giving your 18yo kids a shove (long)

[Tiggeroo]

I have three college kids. The youngest are 18yo twins who will be sophs this year. One has goofed off all year and carried the minimum of courses. He is immature for his age/grade and seems sometimes to have no common sense about money and the way things will work if he goes out in the real world. He's been living at home going to CC. He lied to me about the course load he was taking because he went back and withdrew from two courses half way thru the semester. He is unhappy being in CC. It's just like hs. Well, yep it is but if you get thru you can go to a four year school.
He comes up with ideas but doesn't follow thru on them. He considered transferring to culinary school and decided no.l He was going to work with a family friend in re-habbing homes and real estate investment but no. Last week he told me he is absolutely certain he wants to go into the coast guard. Said it's the first time he's been excited about his future. But he wants to take the fall off from school and just work. Then he wants to spend a month in Costa Rica with some friends before departing in CG. Now it's been a week and he hasn't seen his recruiter yet.
I'm trying to decide what to do with him. He needs to get knocked around a bit before he'll appreciate college. I could give him 30 days and tell him to get his own place. I could charge him rent and let him stay here and just work a crappy job. I could say you can only stay here if you are in school, career type job, trade/internship, or military bound.
I want to be careful. He really doesn't have the skills/maturity to be completely on his own. No school/no health insurance. If I charge him rent I want it to be enough that he feels close to the real world pain of working a minimum wage job. My goal is to make him realize he needs to be preparing himself to be self-supporting. I want him to some day be able to have a normal home, life, family, etc, not flipping burgers at 40yo needing to work two jobs with grandkids collecting welfare. But I don't want to be having this conversation again in five years. I want to do something now serious enough to make his young life miserable but not enogh to push him into a bad decison where he will make things even worst.
BTW other then this he's a good kid. Always works, polite, doesn't push the curfew thing, has good friends.

 

[WatchinCaptKangaroo]

I don't think the go to school full time and not pay rent or work and pay rent situation is unreasonable. And for the rent you do charge (make it reasonable to what renting a room would cost) stash it away so he has some savings for when he moves out (if you can afford to do that). I don't recommend you charge your kids over half your mortgage and not save any of it (what my parents did).

The military may shape him up and give him the maturity and skills he needs. If he signs a contract I would support him in going to Costa Rica for a month before he leaves. If he doesn't then he can go (since he is an adult) but he will go without your help.

 

[minkydog]

Tigger, we are kinda in your shoes, too. We have a DS living in our basement about to turn 20. He messed around at CC this year and we refused to continue to pay, so he dropped out. At that point we required him to get a job with health benefits. He tried to find a fulltime job, but could not, so he has a parttime job at Blockbuster. ( The military is off limits to him due to history of depression.)

Now before you think let me say, this is the most excited I have ever seen him over a job. He is the high-selling salesman in the whole district. In fact, he is so enthusiastic, they are considering him for the manager track. They are offering him more hours, too. So DS is very motivated to work and has no desire to go to college.

Here is what we have decided to do: since it is clear to us that DS is maturing slowly and will need some help getting going, we have begun putting sticks in the nest. He is required to do housework, buy his own soda and junk food, do his own laundry and manage his bills. He has an 11:30pm curfew. Cannot keep the car out overnight. We plan to help him buy a car since he is clueless about that stuff. Then we plan to help him get into a small apartment, perhaps paying part of the rent for a few months until he gets on his feet. If he were in college, we would be paying for most of this stuff(room & board) so why not help him out? Especially if it benefits us as well

Personally, I wish my parents had helped me on this stuff. My mom threw me out when I was 20 with my clothes in a suitcase and I had no idea how to buy a car or get housing. I just lived with losers until I figured it out. It was a hard, depressing life and I don't think it benefitted me as much as my parents supposed it would. If in the future, DS wants to make another go at college, we would consider helping him finance that. But like your son, he's a good kid, has good character and a few learning disabilities, and is less mature than a lot of kids his age. It would be pretty traumatic for us all to just kick him to the curb.

 

[Tiggeroo]

Personally, I wish my parents had helped me on this stuff. My mom threw me out when I was 20 with my clothes in a suitcase and I had no idea how to buy a car or get housing. I just lived with losers until I figured it out. It was a hard, depressing life and I don't think it benefitted me as much as my parents supposed it would. If in the future, DS wants to make another go at college, we would consider helping him finance that. But like your son, he's a good kid, has good character and a few learning disabilities, and is less mature than a lot of kids his age. It would be pretty traumatic for us all to just kick him to the curb.

That's my worry about putting him out. He has alot of friends who will split a house with them. They're college students and they're parents don't mind paying their rent, car, etc. I'm not going to pay for him to live up the street and not go to school. Plus it will be easy for him to get into trouble. But he's a bright kid. In the classes he takes he has gotten all A's and B's. He's lazy about school work , doesn't like school and would like an easy way to a good job. I'm looking for a way to make not going to school seem painful but not to push him into a bad decision.

 

[WatchinCaptKangaroo]

It's a lot easier going to school when you don't have responsiblities then when you are working full time.

School + part time job = time to have fun

School + full time job = little time to have fun

Do timelines help him?

It may be helpful for him to see when he would be done with school. If he does xyz then he should be done around x date. Those 4 years can fly by.

 

[The Mystery Machine]

Since you have considerations of immaturity right now, I would charge him rent and put it into an account.
When he builds up enough $$$ then use it for his first apartment/roommate.

