Member-only story
Parenting Isn’t an 18-Year Forced Contract
It is, in fact, a lifetime of voluntary service
I am not active on Quora, but the Google search to a lot of life’s questions does lead you to Quora because the best answer apparently sits there.
As a result of that, I get a daily Quora feed of questions that “may be of interest to me” even though they’re mostly just clickbaity things.
Yet, this one question that popped up on my feed intrigued me — because I was sure I’d be as outraged by the responses to it as I was by the question itself.
Here is the question:
My 20-year-old daughter wants to move in with us until she is finished with college. She says she will pay the bills but she is a grown adult. How do I tell her that adults leave the nest?
I was quite certain that the responses would be all about how the daughter should realize that she needs to be on her own and how the parent asking the question was absolutely right in their stance. That’s somehow the perception I’ve gotten of the typical “popular” responses on most social media platforms.
We’re all about ferocious independence and individual rights — and we dislike the idea of inter-dependence and the beauty of families and communities.
