Who hasn’t dreamt of opening the front door to find the sofa miraculously cleared of its pelt of newspapers and KitKat wrappers, and the washing that has been strewn across radiators for days folded and neatly tidied away? Rebecca, a 29-year-old sales director, whose extremely helpful parents have their own keys to her flat, would say: “Be careful what you wish for.”
“I work long hours, and my mum and dad, who are both retired now, are incredibly helpful,” she says. “But they have no boundaries at all when it comes to my things. I wouldn’t dream of leaving opened post in my hall, because my dad thinks it’s absolutely OK to read it and bring any outstanding bills to my attention. My mum will put away the washing, but she’ll also rearrange my airing cupboard and comment on the contents of my bin. I recently came home to a note saying: “Darling, should you be eating this?”
Rebecca, who lives in Bristol, is particularly close to her dad. “But he does loads of things that to anyone else would seem completely inappropriate and overbearing. He drives up from Kent and he always arrives at a weird time. He says it’s to give him a chance to ‘settle in’, but really it’s so he has time to have a good snoop before I get back from work. The last time he came, he rearranged my shelves because he thought they looked cluttered and completely cleared out my food cupboards. I know it comes from a lovely place, but it’s absolutely a controlling and interfering place. No matter how many times I say, ‘Dad you can’t do this,’ there’s always something he’s moved or filed. He just can’t help himself.”
“My mum will put away the washing, but she’ll also rearrange my airing cupboard and comment on the contents of my bin
A generation of grown-up “children”, unable to climb onto the housing ladder, are staying at home with the advantage — or disadvantage, depending how you look at it — that mum and dad are on hand to provide domestic support. But it seems even when they’ve gone, we just can’t let go. Research from the Skipton Building Society suggests that parents in the UK go on providing financial support until their children are 31, with nine out of 10 of those living away from home. In America, more than a third of baby-boomers — the first generation born after the war — are still supporting their adult children into their twenties and thirties, often to the detriment of their own retirement plans.
Kat lives in Cheshire. Her dad wouldn’t dream of offering her money — she’s a financially secure 39-year-old mother of two — but he thinks it’s fine to let himself into her house and rearrange the furniture. “This kind of helpful/interfering behaviour has been going on since I was a student,” she says. “I’m now nearly 40 and I run my own company, but my dad still feels he knows better than me where my table lamps should go.
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“Dad’s reasoning is that the items he moves — lamps, chairs, vases — work better where he puts them. I’m still his little girl,” she says. “And he just thinks he knows what’s best for me.” But what started with the relocation of the odd side table reached peak interference when she got back from a business trip to find her dad had completely rearranged her living room. “I said, ‘Dad, we have to talk about this. It’s really not normal.’ But he means well and most of the time I find it quite funny.”
Kat’s dad worked abroad for large chunks of her childhood. She thinks his misdirected helpfulness — which constantly teeters on the edge of meddling — is about wanting to make up for lost time, “combined with almost pathological nosiness”.
Some research close to home suggests we are in the grip of a guilt crisis. Both my brothers (each had a messy divorce) admit not just to supporting grown-up sons and daughters through university, but far beyond. My sister hurtles up the motorway twice a week to visit her adult sons with entire meals straight from the Aga. And she shifts the ironing pile too, despite the fact these boys earn enough to employ an army of domestic helpers. Doing too much? It is not worth having the conversation. Parenting is a very personal pursuit and there are no rules as to when the role should officially end. Or, indeed, reverse.
Many baby-boomer mothers, the first to carve out careers outside the home, see retirement as catch-up time. Serena, 62, who recently retired from the health service, readily agrees that the nurturing has spilt over into her relationship with her adult daughter.
“I couldn’t be there to take Sarah to nursery when she was three, but I can tidy up her flat and put a meal in the oven before she gets home from work.” Sarah is 35 and an account manager for a global advertising agency. She could easily pick up her own dinner, but knows her mum likes to do it. She’s less keen on the subtle interference in her life. “Unbidden, Mum has introduced tiebacks to all my curtains and bought a clothes airer I detest for the bathroom, because she was worried I was wearing damp knickers. It’s quite a difficult tightrope to walk, actually.”
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My neighbour, Eva, who travels a lot for work and relies on her German in-laws to look after both house and children when she and her partner are away, has a very simple solution to all this. “Accept gracefully,” she says. “But when they’ve gone, my husband and I always walk round the house going ‘what the f***?’ My mother-in-law has made some breathtakingly audacious changes to our house. One year, she completely replanted the front garden. She meant to tidy it up, but got carried away.”
The last time I looked over, Eva’s mother-in-law was de-smearing her front windows using a steam cleaner she’d brought from home. I can see how this uncalled-for help might be annoying, but I’m not that fussy. I just want to know if she’d like to come over and do mine.