to ask her to leave.

However, I think it is important, even at the age of 19, to make it clear to her that you are not cutting off all ties. You don't want to see the back of her, you just want a civil household. If you can somehow make that clear to her, that you will stick firmly to this request that she treats you with the respect deserved by anyone, it allows her a way back - assuming that she will at some point see the light.

Maybe do it in the form of a letter if you feel that talking with her will be unproductive. It is important that you tell her in some form, clearly, that you do still love her, that the issue is mutual respect and civility - even if she doesn't listen, even if she is not receptive now, if you can state it clearly somehow.

Certainly you are at the end of your rope. I am sure that your desire is to have a civil, adult relationship with her. If you leave her some way to come back, it is very likely that with maturity and experience she will find her way back.

I am very sorry this is happening to you.

EDIT typo that change the meaning of a sentence.

If I may ask, Watcher, what personality type is your daughter?

I’ve thought about this a bit more, and I don’t see a reason why your actions are at all wrong. At 19, she’s old enough to support herself and is legally and adult. The issue seems, to me, to be not so much that she is making bad choices but she is making your life hell. As such, removing her from your house seems the best option. There doesn’t seem to be anything else that you can do for her; she’ll learn about not putting food down the sink when she’s unblocking the drain at her $50/week two-room apartment faster than she will from your instruction.

I’m a very good child BTW .

Watcher,

You're doing the right thing by forcing her to grow up and live like the adult she is. If I can offer one small criticism, it's that you didn't start this early enough. As soon as your daughter was old enough to work and earn a full time wage she should have been paying room and board. We never appreciate what comes too easy. It would have been good training for her. I would also add that if she does decide to come back and toe the line, that you should insist on housekeeping money and an agreement that either she keeps her room to an acceptable standard or accepts that you will intervene.

Lay down the house rules and let her either live by them or leave, but make sure you make it clear that the offer will remain open until she is willing to accept it.

I don't do the huggy thing, so I'll just nod respectfully!.

Alatar

Watcher, you are perfectly justified in protecting yourself from your daughter's abuse. Kicking her out after all this is not arbitrary or malicious. You are taking action against her behaviors -- which you hope she will gain the maturity to change -- not against the daughter you still love.

Sometimes it takes something this drastic for a child to wake up to how her actions affect others. Since that is something we all have to learn sooner or later, you're doing her a favor.

edited to add: I'm closer to your perspective in age and situation. My son is 15. Feel free to remind me how obvious I thought this all was in a few years!

Ditto what everyone else said. This is not simply a question of "tough love." You are being abused by your daughter, who is an adult.

My rule here is that if you live here, you are either in school, working, or both. And if you work full time, you pay rent. My oldest son moved out (on good terms) when he was given that choice after high school. It seems like you have allowed your daughter to take advantage of you and now is the time to stop it.

If it is possible to talk to her rationally about it, great. If you think you can write a letter that she will read, that's good too. But the main thing is to get her out. Now. If this has been going on for more than five years, it is high time to stop it cold.

You have nothing to feel guilty about. Nothing.

I agree with what everyone else has said (I'm a mother of teenagers, too). You are doing your daughter an important favor, and taking proper care of yourself as well.

Your daughter may not see the sense of it for a long time, if ever, but she'll still be better off--and whatever chance you and she have for a calmer relationship, this seems to be the only path to it.

While she is at home she will take the role of a child. This is not good training for the rest of her life. To grow up she needs to be responsible for herself. If you feel guilty just think of the years that you tolerated the situation. But it needs to change.

Beth, I'm so sorry to hear this. Its obviously difficult to make a judgment based on just the facts that you were able to express here, but it seems to me that you are doing the right thing for both yourself and your daughter. You need to preserve your only sanity or you will be no good to anyone. And your daughter needs to learn to sink or swim on her home.

That doesn't make it any easier, though.

