Coming home to an empty house is sheer bliss, so why can't we say no to our boomerang kids?

  • The Guardian,
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"Just say no!" My response when a friend told me her boy was threatening to boomerang back into the family home was swift, loud and uncompromising. I call him a boy - I've known him almost since birth - although he's now 26 and rising, 6ft 2in tall, with a good degree from a top-class university and a new job that pays a more-than-respectable salary.

The problem was, his adoring, but understandably apprehensive mother explained, that he had managed all right in his first job in a big, northern industrial city where rents were just about affordable, but now he was moving to the capital, where his parents still lived in the house in which he was raised. "He can't afford anything decent in London," she whimpered. "He'll have to come home."

I reminded her that, when we were young, our parents had seen us through our education and then firmly washed their hands of us financially. "Learn to stand on your own two feet," was their unshakable mantra and their strict moral codes would have made returning to our old single beds under their roofs unthinkable. Their methods served us well. We learned to rely on no other resources than our own.

Our children's generation has had far too easy a ride. We've allowed double beds, let girlfriends stay the night for fear of appearing stuffy, and led the kids to believe that life without mod cons is barely worth living. Perhaps now, I suggested, was the time for them to learn that a grotty flat in a grim part of town where smalls had to be scrubbed in the sink and the scent of the downstairs burger bar was ever present (you can see I speak from experience here) might just be character-building.

We had, of course, my friend and I, both known the agony of the emptying nest. My two are now long gone - they are 25 and 21. How we had grieved over the teddies they had left lying around their rooms. We had lain on the beds that still smelled uniquely of our beloved babes and sobbed hot tears of maternal deprivation. We had even sort of missed the girlie posters of which we had so frequently complained.

But we had recovered quite surprisingly quickly. No more trails of droppings that signal arrival home from school. Coat on a chair. Keys on the table. Bag on the floor in a position just asking to be tripped over. Shoes the size of small ships scattered across the hallway. Drum and bass blaring from the bedroom and the first words spoken - yours - "Turn that racket down, will you!"


You can spend a whole evening in front of the telly in total control of the remote with no fear of being forced to watch Jeremy Clarkson or Pimp My Ride.


My friend failed to heed my advice and two years later he is still there, eating her out of house and home, bringing back a string of what she says are entirely unsuitable young women and practising his new hobby before supper - a well amplified electric guitar. When she has complained, I have shown no sympathy and simply mouthed: "I told you so."

Then, two weeks ago, my number one came home with one of those unmistakable "I need to ask you a favour" looks. He has, it seems, hit a temporary hiccup on the housing front and wondered if it would be OK to move back in for a short while till he could find something convenient that he could afford. It took me half a heartbeat to just say yes. Mothers, eh? Who'd trust one?

It's not nice to be out on the town on a Saturday night and watch drunken girls falling over in the street and knocking seven bells out of each other. The number of violent attacks by what are rather reductively known as ladettes is said to have doubled in the past five years and we are told that it is the first time in history that violence has been the most common crime among women and girls.

Dame Eileen Atkins says they are a disgrace to feminism. Not so. They are an inevitable consequence of equal opportunity. These girls have been raised in a culture that has too often painted their gender as natural victims and excused bad behaviour on the male side with the four most dangerous words in the English language - boys will be boys.

It is not nice to be out on the town on a Saturday night and watch drunken lads falling over and knocking each other about, but let's at least condemn them as heartily as we have the girls and stop expecting the female to be what Margaret Atwood called "gooder" simply by virtue of her sex.

This week Jenni read Sacrifice by SJ Bolton: "A real page-turner by a new crime writer - not to be read while alone in the dark." She listened to Leonard and Marianne on Radio 4, hoping for a great love story: "Cohen dumped her and her child for Suzanne. Another hero bites the dust." She watched two episodes of EastEnders: "How can they afford all those black cabs?"

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