Would you let your adult child or parents live with you?

[hunter]

59. I sense some family dysfunction here...

... the dynamic in my family is entirely different, people run away from home to find work or go to school and escape the chaos.

Three of my siblings "ran away from home," two at sixteen, one at seventeen.

I was just an occasional homeless guy sometimes living on my parent's porch with other random misfits appearing and vanishing for mysterious reasons. My retired rocket scientist grandfather got my bedroom when I moved out. My little brother and his S.O. got the master bedroom when my parents retreated to the desert. My parents now live in a remote rain forest in a house I've never visited, but they do have an internet connection. If they ever land at our house I won't be upset, we'll make room for them, but it would be unexpected because some of their progeny live in more interesting places. Likewise, I could just show up at my parent's house or any of my siblings' houses with no definite plans.

Childhood memory: We were living as indigent U.S. Americans in a public park in France. I was a very self-conscious and easily embarrassed middle teen. It was bad. People were feeling sorry for us and giving us food. The local authorities bought us tickets to England to get rid of us. Our family made them uncomfortable and none of us spoke French. We'd left Franco's Spain in the middle of the night, which is how we ended up in France. (My parents paid our debt to France a few months later with very generous interest.) Later Franco died. Years later one of my siblings revisited Spain and it wasn't a problem. My mom always tells people what she thinks, which was a BIG problem in Franco's Spain. My brother is like that too but not so much trouble in Spain now.

Our oldest kid has graduated from college and immediately got a job in another city. Our kids wanted to go away to college, leave our boring small city, and they did what they needed to do to get there.