As far as college, well, I would require either fulltime work (40hrs), or fulltime school (at least 12hrs). I wouldn't care which one but that criteria will need to be met in order to continue to live at home and get the perks.

I know you want to push school on him but it seems he has some more maturing to do before he understands "why" he is going to school. You really need a goal.
At a CC he can get an associates, so if you want to push that would be the direction I might steer him.

 

[kellyg403]

Sounds alot like my 20 yo ds. Love him to death but geez, it seems he is always looking for the easy way to make a million

We did what another has posted and charged rent, he had to pay for the cable in his room etc. He went to 2 years of college only because I forced him to not because he wanted to. He definitely did not do great. His grandmother (btw..not the mother I grew up with but now HIS grandmother) said I was being too hard on him.

I will say in all honesty he has had the same job since 16 and is doing fine. Went fulltime and I know there is nothing wrong with good simple hard work. My expectations of him were what I really was dealing with. Now, he is living on his own and I will say doing great. Believe it or not he hasn't asked for a single penny since he did. We saved the rent we charged him and gave him to him on moving day. So, he had a little in the bank when the time came. 2 months ago, he bought his first car...ALL ON HIS OWN.

I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes we see our children as not living up to the potential we know they have but what we don't see is that our goals for them might not be the same. Some people have to get it on their own. Start charging rent..he doesn't need to know you are saving it for him.

Kelly

 

[barkley]

any kid whose lucky enough to have parents that let them live rent free (at home or in a dorm), provide for all their needs as well pay for their education likely has no clue about the realities of what it costs their parents-let alone how much more it would cost them to do it on their own. they also likely tend to go off with half-cocked ideas on different career paths because they have the leisure of no timelines by which things need to be accomplished (big difference in deciding to take off a semester to fund a fun trip with freinds if you're bankrolling your own way and the student loans will begin to be payable because of that break in attendance, you pay for housing that you're still paying while you're on vacation, have to maintain your car payments, insurance and the like on top of losing your eligibility to health care coverage).

i can see helping a kid but i think parent's are tending to 'overhelp'-they want their kids to go right into well paying jobs and never suffer the hardships of working minimum wage and barely scraping by. better i think, to let a kid see the realities of what they will be facing without the benefit of what it's taken their parent's decades to achieve. while some college programs are'nt structured to realy allow for full time work-anyone who is taking the minimum amount of units can realisticly work either full or part time (no night jobs available-take a day job and attend evenings, the bulk of the students in attendance at community colleges are working adults now). as far as charging rent to a kid and then setting it aside to get their first place-nice idea, but what does it teach them? that mom and dad will still be there to help them with the things they've failed to budget for. better i think to set a resonable amount for rent (and be realistic to what the going rate is-you're not doing them a favor to let them think that they will get room, board, laundry service, shopping service, all the cable channels, utilties.....at 25% of what they would be putting out commercialy), mandate a set percentage of pay to savings (they're adults and they say you can't force them to-it cuts into their 'fun money'-fine they can find a commercial landlord who will likely charge them much more for much less-plus require first, last and security-with no home cooked meals or mom tossing a load into the washer/dryer for them).

i'm all for supporting someone (student or not) who is working towards a goal-or at least making a concerted effort to set one, but frankly i feel one of my jobs as a parent is to motivate-and if that requires letting them be motivated by experiencing some self induced hardships along the way it may be the path they have to travel.

i have some rather strong feelings on this issue-i am one of 4 siblings, 3 of us with emotional/some financial help from our parents worked our way through life and are functional and self sustaining. one opted to go for the fun/easy way out (higher education-waste of good fun times, job with benefits-why? more money out of my paycheck, pay my bills-why?if the creditors hassle too much mom and dad will pony it up, besides i don't own anything the creditors can take-parents never charged rent to/always were the safety net financialy-and now at over age 50 has always lived for the day-he's never matured beyond his teen attitudes. so my sibs and i are faced with an 80 plus year old mom who spends her final days worrying about who will take care of him when she's gone

 

[minkydog]

Sounds alot like my 20 yo ds. Love him to death but geez, it seems he is always looking for the easy way to make a million

I will say in all honesty he has had the same job since 16 and is doing fine. Went fulltime and I know there is nothing wrong with good simple hard work. My expectations of him were what I really was dealing with. Now, he is living on his own and I will say doing great. Believe it or not he hasn't asked for a single penny since he did. We saved the rent we charged him and gave him to him on moving day. So, he had a little in the bank when the time came. 2 months ago, he bought his first car...ALL ON HIS OWN.

I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes we see our children as not living up to the potential we know they have but what we don't see is that our goals for them might not be the same. Some people have to get it on their own.
Kelly

Congrats to your son He has arrived!

What you say is true--our goals may not be their goals. We have to face the fact that this younger generation has a different take on what's important in life, just like we did. Our kids *know* they need college because adults told them they do, but often that doesn't jibe with their own goals.

When I was growing up, my goal was to be fully independent so I never had to rely on my parents for anything else, ever again. I figured out real fast that college was my ticket to freedom. My brother, however, hated school. He also wanted freedom, but he chose to enter the workforce as a mechanic and work his way up. He has never gone to college, but he makes more than I do because he is now a Master Technician on some of the swankiest boats on the East coast.

My brother gives me hope for my own son.