Six tips for managing sharing housing when parents and adult children choose to live together came from an article that was on the web but is not longer. The tips are for parent/children combinations that could be either seniors who are moving in with their children or adult children moving in with their parents. Likely there are children involved.
The six tips are:
- Talk about it before you do it
- Appreciate that individuals need privacy and plan how they will get it
- Talk about tasks and finances and how they will be divided up
- Respect individual needs
- Have regular family meetings to talk about how it’s working
- Be flexible. Negotiate and compromise.
All these tips are to help adults balance the forces of power and control, responsibility and dependence that are so strong between parents and children. And they are pretty much the same as the recommendation in the book “Sharing Housing, A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates” for living with strangers.
Of course families are a bit more complicated. But still if you approach the arrangement thoughtfully you can do very well.
What’s missing is a discussion of love. You do it because you love each other and you want to help each other out. Love is an elusive, intangible but important lubrication.
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