Woman asks her adult daughter to pay half of monthly rent and utilities – her daughter has a fitting response

A lot of times, people come to the internet for advice or rather just confirmation on whether what they did was the right thing. This mother asked a favor from her daughter, but it seemed like it was not well appreciated.

Keep reading to know everything that went down.

A Reddit user with a ‘throwaway’ account titled “throwaway_dating224” had an important question that she wanted to ask the community. She wanted reassurance that she was not in the wrong in a situation she was dealing with in her life.

She revealed that her daughter had moved back home with her in 2019 when she was attending college. It is unclear whether she had moved out for college and subsequently moved back in, or whether she had always lived with her mother. Now, her daughter had graduated from college and gotten a job, but she was still not making enough money to move out on her own.

But since she did have a job nonetheless, her mother had a simple request for her: to split the bills. “I have asked her to split the cost of rent and utilities in half with me … and [she] doesn’t consider it fair,” she wrote. 

She also revealed that the daughter has no desire to live with her but is only doing so to save money so that she can have enough for a down payment on a home or for further education.

She also mentioned that while the rent of their home was low for the area, the cost of living was high.

In addition to all of this, the daughter was “embarrassed at the state of the house” and refused to invite people over. The mother shared that this was only because she was so tired after work that she rarely had time to clean up after herself.

Her question was simple: was it okay for her to ask her daughter to split the rent 50/50?

While the Reddit community gave their two cents on the situation. The California-based parenting expert Stef Tousignant also talked to the media about the situation.

Tousignant said parents have several options in situations like these, “Use your power to force or coerce, give in and let your child dictate the complete outcome — or use love, empathy, and patience to come up with a solution with your child,” she also said. 

“The mother needs to come to the table with compassion for her daughter but boundaries for herself — and the daughter needs to come to the table with respect for her mother and accountability for her actions,” the expert shared. 

As for the Reddit community, some people were angry at the mother for asking, one user wrote, “Why should she pay half when the home is filled with all [of] your things?”

While another user added, “Why are you too tired to move your stuff but not too tired to cash your daughter’s checks?”

Another user shared a way to make the ask fair, “Charging her rent? Fine, no problem there. But if she doesn’t have … use of half the space in the home yet, then remedy that before you charge her or adjust the rent [percentage] accordingly,” the same user added.