You can make a child completely independent from you by kicking her out and severing all ties. But that
's not a desirable independence. Independence is not the supreme virtue. Human being are supposed to be dependent to each other, especially to family members.
Don’t get your feeling about the word mixed with 4th of July.
“Independence” is just a word. What it really means can change within a sentence. For example, when a parent tells his child, “If you don’t respect me then I wont respect you,” the first “respect” could mean having adult like maturity yet completely obeying parental authority, while the second “respect” could mean severing financial support.
If what you want from your daught is emotional maturity and ability to make sound judgement, it takes time and practice. And failures. Young adults’ frontal cortex can often still be developing as late as mid 20’s and delay executive function developments. Also, someone reached adult age without being allowed to make own decisions and small failures don’t become good at it overnight with his 18th or even 21st birthday. It’ difficulty and confusing. Yet he might still want to own his life and try to be more independent in that sense. He can realize previous mistakes and try to correct it on his own, sometimes by changing major or even dropping out of college. To me, this is a process of becoming independent. And this is not easy for the you g adult.
Financial independence is not the virtue by itself. My wife’s current career, which is not homemaking and one that I deeply respect, doesn’t allow her to be financially independent. But that’s ok because she has me. She is more independent than I am in the emotional maturity and decision making ability. Should needs arise, she will become financially independent in short time.
Going back to the hypothetical young adult above, is the immediate financial independence necessary based on the family’s budget? If not, would forcing him to be substantially financially independent help him to achieve the above goal, and eventually becoming the grown up adult, with successful career with real financial independence to support his own family rather than being able to work on the minimum wage and pay for own rent and food possibility with government subsidiary? Would’t the realization of cold truth that his parent’s intention to not support him financially force him make choices that seems more independent immediately but sub-optimal in the long term?
As I said in my last late night’s post, I don’t have an answer. The parent would be in the best position to find one, possibly with family counseling that might not help the child immediately, but can help the parent to help the child.
Personally I would support my child changing college and major, again, if it seems reasonable, even if it doesn’t seem wise. But that’s just me. You have different, but I am sure is just as sound value system, and your and your daughter’s life history surely are not the same as ours.
The only thing I can say is don’t loose faith in your child and compassion. Ignore anyone asking you to give up compassion to be fair. Parent-child relationship is ultimately single directional. There is no above and beyond. Fairness is what your child will give to her child as you are giving to her.
Oh and if you haven’t recently, try to see things in her views. Not just you in her situation but her in her situation. A wise career path might seem really unacceptably not the right choice that you must get out of at any cost, which make you resentful to everybody and everything that allowed to make the stupid previous choice. A newly wed spouse might not put up with it, but still might after 20 years of marriage. This kind of life crisis is not that often after all. And you have that 20 years history of trust to cash in.
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