We’re all in it now! Read on to get help on living at home with parents while studying from home/ doing online college without losing your adulthood or anyone losing their minds. 

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Covid has sent almost all of us college students home, which is a privilege and boon for some and a terror for others. While I can’t help with most of the reasons you’re uncomfortable at home, I can help with one thing: keeping a good relationship with a (basically) sane/ emotionally balanced parent. 

Now, I’m not perfect. When I got home,  I fell into my old bad habits of basically just focusing on myself. I forgot that I live with other people and I need to do my part to keep the home livable. 

After a few close calls, I have figured out how to not only refrain from leeching off of my mother’s graciousness, but also how to maintain my adulthood and continue to grow.

** Rules for College Students Living at Home (During Online School or Otherwise**

The Basics: Setting Expectations and Boundaries with Your Parents

Setting expectations and boundaries with your parents is honestly the best way to solve most of the problems created by living with your parents as an adult. The dynamic has changed. They have different expectations from you and you have different expectations for your freedom.

Some of the things you can consider discussing are:

• Curfew 
• Purchasing expectations (what you’ll pay for and what, if anything, they’ll pay for),
• If rent is expected
• Whether or not they can enter your room whenever they want
• Expectations for how much work you need to do around the house 

And etc..

Here’s a great guide for what to bring up when trying to set boundaries ad expectations with your parents

For People Who Can’t Set Boundaries and Expectations (or Just Don’t Want the Confrontation)

So, not everyone can, or are willing to, sit with their parents and set boundaries. Sometimes explicit or semi-confrontational conversations with parents can’t be had peacefully. 

In other cases, your parents have generally had the same chore expectations for years and expect you to know them, despite your inconsistent adherence, sometimes you just don’t need to have these conversations. 

Further, you may already have a feeling for what they are from trial and error. For example,: 

• Your room is your mom’s room (because she owns the house) and the only reason you have privacy is because she’s too busy to be in there
• The house has to be silent by 8 (or whenever your parents go to sleep) 
• You are the one who’d better be taking the dog out
• If you buy groceries that the whole family can’t use, you’d better pay for it yourself

And an assortment of other things you may know intuitively.

Not to worry! You don’t have to have a conversation right now if you don’t want to.

The following rules are for when you know the rules and need help adhering to them OR you’re trying to figure out the rules and how to keep the peace.

Note: If you can’t read minds or don’t know your parents very well, you may still have to eventually have these conversations. You may just be pushing off the inevitable.

Level 1:  Keeping the Peace and Not Being Terrible: Cleaning 

In my experience, nothing invokes parental rage quite like not carrying your weight around the house. Specifically, through not doing any chores.

Here are a few tips on how to pull your weight:

Clean Up After Yourself 

Clean up after yourself, if not in your room, then absolutely in public spaces. Wash your dishes. Pick up things you drop. In general, be aware of the chaos you wreak, as well as the fact that you don’t have a maid to pick up after you.

(Unless, of course, you do have a maid. In which case, why are you here? Skip to the other sections.) 

Help With the General Functioning of the House.

Move beyond just your messes and seek to help with messes that belong to the house as a whole. 

Load and empty the dishwasher. Check the mail. Take out the trash. You don’t have to do all of these things. 

Pick a couple chores and be consistent. It really doesn’t count if you’re not reliable.

Pick a Task that Would Really Make a Difference to Your Parents and Make that Your Project

This is a bit extra, depending on the needs of your family. If your parents need a lot of help, this is something you should absolutely do. If your parents don’t need much help, this would mostly be endearing. Helpful absolutely, but mostly endearing. So, if you’re strapped for time, you can do this with less urgency or not at all.

There’s always a huge project around the house that needs to be done. Whether it’s replanting someone’s favorite flowers, organizing file cabinets, unpacking boxes, or decluttering the garage, there are big projects that are hard to get around to and really just hard to do in general. 

Sometimes this task is even clearing out your room to make it easier for your parents to repurpose it when you leave. (If moving out is in the cards, depending on your family’s reliance on you, or even the economy).

So, look around the house, listen to your parents’ complaints, and from that decide what would be the most helpful thing you could do for them. Then break it down into manageable tasks and make a bit of progress every day (or at least four days a week). 

