An ultra-popular adulting course? Sounds like a good business opportunity, app, or youtube channel.
When I think back on the people I’ve known growing up and becoming adults, the successful ones seemed to share some traits that made them similar even though they came from different families. I had a few friends who had very little direction from their parents because their parents were divorced or dead. One had a heavy interest in technology and became very well-adjusted because he was motivated to not live with his parents. The other had a broken, poverty-stricken family and the only way out was to work hard and have his own place. Other friends had parents who stayed married but seemed to be very involved in their kids lives. They weren’t helicopter parents, they were just good parents whose kids were able to talk to them about anything. I was always astounded how much, and how open, some of my friends talked with their parents.
None of my friends who successfully adulted lived with their parents past high school. They had roommates and lived in apartments. They worked and paid for their own cars. They also have the most successful marriages that I know among my friends. I’m the friend who took a lot longer to adult and I think it is partly because of my relationship to my parents. I talked to my parents, but it was usually superficial or I only tried to make them happy and proud and I was too afraid to open up to them about anything. They had me do things but they never offered help. More often than not, my mother would take care of all my paperwork. Because of that, it delayed my ability to read and take care of my own mail, bills, student loans, applications, insurance, taxes, etc. I struggled to develop a good filing system. It took until my mid-20s before I asked my mother how she cleaned the toilet. She had always taken care of it, and since I didn’t have the money to live on my own, I never needed to learn.
Parents do a disservice to their children when the kid doesn’t need to learn how to do something that adults normally have to do. If your kid wants to go to college but can’t figure out how to fill out an application, then it doesn’t help to print everything out and hold their hand through it all. Helping isn’t a bad thing, but it should be mentoring and coaching, not hand-holding. It’s better to let your kid miss a car payment and see their car repossessed than panic and pay their bill for them.
