When your adult child wants to come “home” and live with you, you may be torn between wanting to help your child and wanting your own, exclusive bathroom and other niceties of privacy and quiet. In fact, the wound left by their stormy teenage years may still smart. What you may need are strategies to make them decide that moving back in with their parent(s) is just not what they really want. Here they are:

• Bribe your child to stay away
• Put a big billboard up to hide your house with the signage painted on it, “House? What house?”
• Tell them they can move in – as long as they pay one year’s rent in advance and agree to buy all the groceries.
• Get a restraining order against them as an abused parent.  Why wait?
• Move with no forwarding address
• Burn down your house
• Give them incorrect MapQuest directions
• Step 1: Tell them they can live in the basement. Step 2: Flood the basement.
• Step 1: Tell them they can live in the attic. Step 2: Stock the attic with thousands of spiders
• Let them live with you on the condition that you can take everything you can from them and sell it to pay for their keep.
• Get a Rottweiler that just doesn’t like anyone any younger than you
• Tell them they have to share a room with your pet alligator
• Tell them that you lost the house and are actually homeless now
• Tell them that you sold the house and are moving into assisted living. Then move to Rio.
• Buy a condominium and let them live there, free, forever, because I guarantee they will never, ever leave