Meal Planning Felt Easier Without His Adult Child—Now He’s Considering A New Rule
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Living with an adult child can make it hard to know where parenting should end.
One father has spent years taking care of the meals in his home while working around what his child will and won’t eat.
Then his child left for two weeks, and he realized how much lighter everything felt without that responsibility.
For once, he could make whatever sounded good without spending so much time thinking about food.
Now his child is coming home, but he doesn’t want to return to the old routine.
Keep reading for the full story.
WIBTA if I stopped cooking/ serving food for my child?
I’m (57) a single parent, living with my adult child (32). We moved within the EU when they were 18 to a country where higher education was more accessible.
We have been living together since. After they finished university, they started to work and now contribute half of the household expenses.
The issue is food. More precisely, meals.
He’s always had a love-hate relationship with food.
I was rather obese for decades. Then, in 2015, I started a fat loss journey. Eating better, moving more, you know the drill. This was particularly hard for me because I have never seen food as fuel—it is a love-hate relationship for me. It gives pleasure and reward. I might even be addicted to it. I still somehow managed to get rid of quite a lot of fat and build muscle.
Then 2020 scrambled my new world, and almost half of the weight crept back on. I have been fighting with this since then, not being able to find my core focus again for a long enough time. I am still counting calories and trying to be mindful, but with aging, this gets harder and harder. I am so tired of this war.
In the past couple of years, I learned this new expression that helped me understand my main issue: food noise. Yes! This is what clouds my head all the time. The grocery runs, the planning, the meal prepping—basically everything relating to food.
Even at their current ages, it’s still a parent-child relationship.
During the years, our relationship has never grown from a parent-child relationship into a “cohabiting adults” relationship. I often feel like I’m tiptoeing around topics, especially when it comes to my needs, feelings, and thoughts. Please don’t get me wrong, they are a loving and caring person, only having a very short fuse that makes serious conversations hard for me.
Now they are away with their partner for two weeks. This is rare. We not only live together, but do almost everything together.
Now, I find that I feel somehow… liberated?
See, I am the one who deals with the household, including groceries and cooking. I am not fussy about food, but they are. There are meals I don’t make only because they would not eat them.
Now, he’s not wanting to go back to life as usual.
I usually batch cook because I don’t like to cook. I do it as little as possible. Batch cooking also helps with calorie counting and portioning. I portion, heat up, and serve both our meals. We don’t eat together, though. Our “tradition” is to have dinner while watching something on Netflix or playing in our separate rooms.
In the past few days, I started to feel lighter and less “food-oriented” because I don’t have to think about their preferences. I have been buying and cooking whatever I want. That food noise has gone considerably down in my head.
My child will be back soon. But I don’t want to get back to the old habit. I don’t want to cook only the foods they would eat. I don’t want to deal with their portions and serving them.
WIBTA?
Oh no! It’s so easy to see why he’s done doing this, but the child may have a problem with it.
Let’s see what advice the fine folks over at Reddit have to offer.
This could be true.
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Yeah, basically.
According to this comment, he should move out.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a grandson who is tired of driving 5 hours one way to work on his grandparent’s investment property for free.
Here’s someone who never expected that from their mom.
There’s nothing wrong with him expecting his adult child to start handling their own meals.
He may have waited a long time to make that change, but that doesn’t mean he has to keep planning everything around them forever.
At some point, the relationship has to shift from parent and child to two adults living in the same home.
And while he can still help when it makes sense, asking them to cook for themselves seems completely reasonable at this stage of the game.
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