How Parents and Adult Children Can Navigate Living Together: Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist in Healthline

Since the pandemic, an increasing amount of parents and adult children have decided to live together. While there is often much discussion about these relationships grating on both the adult children and their parents, these arrangements can often be beneficial. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be navigated with clarity and care. Our Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist recently addressed how parents and adult children can create an ideal living situation without backsliding into old dynamics in Healthline.

In “How to Manage When Your Adult Children Are Living at Home,” Matt explains that one of the most important aspects of living together as adult children and parents is to establish clear rules and expectations about finances, rent, cleaning, and other household rules. The key is not what those rules and expectations are but that they are talked about openly and agreed upon by both parties. “Think about what’s sustainable, what’s realistic, what’s going to feel really good down the line,” he says.

Conflicts arise when these expectations and rules are not made clear enough and parents and adult children are not communicating effectively. When things are left unclear or unaddressed, resentment can grow. Matt observes, “The trouble I see in these kinds of conversations inevitably is when somebody was dropping hints, or raised [the issue] and then left the conversation thinking, ‘Oh, that went well,’ and then thinking, ‘Wait, was I misunderstood? Did you think I was talking about something else?’” He suggests erring “on the side of talking sooner and more transparently and with greater clarity than most people think is necessary.” Some formality such as written-down rules can be useful.

This clarity can also keep the relationship from becoming too casual, which is a condition that can encourage old ways of operating. When parents and adult children live in a home together—sometimes the very same home in which the adult children grew up—the system can drift into a dynamic where familiar roles from childhood reemerge. Matt asserts, “Even 10 or 20 years later, old dynamics are going to come back—even if you’re in a different home, even if a lot has changed.” And if there are unresolved feelings, those are likely to arise too.

Matt emphasizes that it’s essential that adults function as adults, no matter their familial dynamic. Parents and adult children that share a home both need to come to some mutual understandings. Adult children need to understand that their parents may ask for limits on things that wouldn’t be limited if they were living on their own. Likewise, parents need to understand that their adult children are adults, even if they are their children. “It’s helpful when parents are able to show up to these conversations with curiosity, revisiting assumptions around things that used to be done a certain way,” Matt says.

Family therapy can be especially helpful when these historical dynamics and feelings reappear. Some parents and adult children may find their old feelings too overwhelming, rendering the living situation untenable. But, there are also copious opportunities for families—even for families where harm happened when adult children were children—to create new ways of relating and living together.