How to parent your grown-up kids
Of all the revelations in Tina Brown’s new book, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil (Meghan wanted out fast, the Queen tut-tuts at Charles’s spending sprees), the one that really got our attention – and for parents of grown-up children made for uncomfortable reading – was the one about bedroom reallocation.
Apparently, Harry was beyond incensed when Camilla decided to turn his bedroom at Highgrove into her dressing room.
Uh-oh. If you have grown-up children – as in ones who live independently in their own houses (admittedly, this is rarer for the boomerang generation, but it does still happen) – this is the moment when you break out in a cold sweat. Because the “what have you done to my bedroom?” cry is familiar to all of us.
It goes like this. After an appropriate period of time (three months) when you are as sure as can be that they’re not coming back for more than a weekend, you take back their bedroom. Of course you do.
It’s a spare room, plus cupboard space, waiting to go as soon as you box up all the traffic cones/old Rizla packets/18 hand cameras and unopened text books. Naturally, you will be removing the graffitied bedside table, painting the whole thing white and adding a WFH desk as soon as possible.
Similarly, you will be “rationalising” the downstairs shoes dump, clearing out the side return (“are you ever going to use this wheel-less bicycle? Let me know by Friday, or it’s going to the dump”). And in due course you may well knock the TV room into the kitchen since there’s no longer any need for a door to shut them in and contain the fug.
But all of this will be taken as a slight. In their minds what you are doing is no different from cutting the absent divorced parent out of the family photograph. It’s the same as scrubbing off the scribbled height chart on the kitchen wall (which you will also end up doing… everybody does). And that’s just the home improvements side of things.
Here is a short list of other things parents of adult children need to watch out for, if they want to avoid causing offence.
Putting the cat down. Do not attempt this without seeking a full family conference. You may need to get the vet on speakerphone, too.
Not asking them to the family event. They were always so bored by this sort of thing (second cousin’s wedding on a bank holiday weekend) so, naturally, you thought you were doing them a favour by excusing them, but no. Absence from the home makes the family gene grow stronger. Suddenly, they want to be ushers.
Not offering them the horrible old swirly green table. Couldn’t get rid of it at a car boot sale, and yet… In their minds you are throwing out their life.
Deciding to move, without permission. You aren’t emigrating, you’re downsizing to the flat round the corner, but you might as well be pulling a “canoe couple” manoeuvre as far as they’re concerned, if there is not full transparency and opinion seeking.
Not asking what they’re doing on their birthdays. Surely they’re busy, they have a girlfriend/boyfriend and they were in Greece last time we looked? Still. Always ask.
Not ringing them on their birthday. Just in case you were thinking they were too busy to talk. Just in case you tried twice and didn’t get through. Keep trying!
Not getting into paramedic gear when they are ill. So what if they’re pushing 30, they are absolutely relying on you to do the full “take this and this and cancel that and I’m bringing soup”.
Being busy the one Saturday when they thought they “might come over”. They’re not definitely coming over. They’re not coming over if something else comes up. But if you happen to have a plan then you might as well cut to the chase and roar: Look We Don’t Love You Anymore. Face it. It doesn’t get any easier.
This is when you break out in a cold sweat – the “what have you done to my bedroom?” cry