My kids are still living at home in their 20s – how can I get them to move out?

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Two’s company – four’s a crowd when you’re ready for retirement and travelling the world but your children are still living at home and showing no signs of moving on. Photo / Getty Images
Annabel Rivkin and Emilie McMeekan advise readers who want to explore the world when they retire, but say they can’t while their children stay put instead of renting their own place.
Dear A&E,

My wife and I are excited to be making our retirement plans (including travelling around
America), which we hope to begin in the next year. However, my wife is hesitant to take the leap and explore the world while our children (aged 23 and 26) are still living in the family home, which we’d need to sell before our travels. Although they have stable jobs and could rent elsewhere, the kids are too comfortable and happy living here, and they’d rather stay and save as long as possible. I hate to say I’m growing impatient, but I’m ready for this next step. Should I postpone our plans or encourage them to move out?

– Grounded.
Dear Grounded,
It’s a gnarly one this, isn’t it? Because it’s about everything: it’s money, it’s roots, it’s security, it’s rejection, it’s value, it’s priorities. It’s a fondue of a problem: every time you dip into it, things emerge stickier and harder to detach. Your brilliant plans to travel the world feel like another agonising cutting of the cord. Your children are happy (isn’t that what all parents strive for?) and safe, and there you go – like the woodcutter in Hansel and Gretel – brutally sending them out to fend for themselves. Of course, you’re not dispatching them into the wild wood to be entrapped, but perhaps this is how you and your wife feel. And how you imagine your children will feel.
Children, including adult children, can be incredibly selfish when it comes to their parents; expecting them somehow only to exist when they walk in the room, while for the rest of the time they are just frozen in familial aspic. As though parents are the sound of one hand clapping until their children enter and animate them. Children, be they 15, 25, 35 or 55, will habitually revert to a very teenage attitude if their parents do something unexpected. They think, “How dare you inconvenience me? How dare you pretend that you have any right to a life or freedom?” It’s the programming. They have been hard-wired through 20-plus years of availability and it is very difficult to escape that default reflex; that “you are here to serve me” attitude. However, this will almost certainly only be a momentary reaction, caused by fear of being launched into the world, rather than the position your children will adopt for ever after.
This is, indeed, all very sensitive. The selling of the family home will bring up a whole host of emotions – for all of you, even you two, champing at the bit to spread your wings. Perhaps you could take a beat and congratulate yourself and your wife on creating a space, a family life your adult children are still embracing. Your house is still the most relaxed place for them, even as they nibble at the wider world. Many children can’t wait to escape oppressive, stuffy family environments, never to look back. We all recognise it is hard for young people these days, what with house prices, unscrupulous landlords, an inconsistent job market all concertina-ing up on them and their ambitions to flourish.
But – and this is a good but – that does not mean that you should be paralysed. Calcified. Grounded. It is still time for you to put your plans in action. Part of the anxiety for you all is that you are in that painful limbo: the waiting room of your plans. The longer you leave it – with your wife gazing at her offspring and you looking at the calendar – the less relaxing, the less safe this space is going to get. Annabel has a theory that “about to be” is the worst of all the states: Your children are “about to be” made homeless, you are “about to be” travelling the world, but until things have been set in motion, you are in an uncomfortable liminal existence.
What this situation is crying out for is clarity: a deadline, a boundary, an activation. Continue to make your plans. Make your children aware of your plans; communicate clearly and honestly with them. Tell them the house is going on the market and remind them it’s because you are going to travel the world, which is the fulfilment of a life-long dream. Give them some runway but set a deadline: This is not, “You must move out tomorrow”, but rather, “We love our time with you. We are going to find all sorts of wonderful ways to be together; to be cosy, to be adventurous in the future. By the way, please keep your rooms tidy because there are going to be viewings. You’ve always known that this was our plan and it’s still our plan.”
Sometimes plans with long tails are the hardest to put into motion because they have been in the ether for so long. It can feel as though they are merely dreams and will never happen. But your time is now, dear Grounded. If you martyr yourself to your children, you will miss the boat, literally and metaphorically, and that would be the death of a – perfectly attainable and even inspirational – dream. And when you are lying in bed at 4am, worrying that somehow this new selfishness feels wrong, or talking your wife down off the guilt cliff, remember that it is entirely better for grown-up children to have independent, active parents. This is, in fact, a wonderful opportunity for all of you. The most enriching moments are often the hardest but they do, in the end, profoundly deliver.
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