Controling Mother Creating a "Momma's Boy" Part #2

Are your children dependent on you for everything?
Has your home become a revolving door for your adult children? Should you keep bailing your children out of their problems?

It is hard to say “no” to your children when you see them suffer. We want to give them a soft place to fall.
There is a fine line between helping and enabling. Children can become dependent on their parents, rather than becoming self-sufficient.
Gary Buffone, author of Choking on the Silver Spoon, Keeping Your Kids Heathy, Wealthy and Wise in a Land of Plenty, states that the more money children receive, the less they accumulate, while those who are given few dollars accumulate more.
You need to ask yourself why you want to bail out your children. Is it protecting you from pain, a source of power, to avoid loneliness, or some other reason that doesn’t have to do with your childrens’ well-being?

What happens to children who become completly dependent upon a parent?
1) The adult children do not work
2) The adult children still live at home far past the time to grow their wings and fly
3) The adult children have no life of their own, they are only an extenson of the enabeling parent.
4) The adult children do not know how to pay their own bills or balance their check and or savings accounts.
5) Hope is lost that they will be able to provide for themseves in the furture.
6) The adult children are not able to stay in a commited relationship with another adult.

A parent who makes a child independent upon them are often enablers. So lets take a look at what an enabler is:
Here is an example:
The parents of a drug addict who let their grown up offspring stay in their home despite the fact that they continually refuse to acknowledge or get help for their drug abuse. The parent often supports the addict financially or cleans up after them when they are physically ill or destroy parts of the house. If he/she does happen to be employed they may call in sick on their behalf and make excuses for them. The parents hesitate to confront the son/daughter because they think it will somehow make things worse. In reality though, just letting them go on abusing drugs does absolutely nothing to help them. So the support they offer is in fact supporting the drug abuse and not stopping it. If the son/daughter can go on abusing drugs with no consequences they have no motivation to stop. If their bills are being paid for and someone is cleaning up after them and making excuses for them they pretty much have it made in their own eyes. (not withstanding the health issues which they tend to ignore anyway)

The primary job of a parent is to prepare their children for how the world really works. We teach and train our children from childhood the knowledge and skills necessary to become independent adults, self-sufficient and upstanding members of society. In the real world, you don’t always get what you want. Many young adults today have unrealistic expectations when they initially go out on their own. Many feel they are entitled to immediately live a middle-class life style (or better), because that’s what they’re used to, and because they haven’t learned that there is a difference between helping and enabling. They weren’t born, or were very young children, during the years their parents struggled to make ends meet, pay their bills (and on time), having to eat hot dogs and beans instead of steak dinners, struggling to live within their means.

You see, enablers act the way they do out of a sense of misguided love and/or concern. While enabling is generally intended to protect a person from their problem(s), eventually the enabling becomes a part of the problem and one additional obstacle standing in the way of a solution.