Adult children, would you not move because your parents told you you couldn't?

Simple. Take the parents with her to the city. After all family stays together. The mother wouldn’t want the family broken up would she?

They won’t budge. They all grew up where they live and they have other family members plus they own their home. They aren’t going anywhere.

We don’t really know that she wants to leave, we only know she blames her mom when she gives you a reason.

We speak in depth. She wants to leave. She hates traveling for work.

A lot of people won’t leave their family to their own detriment. Why doesn’t she make a one year plan. She can ALWAYS go back home.

She may have some weird attachment to her parents and want to be with them. Some families are very close and especially if the daughter is not married, she stays with the parents until she gets married. Does your friend live with her parents or just near them?

Also, maybe there’s more to the story than she is admitting. She might not want to tell you other details. Maybe the other details are embarrassing or maybe she has some other situation going on (like she’s in a relationship) and she doesn’t want to tell you.

In our family all of us were told at least a year before we turned 18 years of age that we had a years notice to move out, ready or not.

Maybe this friend is dependent on the parents since they have a home, car,entertainment, food all etc She sees no need to move. She has become too comfortable with others providing everything for her.

Hope that you are not going to be her next surrogate Parent?
I think that you may want to rethink that offer to her until she has had time to live independent of others .

Its actually a good thing that your friend leaves her job,as its now an incentive to become an adult in charge of her own life .

There are lots of jobs elsewhere that she could be applying for ,but perhaps she is not telling you the truth or perhaps the parents paid for her education and now she expects them to pay for her for the rest of her life?

Who knows for sure until she can be honest with you at least.

DO not provide a place for her if possible, but if you do succumb have rules and boundaries set as to the time that she is to move out and in the meantime she pays rent.
Otherwise you will become her full time parent.

I would invite your friend to stay with you as that friend will never learn to become independent and rely on themselves.

She could be scared of taking control of her own life?
Therapy may help to understand her hesitation whether because of her parents, guilt of leaving ,or just too comfortable having sugar daddy/mommy?

Some people hate leaving comfort zones. It’s easy to understand, but adventure is risk is crucial to human development.

I honestly don’t even wanna know how my life would have turned out if I stayed in my little town: 15 percent of my friends were already smoking crystal meth during and after high school lol.

There are pros and cons for sure, but I personally have a bias towards controlling behavior. The whole point of life is to leave the nest and make your own nest.

@Blackberry And add become an adult.
The parents job is to teach their children how to learn to become a full functioning adult in life and to continue on in life even when the parents pass on. This is the cycle of life.

@Inspired_2write I made a mistake forgot to add the word “NOT” after the sentence

” I would… add( NOT)... invite your friend to stay with you as that friend will never learn to become independent and rely on themselves.”

I wouldn’t spend too much time and energy trying to convince an adult to make a change they don’t want to make or are not ready to make.

The good thing is she will always find employment as a nurse. Even if she has to work someplace that she doesn’t want to (for example, a doctor’s office), it’s a job and she’ll figure things out and do what she needs to do.

Just keep in mind that if you only know her on the internet it’s very possible she is not telling you the whole story.

Seems like the more common problem I hear about today is adult children who don’t want to leave (because “adulting is hard”). This seems more unusual.

In some cultures, it’s normal for people to live with their parents until they’re married, regardless of when they get married. The “18 and you’re out” model is not universal. Since you mention her religious background and her family’s strong emphasis on staying together, it sounds like she comes from a traditional background where something like this may be more common.

I’m also sometimes surprised by the hold some parents still have over their children, well into their adult years. That seems to happen sometimes with parents who were always on the controlling side. Guilt and fear of a severed relationship (if too much independence is asserted) play a role.

Just some of my ideas. Don’t really have a solution in mind. Ultimately it’s her decision.

@Stache, it is extraordinarily difficult, if one is raised in an atmosphere of subtle but absolute parental control, to go against the conditioning of a lifetime.

I have never really left my home area, to live, so I get it. There’s often a sense of familial obligation and duty, that some people just don’t feel and others do. It’s her life, she should live it however she chooses, but I certainly wouldn’t feel sorry for someone for having a close family that loves them. Indeed, she may be happy and fulfilled living this way, we all have different dreams.
There’s been times when I was travelling that I’d think about how nice it would be to live where no one knows you, or your family, or your life, but there’s also a lot to be said for having a loving community and family around you.

@KNOWITALL, I think the focus of the details is the statement ”I can’t because my mom won’t let me” which speaks more to emotional coercion than personal desire to stay close to a loving family.

I’m glad you don’t have this, you are very fortunate.

Being cynical, it’s also possible the lady friend is not being totally honest about why she is not willing to move.

@stache I really get it. My dad died when I was 17 and my mom didn’t want me to leave to go to college so I went to the community college. As time went on, she became more and more dependent on me to the point I felt guilty for thinking about leaving. I did have my own apartment, though. Same thing happened to my best friend. Her dad died when she was 20, so she did get to go off to college. But her mother lived with her most of her adult life.
My best friend and I were driving through our old home town the other day to go to a friends funeral.
We both looked at each other and said “what have we done? Why didn’t we get out?”
Encourage your friend to get her own life and not live for her parents. That’s not how it should be.

When I was in college I came across an ad for a stewardess on a cruise ship for the summer. I’d have to move to California at least for a while. I called my Mom to discuss it.
She told me I could not go because she was leaving and moving “home” to the Pacific Northwest and I was expected to move up there as well.
Pissed me off and I didn’t move anywhere.
My sister tried moving up there after she graduated from High School, but only made it through one semester before she got homesick for her friends and her life and came back.
Mom was pretty upset with both of us.

Just a random comment.

I have friends, and family by marriage, who are still angry at their parents for making it difficult to leave home, or to leave the immediate area. Then, years later, they do the same shit to their own kids and they don’t see it. It’s bizarro land for me listening to them and trying not to tell hold a mirror up for them. They still have negative feelings about their parents or in-laws years later, even though they did it themselves.

All of these people, when they did leave, or their kids left, wound up angry, sometimes not speaking for a while, and saying things like, “it’s probably better I left (they left) because we don’t speak hardly anyway.” Then if they eventually move close to each other again, they talk about the other person changing, that things are better.

I see the same pattern over and over again. My family isn’t like that, but what my dad does is get paranoid and tell you everything that will be wrong or bad in the new place or new situation. He doesn’t make it about staying near him, he makes it about the place your going to being a bad choice.

So, a lot of kids have a hard time shaking off these head trips and fears, and the voice of their parents is in their own head.

Mom did that to me. No matter what, it’s always wrong.
When I sold the house in Wichita to move and had to rent a place, it was the wrong thing to do because I would lose the benefits of claiming the house for taxes (never mind that it was in an increasingly bad part of the city and I was moving 50 miles to a much safer small town.)
Then when I was in a position to buy a house again 4 years later, THAT was the wrong thing to do because I would be responsible for everything that went wrong.

Apparently my kids had no problems moving out, though!

Wow. She’s been groomed hasn’t she. :(

Hey, thanks for the responses. For some reason I’m just now seeing these.

My friend ended up getting a job at a hospital in the same city where she was working previously. It all worked out for her family.