Dear Richard Madeley: We love having our daughter back home but worry she is stagnating
Dear Richard
Last summer our daughter came back to live with us after uni. We missed her very much and have loved having her around again. She is doing part-time bar work and seeing her old friends, many of whom are still living at home or have come back there – it seems to be the new normal, with housing being so expensive.
On a purely selfish level, we are happy for this to continue as long as she wants. But we live in a small and sleepy town where graduate-level jobs are rare to non-existent. We know she has applied for jobs and we infer that she was unsuccessful, but when we’ve talked about it she has not been very forthcoming and we didn’t want her to feel under any pressure to leave. But we don’t want her to stagnate. Should we be doing something to make the prospect of moving forward with her life more appealing?
— A and G, Shropshire
Dear A and G
These are real conundrums, aren’t they? We want our children to strike out on their own, but we relish their company. We want them to be happy, but we know that may require them to set out on difficult paths – so we almost conspire with them to put off those hard decisions. And then we feel we’re being irresponsible, even selfish.
Having said that, I think you may be jumping the gun here. Your daughter is barely a year out of uni. What is she – 22, 23? There’s plenty of time for her to chart a course and embark on a career. And as you note, most of her friends are in the same boat: living at home, taking their time to choose what to do next, enjoying being with family and friends. It’s the new normal, as you say.
So I’d go with the flow, at least for a while longer. Savour these post-salad days with your newly grown-up daughter. Yes, the housing shortage means that more young people like her have little choice but to live with their parents for longer than previous generations. But every cloud, eh?
