I do think that these days, the trend is going towards 20-29 year olds living at home until they’re married… so in a way, parents are getting a boomerang effect – they leave for univ/college, and then come back to nest until marriage. delayed failure to launch in my opinion..

I agree that 18 is a young age, but for some it may not be young at all if they can handle it emotionally and with maturity, but for my other friends even at 25, they are still not ready to be on their own.

I’m not saying that you have to support your kids as adults and ask no questions, but I am saying that family is about more than reproducing your genes. If you don’t think “I want my kids to have better lives than I did” then you shouldn’t bother.

There has to be a balance between spoon feeding them and giving them nothing (which in today’s world means they will start out with a load of debt).

But do you ever wonder when you should draw the line? Even if it’s family?

Husband and I have come to the conclusion that our parents (well, MINE really), have to learn in some way (we’d never let them become destitute or dead poor), to budget and handle their money responsibly like real adults.

It sounds quite unfair to you and your husband to have them help out your sis-in-law so much. This sounds like a classic “Millonaire Next Door” Outpatient syndrome…

However, they still bail his sister (28 years old) out to the tune of hundreds of pounds a month, even though they can’t afford it and are heading towards bankruptcy again.

And who will pick up the pieces when it all goes wrong again? That would be me and my husband. *sigh* I love them, but I wish they’d develop a Clue Gland or something.

When it came around to University, I never heard a peep out of my parents about it – I figured it out later that he probably lost it all in the stock market and/or gambling.

*sigh* That’s why I’m mad. They promised it to me all those years, then pretended they never did.

Although to be fair(ish), my siblings paid for University as well. (Never mind it was WAY cheaper than what *I* paid, and they sponged off my parents living at home for free). I ended up moving out early at 19 and going to a different University in a different city where my parents didn’t live, so I lost out in that sense. (sigh)…

But it’s all in the past now, I guess it’s made me a stronger person in the sense that I had to learn the value of hard work and money early on in my career and life, instead of later.