Try to have it done at the latest before you leave. For example, if you are home for the summer, but also doing online school at home, then get it done before classes start. 

This will really make a difference in your parent’s peace of mind.

Level 2: Getting Your Parents to Take You Seriously (And Let You Work and Live): Routine and Looking Put Together 

It’s hard to not become a child when you live at home. The social cues of your parents’ house  so very strongly suggest a certain set of behaviors. 

And even if you  resist these cues and you do all the things to hint at the idea that you may be an adult, your parents have been seeing a child for the past 18+ years. They’re not going to stop now.. 

Here are a few things you can do to establish yourself as an adult in not only you parents’ minds, but in your mind as well. Having others take you seriously begins with you taking yourself seriously.

Create a Daily or Weekly Routine

Not having a plan for your day is one of the things that will leave you open to interrogation, Or, even worse, someone assigning your whole day to something that has nothing to do with your goals (read: cleaning).

You don’t have to have a super specific, time blocked routine (though you can if you want). But you should know what you want to do with your day and have a semi-regular method of getting through it.

At the very least have a list of things you would like to get done regularly and a main driver for each day (even if that main driver is napping).

This consistent routine would also be helpful in building a wall around your rest days. If you’re planning on resting for most of the day and you’re not ill, ideally you’ll clean up a bit around the house or have a backlog of busy days to point to before you disappear into your blankets.

The most important thing you can get out of having a routine, however, is intentionally creating your own life. The external pressure of feeling like you need to look like a person with goals may force you to examine your goals. 

There is of course graduating, but what else do you want to do with your time? This forced goal setting will help you examine that.

This reflection may force you to take your time and ambitions more seriously. Further, this constant attempt at consistency will help you build the mental habit of getting in the mindset of productivity, increasing the likelihood that you get anything done.

Dress Like an Adult (or at Least Like You Have Plans for the Day)

Even if your appearance isn’t something you and your parents fight about, if you are laying around in pajamas, or frumpy and dirty clothes all day, you’re probably not going to get treated like an adult unless your parents choose to ignore you until it’s time to call you up for dinner.

More pressingly, however, taking the time to brush or braid your hair and change into clean clothes (or, even better, clothes that aren’t your pajamas) can change your mindset about the day. Just changing outfits can signal to yourself your intent for the day.

Level 3: Having a Separate Existence: Handling Your Own Problems and Handling Your Own Money

Having your own life while living at home is desirable for a lot of people, and possibly necessary. 

This is helped by having a routine and being fully engaged in your own goals, but here are a few other tips to think about.

Handle Your Own Problems

I think the most universal rule for adulthood is that you are responsible for yourself and for your problems. The first person you should ask about what to do is YOU. 

Do some critical thinking. Dive into your memory and experience. You’ll be surprised not only by how much you can figure out by yourself. Honestly, you may find you’re smarter (about your own problems) than google, and about as smart as any trusted source whose advice is heavily based on their own anecdotal life experience.

You won’t always be right, but you know what – neither are your parents. And attempting to handle your own problems doesn’t mean you don’t consult your parents or other people who likely know better than you. It just means at the end of the day, you are in charge of your own problems and you make your own decisions.

When you never include yourself in the process of trying to solve your own problems or ever decide on a solution on your own, you come to feel like you aren’t in charge of your life and can’t change things that actually are within your control.

You start to create a habit of feeling like someone always has to come and save you.

Solving your own problems starts to make you feel like you are actually the master of your own ship and can actually direct the path of your life, even if in a very mundane way.

[Note: this also doesn’t seem to transfer well between domains. Just because you’ve always solved your study issues doesn’t mean you believe you can figure out through research and trial and error a budget. Push yourself in all domains to gain self confidence]

Now, of course, there are times when you absolutely need help and if you are in a time sensitive crisis you should run and consult your support system if you are lucky enough to have one. But in general, spend some time trying to solve problems on your own before you reach out for help. Make sure it doesn’t seem like people are always cleaning up messes for you or making decisions for you.

How to Solve Problems that Have Been Delegated to You

There are some problems that aren’t necessarily yours, but are associated with stuff you’re doing around the house as part of being a member of the household. 