I'm not a parent, but I am an adult child, and I don't think you acted inappropriately at all. In fact, I'd recommend changing the locks and setting some conditions for when she can come back in. The apron strings need to be cut at some time, and at 19 she's a legal adult and you have no further obligations to her. Some people just need a good hard wake-up call before they grow up.

I kicked myself out to go to college, and then got officially knocked out of the nest when I started grad school. It was a pretty amicable split - my parents helped me find an apartment in Boulder, they sent a whole lot of furniture and other things that were cluttering up their house but necessary for me (dishes, a rug or two, my old photo albums, some pictures for the walls, bedding, flatware, etc.). I wasn't too happy living at home that summer anyways. Living independently is kind of addictive.

Ricerthalos, kicking oneself out is the way to go - I know some parents who tried to keep their children as long as possible, to no good effect. My parents tried to keep me, too, but it was always clear that sometimes sooner or later I would have to go. It was sooner.

When I was younger, a neighbour had two kids who were just a year apart - both weren't the sunshine kids you'd see in the ads, but intelligent, adventurous, and normal in every other aspects. While their daughter more or less without effort went to college and turned, after experimenting with drugs, different friends, music and all, to a somewhat conservative mum, her brother didn't take the curve while experimenting with drugs and strange friends. He dropped out and was barely saved from a junkie's death. Eventually, he became clean and responsible again, but their parents wondered and wondered what they made right with the one and wrong with the other.

Imho, they made nothing wrong with one or the other - it is within a young person's responsibility to do what they should do, but to suffer the consequences. My neighbours kicked thir son out, too, but when he came close to death they were there for him. Not to take him in again and let his whims dominate their lifes, but to seek a rehab facility and bring him into contact with social workers who put him back on the tracks.

Any adult who sprayed Windex in my sleeping face because I washed their curtains for them would no longer be welcome in my home.

Wow.

I wonder if she isn't trying to make it so horrible that you WILL kick her out? If she really kind of wants to go, somewhere inside, but doesn't have the strength somehow to sever that bond on her own?


My heart goes out to you, Watcher. What a wrenching experience!

You'd be doing the right thing Watcher. As others said, you should not feel guilty. You've been trying to make things better for years and your daughter hasn't done her part.

I not that much older than your daughter so I don't have an experience with this kind of thing...though I have observed it. It's been happening with a cousin of mine. She did move out for a while, but her parents were still helping her pay rent and her college tuition. In the meantime she became a heavy marijuana user. Still they kept bailing her out when she got into trouble, quite literally once when she was arrested for her drug use. Now she's moved back home and is still taking advantage of them. As much as I love her, I think she really needs to be totally cut off and forced to survive on her own. Her parents are only enabling (sp?) her bad habit. Sometimes it takes failing miserably to realize what you need to be doing right.

Lord_M had a good point: she'll learn really quickly not to clog up sinks whenever she's responsible for getting them unclogged and having to pay for it.

Hugs for you in this tough time. Just stay strong and realize you are doing the right thing.

I am not going to offer any advice to you, because each specific situation is different. I have no way of knowing what the whole story is and I can't in good faith offer you any solution.
I can offer my support and my empathy. I have 4 kids, 3 of which are teens. I know how difficult things can be.
Whatever you do, protect yourself. Try to work things out, but protect you in the meantime.

Kick her out NOW! Change the locks, install an alarm system. If she's spraying noxious chemicals in your face, you cannot trust her. There's no telling when she'll get mad again and do you some real harm.

Domestic violence is no joke. Aren't most murders committed by family members?

If I recall right, your daughter is an ESFP like my youngest, and they just don't have an instinct for moderation. Emotions are overwhelming and dramatic and have to be reacted to extravagently. If you let such a one stay in your house with such feelings of animosity and rebellion, you are putting her at risk of losing her temper and doing something that will get her put in jail for years.

It is in her best interests to be put OUT of that situation, and it goes without saying that you are better off with her gone.

Windex in the eyes! That's just horrible. Horrible. Unacceptable and over the top, and you can't risk whatever the next escalation will be!

