Dear Tell All: My daughter is home from her freshman year of college, and it’s a disaster. She was always a sweet kid, and still is at heart, I think. But my wife and I are stunned by her insensitive behavior.
We’re always had formal Rules of the House, and she’s always respected them, all the way through her senior year of high school. In just the last two weeks, however, she’s broken at least half of the rules. She stays out late and doesn’t tell us when she’s coming home. She has friends over after my wife and I go to bed, making a lot of noise and leaving a mess for us to clean up the next day.
Last weekend, in the middle of the night, I saw that she still wasn’t home. So I taped a copy of the Rules of the House to her bedroom door. The next morning, I found her door closed and the paper ripped off. Later in the day, I noticed it crumpled in her wastebasket.
This is not the girl I remember from previous summers, when we’d spend happy family time at Michael’s Frozen Custard or the Arboretum. With this 19-year-old hellcat under our roof, is there any way to salvage summer 2016?
Sad Dad
Dear Sad Dad: There’s a solution here, but you probably won’t like it. It involves letting your daughter grow up.
Now that she’s 19, and has spent almost a year living on her own, she understandably wants more control over her life. Sorry, Sad Dad, but the old Rules of the House don’t apply anymore. If you can’t see the need for flexibility here, it’s time to retake Parenting 101.
That said, your daughter needs to be part of this solution too. If you respect her need to make decisions for herself, she should respect your need to keep order in the household. Rather than taping a set of rules to her door, communicate your point of view face-to-face, then give her a chance to communicate hers.
It’s best to have this conversation in a neutral zone, away from your fraught living space. How about doing it at Michael’s Frozen Custard, for old times’ sake? A spoonful of hot fudge might bring out your daughter’s sweet side again.
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