What does 18 mean to you?

[Nrdsb4]

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In our family, for instance, if a college student home for Winter Break wanted to have access to a car on a weekday, he/she would have to drive me to work in the morning and pick me up at the end of the day. To take me to work, the student would have to be ready to leave the house (and lucid enough to drive) by 7:30 a.m. My kids habitually spent half the night on the Internet during Winter Breaks, so this was rather hard to achieve. They didn’t ask for my car all that often because they didn’t want to get up early, and therefore they spent a lot of days stuck at home with little to do (there is no mass transit serving our neighborhood).

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<p>LOL, sounds like my family. Except I have to leave for work at 5:45 am. D1 has to really want that car, and so far she has managed to talk DH out of his for short periods rather than use mine during the week.</p>

<p>To the OP, for our family, nothing changed on any one date or at a certain age. Things have just kind of mutated over time. D1 is 21 now, and I can’t pin my finger on any certain day where she no longer had a curfew or was suddenly able to do X or Y. If she doesn’t need the car, she doesn’t really need to ask my permission to go out to dinner or a movie with a friend, yet she always does. I guess it’s just a show of respect to run it by us rather than to just inform us of her plans. For our now 18 year old (just turned last week), nothing has changed as of yet. All current rules and curfews apply, and she hasn’t really asked about it. We certainly don’t treat her “like a 12 year old,” but she really doesn’t have the maturity of full fledged adult, so she isn’t treated like one either.
I think we are like many parents: each child is treated as an individual, so few blanket policies, and we pretty much take things one day at a time.</p>