She'll be better off on her own. You'll be better off with her on her own. And I'm sure that deep down in her heart, she will be relieved to be free of the temptation to abuse you.

Please don't let it go any further. You've done your best, she's made it through childhood and is now an adult and should be in charge of her own life from now on.

She'll be BETTER OFF if you kick her out, than if you let her stay. Please don't let her talk you out of it.

Watcher,

I too am very sorry that you are going through this. Quite a few of us have probably been through similar (if not comparable) situations, either as parent or as child.

The thing is, if your daughter has reached the age of 19 and the respect problem is of this magnitude, there is no one action that will repair the damage.

Presumably you are concerned that if you throw her out of the house she will move in with 24 yr old wannabe and end up ruining her life, and you would like to avoid that scenario.

I can't really give advice about what to do, but perhaps advice about what questions to ask yourself ...

First of all, I think you need to find a way to stand far enough back from the current crisis to ask yourself what kind of relationship you want to have with your daughter, if it were possible to achieve what you want. It's impossible to choose a path when you don't know where you're trying to go.

Part of that is deciding how much you yourself can tolerate at this point ... how much additional work you're willing to put into the relationship. Sometimes the work required to save a relationship takes more energy than the people who are in it have left. And then, you know, we lose the relationship and part of our dream dies with it, and there is grief that comes with that. But you can't destroy yourself for the sake of another person - you will lose both her and yourself if you try to do that.

There are emblems of adulthood and adult relationships, and one of them is certainly taking one's share of responsibility. That means paying rent, doing one's own wash, etc. So I certainly think it is reasonable to ask these things of your daughter, and make your provision of lodging contingent upon them.

But it sounds to me as if her refusal to abide by simple rules is symptomatic of a larger problem, and when there is a broken marriage involved and a father who is unaccountable, the psychological background to these sorts of symbolic behavior can be very complicated. Her attitude probably is not that Mom should do the laundry as long as Mom is alive, but rather that Mom is going to do the laundry until daughter gets recognition for some other burden that is as yet unspoken.

She's making a mess in the house that you will have to clean up because there's some other invisible mess that needs cleaning and isn't being talked about. This is pop psych, of course ... but ... I went through a not-dissimilar situation with my oldest daughter - in the part of the problem that looked like yours it was her father who was the target ... but the principle was sort of the same ... she entered an abusive relationship in an attempt to get her father to own up to the fact that he had abused her, and she was over at his house with her boyfriend all the time, egging her boyfriend to verbally attack her father and they would come almost to physical blows, and then she would leave with the boyfriend and he would take out his anger on her, and then she would come to me and want me to convey this information to her father and somehow get him to accept blame for it ... which was impossible of course. It was a terrible year, and we got through it, but helping my daughter find a better way of dealing with her abusive father was my "job" for that year and there were times when I thought my daughter would end up in a mental institution. It was really terrible.

Anyway, the point is, sometimes behaviors are not about what they appear to be, and it takes an enormous amount of persistence to keep communicating until you get to the bottom of the issue. To do that, you have to have a very clear picture in your own mind of where you want to end up ... what the relationship should look like when it is healed. And that objective has to be realistic. People don't get over major problems in a day or a week.

And, speaking of adult children who still need help ... ... I just got a call from daughter #2 about something she needs help with ... but I'll come back to the thread later.

Jn

Well, I think we can all go home now.

Jn has brought her usual thoughtful perspective to this issue, and said it better than nearly anyone else could have ...

But ... of course there is more to say ...

The spraying of windex in your face is abominable, Watcher, and it is clear that you the reasonable one in this scenario, and deserve a lot of sympathy. Having said that, I can sort of understand the perspective of your daughter. (Sort of --- thankfully I was never in a situation near this bad at all.) It's really not a proper or reasonable perspective --- I'm not saying that --- but it is a rather common one.