As much as you can solve the problems that will necessarily come up on your own, only reaching out when you absolutely cannot figure it out. 

You can do this using common sense and your own understanding of your parents and their preferences.

A big reason for this is that  one of the big benefits of delegation (to the delegator) is to not have to spend much mental energy on the act anymore, as well as physical practical energy. You may not be asked again if you ask too many questions, which may be good or bad, depending on how much you’re already doing and the relationship you have with your parents.

So, if you can do it yourself, do it yourself. If you can’t do it yourself, they should know that this either isn’t something they can delegate or something they have to be more patient with you on.

Make Your Own Money (Or Manage Your Parents’ Money Better)

A huge area of conflict between kids and parents (and a huge stepping stone from childhood to adulthood) is money management and distribution. 

Having an adult child at home to support is often a big financial responsibility for parents, or even a drain. Bringing some money in yourself (or decreasing your consumption habits) could lessen the burden substantially.

Money is also a big source of control. Control that others can have over you, as well as control you can have over your life. So it’s something you should really think about approaching deliberately as you live with your parents.

How to Make Your Own Money

As discussed above, money is not only a stressor but a huge locus of control. Making your own can decrease the burden you put on the household, or even provide you with resources to help support the household. 

At the very least, it will provide you with funds that you don’t have to answer for or explain or ask for permission to use.

Some ways you can make money are: 

Getting a job (This is basically common sense). Here are some classic options: 

• Starbucks Barista
• CVS Pharmacy Tech (provides on the job training, could look great on a CV) 
• Subway Sandwich Artist
• Work on campus in some capacity (library assistant, man the information desks, research assistant, tutoring as employed by the university, etc.). 

If you don’t want to do something with set work hours and need something with a more flexible schedule, consider working as a freelancer or starting your own business. You can walk dogs (independently or through wag), driver for Uber, babysit, tutor, freelance write, sell crafts (anything from crochet hats to prints) or even start a blog.

Unless you’re going through an app facilitated by the gig economy, however, there will need to be some more intense marketing work and a bit of a wait before income starts coming in, so if you need money soon, I recommend working through an app or a company with a more secure institutional foothold.

How to Decrease Your Consumption Habits and Cost Less Money

If you can’t get a job for whatever reason: maybe you physically can’t or you’re very invested in the day to day running of the household through caring for siblings, parents, or grandparents, or maybe you just don’t have the time, consider if this is an area of conflict for your family. If not, just focus on your responsibilities.

If it is a source of conflict, here are some tips to decrease your consumption habits:

• Turn off the lights behind you and take shorter showers
• Spend substantially less on leisure. You’ll be surprised how entertained you can keep yourself with what you already have
• Don’t eat for fun. Only eat when you’re hungry (food is expensive!)
• Don’t accept offers to have things purchased for you. People sometimes give more than they can afford to. 

In general, find domains of your life where you could do with less or without and then cut some things out.

You likely aren’t being extravagant. I imagine most adults have a tight handle on their pocketbooks or their adult children seem to have some awareness of how much they can spend. But if you think you may be, start cutting in these small areas and maybe even consider essentialism in order to be more content with less (a useful book for this would be Essentialism by Greg McKeown).

Remember: You Can’t Control How Other People Feel

These tips and this process can be very helpful for developing a systematic way to pull your own weight and continue to grow and gain independence while at home.

However, this will not necessarily make your parents happy all the time or keep perfect peace in the house. 

You should clean up after yourself. You should act like a member of the household and not like you’re in a hotel. This is just reasonable human adult behavior. 

However, this won’t necessarily change your parent’s personality or any deeper issues they have or beliefs they have about you that can’t even remotely be fixed even if you go out and get a job.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for a relationship is distance. Sometimes it’s therapy. And sometimes it’s ending, or at the very least taking some time away from, the relationship. 

I’m not a licensed counselor (or an unlicensed counselor) of any sort, so I recommend you seek some help if you’re in a situation like this.

One of the keys to making peace at home is becoming a fully fledged adult. But a big part of becoming an adult is setting boundaries and learning when you’re not the problem.