Helping Your Child Move Out Of Your Home With Dignity

You need only look at the endless halls of first-year university dorms to see just how many late teenagers still have little idea of how to support themselves when away from home. Beer and wine bottles are often laid upon the windowsills (a symptom of wanton partying,) dirty dishes often pile higher and higher next to the sink, and the less said about the carpets, the better. Your son or daughter could be completely separate from this mess of course, but there’s a high chance that at least one person in their shared flat is causing some kind of problem like this. Helping your child move out of your home with dignity, no matter if it’s for a first apartment, a university experience, or a range of other matters, is important.

Note: This blog post is a sponsored conversation written by Lynn Smythe, the Founder and Chief Blogger for The Creative Cottage lifestyle blog. The opinions, thoughts, ideas and text are all mine.

Of course, certain teenagers or young adults are at certain levels of maturity when they leave, but as long as you can confirm they are able before they do, and as long as your child doesn’t end up like the 30-year old man who made the news for being sued by his parents, you can be sure that you’ll have done a good job. Let’s go through the notes to help you make the most of this:

Cooking for the First Time

Whenever we move out for the first time, we need to learn how to take care of our basic essentials, especially those that can rack up costs should we not manage them well. A good diet is one of the fundamental aspects of feeling our best selves. Not only do we need to have the capacity of cooking effectively, but to do so with care, attention, and with an eye for planning. If your child doesn’t understand this, or has little experience, they will often make many mistakes.

First off, they need to know how to operate an oven. This might sound extremely patronizing, but it’s true to consider. They need to know to leave the door open if on grill mode, or how to clean the dirtiest of grime to prevent a fire-hazard buildup. It’s also important for them to know how to effectively cook through meats to prevent food poisoning or worse, and to ensure they understand basic food hygiene methods, such as avoiding cross-contamination. You can teach them all of this. It might take a couple of weekends, but these are skills that any teenager should know. This can also prevent them from relying on takeout food, fast food or supermarket ready meals, because not only are these nutritionally questionable most of the time, but can also get expensive compared to the cost of filling a cupboard with real goods.

This is where encouraging them to go to the grocer and butcher can be a great idea. Teaching them how to communicate their needs, check good produce and how to store it, and on top of that handing them a simple cooking book, perhaps for certain recipes, perhaps for a slow-cooking application can all be worthwhile. This way, you’ll be certain that when your child is living on their own or in a shared house, they can support themselves nutritionally.

First Home Organization

They likely know how to dress themselves, but do they know how to complete a laundry cycle? Again, this sounds like true patronizing, but it’s not. There are many teenagers who have never washed their own clothes before. It’s not as if them heading to live on their own will help matters. Laundry will pile high, and they might come to visit you in order to have you do it. Of course, them bringing a load home now and then could be fine, especially if they would otherwise need to visit a laundromat. But remember, you’re not always going to be there to help them with this, and there comes an age where this will feel odd to assist with.

Teaching them the proper way to fold clothes, how to clean thoroughly, how to remove fire hazards, and how to keep a place ventilated can help them keep good care of the home around them. It might sound completely obvious, an part of our daily habitual process, but we can easily forget that others may not be so familiar with this routine, especially a teenager or young adult.

Safe organization can also help them express themselves creatively. For example, it might be that you show them how to use iron-on decorative efforts to make their home stand out a little more, how to get red wine stains out of the carpet, and how to look after their first pet appropriately. Moving out of home can be a complex process, and not all weeks look like others. But when organized, a home can remain as beautiful as it might have been, and allow your child to enjoy a higher standard of living.

Apartment Security

Of course, your child isn’t likely going to cause any trouble themselves, but it’s important to know how and when defending a home might become necessary. Show them how to apply locks, teach them not to hide keys out in the foyer or under an outside carpet unless absolutely essential, teach them to only answer the door when expecting a guest or a delivery, and never after a certain time of night.

Teach them how to stay in contact with friends and family to signify that something might be wrong, and this might sound like tempting fate, but having them keep possession of some kind of long tool can help them defend themselves should intruders come in. A baseball bat can be a good option. They will likely never use it, but it can help you feel better than one might be in their room. This isn’t to condone violence in the least, but sometimes, it can be a last-ditch measure after calling the police and giving the address to the property.

It can also be worth showing them how to shred documents before throwing them out, because the address label on important documentation can sometimes be taken by fraudsters and used to nefarious ends. It’s also important that they are familiarized with their local housing authority, and know the proper methodology to report a crime, a noise complaint, or any other sense of grievance. Good home practice such as locking windows when leaving and at night, always keeping doors locked, and practicing great fire safety efforts can all be more than worthwhile.

Budgeting and Financial Organization

It’s essential for your child to learn how to budget their money. This is because when you factor in all of the expenditures and recurring bills, they will then know just how much money they have to work with. They should understand how to prioritize. Paying rent is of course much more important than purchasing that new video game. Buying food healthy and nutritionally dense is always more appropriate than heading out on the town and drinking until the early hours of the morning.

This is the place where many young adults and teenagers falter. They likely work to support themselves, but now they have complete control over their finances, they can easily make mistakes. Teaching them how to draw up a budget, how to save, and how to keep themselves more appropriately present with their financial ambitions will ensure that they stay stable, and cruise through their first tenancy.

With this advice, we very much your child is able to move out with dignity. You will have supported them well.