Of course you have a right to go in and clean those dirty curtains --- it is your house, and she's not paying any kind of rent or anything. But I really can see this from the perpective of your daughter, how it does feel like an invasion of privacy, how it mentally seems almost as if you had rooted around in her closet, ferreted through her things. If I was in her position, back at that age in that situation, I know what I would be thinking: "Those are my damn curtains, and if I want them dirty they stay dirty. Don't interfere! How dare you just come in and take them away!"

"Don't interfere" is a big one, I think, and it can get pretty irrational. A number of years ago I let my registration on my car lapse a bit, because I hadn't gotten the smog test yet, and my father noticed that my license plate tag was out of date, and he sort of bugged me about it two or three times, but I just blew him off. But then he told my mother about this (they are divorced) thinking maybe she could talk some sense into me or something about it. When I found out that he had told her this, I just lost it, in a way. From my perspective he was meddling in my life, telling stories about me to other people, and I just wasn't going to have it. A bit irrational, yes. But very real, and a fairly common sort of reaction, I think. I didn't speak to him for a few months afterward, and there were buried psychological issues underneath this, I think, and since then things have been a lot better, and I wouldn't react the same exactly if this happened again, though the issue of parental interference is still a tender spot for me.

I lived with my mother for a year about six years ago, I guess, and I wanted to pay rent, and she refused, and I honestly think it would have been a lot better if I had, though things were never even close to as bad as you are describing here. I think you are well within your rights to kick her out, and this would be very very understandable, but I think trying to make one last attempt to keep her in the house under a rent scenario to keep communication going is worth trying. While she is living there for free, she is at once dependent on you and also desperate to assert her own independence, which is a very combustible situation.

Faramond

TheWatcher. Beth. My heart aches for you.

You did the right thing. YOU DID THE RIGHT THING.

I can't believe this. I came in here to my office to sit at the computer and tell my sad tale about an adult child and I find this. You did the right thing.

Maybe by doing the right thing NOW, you have saved yourself some of the agony I am enduring at this very minute.

I, on the other hand, just did the wrong thing. And I'm already sorry, but I have no way to undo it.

My oldest son, aged 39, is a meth and crack addict. He has been in jail for 6 weeks, for the second time in less than a year. He has not been sentenced to jail, but is awaiting trial on some serious fraud charges. Since he missed a court hearing, there was a warrant for his arrest, he was picked up, and held. He made the cash bail but needed someone to sign a "surety bond". He has a trial date in October, and the truth is that even when he is found guilty he has served so much "dead time" that he will probably get no more jail time.

We have his children. Today he signed them absolutely over to us, completely, keeping no legal interest in them whatsoever. He also signed over to us $150,000 representing the equity in his house, which he lost to foreclosure last year. We were applying to the court for both the children and the money, but he signed voluntarily and saved everyone the misery of a trial. We wanted the money set safely aside, with the income going to us for child support and so that IF he ever really gets straight he can use part of it as down payment on another house. The rest is going into a fund for the boys' education.

And I agreed to sign the surety bond so he could get out of jail. This was wrong of me, but I just agreed to do it. It's true that if he doesn't stay straight I can revoke the bond and a warrant for his arrest will be issued immediately, but I still shouldn't have said I would sign the bond.

I didn't feel right refusing to sign the bond and I don't feel right having agreed.

So there you are. He's going to be 40 years old in November. He has lost everything he ever had, because of meth, and now he has given away his children. We had legal custody before, but now we are actually their legal guardians, and he has no rights in them at all.

I am not hopeful that he will stay straight. I can scarcely describe the pain of this. I was going to post this last night, asking for advice, but I didn't really need the advice. I knew what was RIGHT but I knew what I really wanted to do, which was to sign the stupid bond if he signed the papers.

I won't hesitate to revoke it, should he start using. I guess that's one thing.

TheWatcher. I've been where you are, more or less. You can't NOT do this. Letting her stay at home is ENABLING her. Don't do it any more.

Much love from vison.