House Rules for Adult Children Living at Home

A Guide to Peaceful Cohabitation

What To Do When an Adult Child Moves Back Home

On another site I am a member of, the question was raised as to what rules should be established with an adult child who moves back into the home. There is still an underage child in the home, and the single parent has strong feelings about church attendance. 

I happened to be the first person to respond to the post. I noted in my reply that while I do not have adult children at this time, I have rented out rooms in my home to adults. I have also been in the situation, when I was married, of living with my former spouse's parents at their house, as an adult. Surprising to me was the number of other posts which came in after mine completely agreeing with all I said. They had all experienced the situation as an adult child living at home or as the parent of an adult child who moved back in. Their experiences and my own taught us all valuable lessons about how to keep the peace in the home and how to maintain healthy happy relationships with one another.

What Experience Taught Me

Whether they live under your roof or not, your adult children are just that: adults. They have the right to be treated as such, just as you have the right to expect them to act as such. Because they are adults, the rules you can appropriately have over their life and their conduct is significantly different from those you had while they were underage.

House Rules Versus Running-Their- Life Rules

This is where it gets tricky. Parents love their kids. They want the best for them. When they see their kids clearly making mistakes and bad choices, they immediately want to intervene. The key is to remember that they are adults now and they have the right to make the choices they make as well as face the consequences, good or bad, of those choices. This is when all those years of teaching them should be kicking in. We all learn through our mistakes, and we all continue to make mistakes as adults. Our adult children have the right to live as a mistake-making-consequence-facing human, just as we do. . .and as we are.