Excessive Parent Involvement = Chronic Child Dependency (CDD)

BlahDeBlah
Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:07:53 +0000

I dunno, I’ve certainly encountered a lot of people that would be at a total loss as to how to conduct their everyday lives if their parents suddenly died, or something. People who are adults, technically, and think it’s funny that they have absolutely no idea how to cook, people who cart their laundry home every week because they don’t know how to operate a washing machine (and apparently, can’t figure it out just by looking at it). Of course, my parents weren’t much involved in my college decisions because they weren’t aware that they were expected to be.

I used to have a friend who goes to her school because her mother wanted her to go to school close to home and her dad wanted her to go to a prestigious school, so she stuck with the nearest prestigious school. If they call her and say, hey you haven’t been home in a few weeks, she drops everything and goes home. If she doesn’t go home, they go and visit her. If you ask her why she picked her major, she says, “my parents wanted me to be a ___”. If you ask her if she likes it, she says yeah I guess it’s ok. If you ask her what she wants to do, it’s always “well, my parents want…” Plans to go on living in the dorms, even in grad school, because the low responsibility is the closest thing to having mommy around to do everything for her. She doesn’t have to be bothered with trifles like how much things cost and how much money she has because while she has a work study job, if she runs out of money she can just ask her parents for more. The only time I successfully managed to get out of her what SHE would prefer to do, she wanted to do something like become a starving poet and live in LA with all the wonderful liberal creative people. Lacking a sense of reality, much? Maybe if she was 15 it would be ok, but I don’t think that level of independence-avoidance is healthy when you’re into your 20’s.