Need a quick answer to a career or personal dilemma? Career and life coach Marielys Camacho-Reyes will answer your concerns in her column “Ask the Coach.”
Dear Coach,
I am very upset with my daughter right now, but I am trying to reach out to you to see if you can give me an advice for a problem that I have. My daughter is in college but she still lives with us. That is not the problem. The problem is that she constantly brings her friends home during their lunch hour so they can eat here instead of using their money to pay for their own lunch. At the beginning, I was okay with it, but after I realized that these visits were going to be on a constant basis, I talked to my daughter about it and told her to limit the visits to special events only. Well, long story short; she got offended and now, she would not talk to me. She is even considering moving out of the house. My intentions were never to offend her or to make her move out of the house. I tried talking to her about this, but she wants nothing to do with me. Any advice?
The Cook
Dear Cook,
I am sorry that your daughter took all this the wrong way, but you did the right thing. Her friends were clearly taking advantage of the situation and she needs to understand where is that you are coming from and respect your decision. Bringing people home for dinner once in a while is okay; expecting you to feed her entire group of friend every day is not only inconsiderate, but also disrespectful. And, that is not even taking in consideration the amount of money that you must have spent in food for all those visitors. I think that your daughter is behaving like a brat and if she is not willing to play by your rules, then I guess is time for her to move to her own place and start dealing with the responsibilities of running a house. Go ahead and tell her to move out and start inviting her friends over to her house for lunch to see how she likes that. On a serious note; if I were you, I would not sweat too much over it. Yes, she is mad now and may be threaten you to leave the house, but the truth is that eventually, she will get over it and things will go back to normal between you guys. Just give her time and see what happens. If after you give her some time to think about what happened, she continues with the idea of moving out, I guess the best thing you can do is to give her your blessing and allow her to go on with her life. At the end, that is all you can do; unless you are willing to start cooking again for her friends just to make her happy.
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