“I Didn’t Raise Her To Act Like This”: Woman Protects Younger Daughters By Kicking Out The Eldest

Life’s often unfair, and in many cases, there’s not much you can do about it except move on and try to hold everything together. Mother and Reddit user Exotic-Ice-8239 was dealt an unimaginable blow when her husband passed away, leaving her to raise their three daughters on her own.

With help from her parents, the widow managed to rebuild some stability over the years. But lately, she has been struggling with her eldest daughter, whose behavior has spiraled out of control to the point where the woman felt she had to kick her out of the house.

However, she faced a wave of criticism from her own family and turned to the internet for answers.

Most adults in the United States report being affected by the addiction crisis facing the country. Two-thirds of adults say they have either personally felt they were addicted or had a family member who was addicted to alcohol or drugs. This includes prescription painkillers, illegal drugs, or alcohol, having an overdose that required hospitalization, experiencing homelessness due to addiction, or having a family member who passed away from an overdose.

Experiences with addiction are widespread, affecting people across income levels, education, race, ethnicity, and age. Still, socioeconomic status remains a factor. For instance, a quarter (25%) of adults with a household income under $40,000 report having personally struggled with drug or alcohol addiction, experienced a drug overdose requiring an ER visit or hospitalization, or faced homelessness due to addiction. In comparison, fewer than one in five (18%) of those earning between $40,000 and $90,000, and one in six (16%) of adults with household incomes of $90,000 or more, report the same problems.

Having all of this in mind, it’s not surprising that more than half (51%) of U.S. adults are concerned that a family member might develop a substance use disorder.

Ideally, adult children leave their old folks after a mutually agreed process with realistic goals and expectations.

Jerrold Shapiro, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University, says he knows a family that had two adult children at home. Both had finished college. One was working while the other was still looking for a job. The parents concluded they needed the house to themselves.

The parents set a deadline for their children to move out. The one with the job said that it was doable. The other said she might need more time if she wasn’t working soon. She asked for a few more months and the parents agreed.

It turned out that the daughter soon found a job and both were out by the first date. But, Shapiro notes, the key was that the parents were flexible and the children were reasonable.

Shapiro says he knows yet another family with a 27-year-old son who moved back home after grad school. He’s working, and the parents are collecting a percentage of his salary as rent. But they’re putting the money into an investment account to buy the son a house. “They’re very savvy people,” Shapiro says. “It seems to be working fine for them.”

But sometimes, “going nuclear” might, in fact, be the only option.

Shapiro says he knows some parents who “worked on it and worked on it,” but their son wouldn’t leave. His addictions likely fed into this terrible situation as well. Desperate, the parents ultimately sold their house from under their son and moved to another city. “None of the three of them was good at negotiating things,” Shapiro says. This situation was “way out of the norm.” But sadly, these things do happen.