Sellers popped the bubbly, vendors flew off to Hawaii and some sold their home for half a million dollars above the reserve price. Amelia Crawford
But you missed tickets to Sydney’s record breaking auction weekend. In fact, you couldn’t even get to the box office, because you were too busy making your 25-year-old son a sandwich.
You could have sold your property 10 times this week but the current trend for children to return to the nest and for some, never spread their wings in the first place, has meant that selling the family home is no longer an option.
Soaring rent prices and a soft job market have seen an end to the right of passage for children to move out of home and learn that mould grows on food. As they revert back to their family dwellings, they relish in clean clothes, eating fruit and an effortless attempt to save money so they can spend more of it (and some of yours too).
Without the intention of sounding patronising, on the one hand I feel a lot of sympathy for mothers who are undergoing the effects of a boomerang child. For lack of a more honest term, I am one. While I may have learnt the value of a helping hand at an early age, this was not and unfortunately still isn’t the case for many of my kind. However, on the other hand it wouldn’t be wrong to say that staying at home saves mothers from a sense of deep loss and even loneliness at the worst of times.
But going back to the other hand (for want of having more hands), staying at home for longer (regardless of its affect) is not completely our fault. During my interactions as a boomerang child, I have never seen or felt the indignation of my being around.
Sadly, truly and almost inevitably, mothers (and of course occasionally fathers) will return to their roll of ‘mothering’, no questions asked. Quite honestly, this automated compliance is foolish, for both mothers and children involved.
It’s not psychology to decrypt the affects of giving kids too much praise. Responding positively at first, after too much they will collapse at the first experience of difficulty. This concept is no different when your kids enter adulthood. If your son knows he will automatically get rewarded when he asks for a sandwich, then what is the impetus for improvement? Why bother learning problem solving skills like how to work the dishwasher or iron the collar of a shirt, when there are never obstacles to begin with?
Mothers might ponder why their own parents had it so much easier and assume it was because simpler times demanded far less of parents, but maybe it was just that they had a better sense of what their job was and when to say ‘I quit.’
Impromptu dates with your husband and spending time painting, are all luxuries that can still be had, but take it from a boomerang herself, it’s not us, it’s you, and I mean this in the most genuine and heart felt way.
An increasing number of mothers possess the ability to have fulfilling careers whilst providing and caring for a family; but the latter of the two should not be a job that you hold indeterminately.
As we struggle to find our way we should have to do what every other person did before us and find it on our own. It is not your job to make us happy. I’m pretty sure if you had figured out the key to happiness, you would have sold it and bought us a separate house to live in by now.
Life decisions like downsizing, taking the holiday of a lifetime or having time to write the novel you’ve always dreamed of, should not be subject to young adults with the characteristics of a boomerang.
If a sale is what you need to achieve one of the above, then you can be assured that all hope is not lost. Prices won’t collapse in the following weeks and while the market will remain solid, winter will see the beginning of a slow-down, so act now or forever hold your peace.
And, if you think kicking your children out to sell the family home will ruin any chance of enticing them to an occasional dinner, I can assure you, no matter how hard you throw us, we will always come back.
