Carolyn Hax: Parents debate making their recent master’s grad pay rent

Q: What are your thoughts on charging rent to an adult daughter who will graduate with her master’s degree? I said we would charge her a nominal fee, as it would teach her responsibility after we footed the bill for her education. My husband says we would not need to charge her rent since we can afford it. Who’s right?

— The Greedy Mom?

A: I have something beneath thoughts, more like a visceral reaction, when you say you intend to “teach” your daughter “responsibility” right after she earns her master’s.

It’s not just you. It’s this:

When adults move back in with parents, there’s natural tension because adults don’t like being told what to do — but old parent-child power dynamics don’t just shut off like you’re flipping a switch.

If you go into this arrangement primed to “teach” your daughter a thing or two, especially when she has JUST performed to a literal higher degree of responsibility, then you aren’t neutralizing this inherent conflict — you’re actively choosing to stoke it. I.e., treating her like a child.

You will have much better results, in both harmony and responsibility, if you PRESUME her maturity, competence and eagerness to make an adult contribution. (Trade her master’s for iffy behavior/serious doubts and I’d say the same thing.)

So if your husband is correct that money is not an issue, and if your concern is solely that your daughter contribute, then let her do so in the most meaningful way. Approach her as an adult partner in the household who helps envision and decide how this new arrangement will work. Listen to her ideas for contributing. Handing down orders after working them out with her dad is infantilizing. Parental business as usual.

This is what I mean by neutralizing the natural conflict. But if you’re ever unsure whether a plan of yours is going to stoke the conflict, the easiest gauge is to do what I did: View it from the kid perspective. Imagine how you’d feel on the receiving end of a parental handing- or talking-down-to like that.

Maybe you don’t have to imagine it and that’s how your parents treated you. OK. If that’s the case, then here’s a reminder to repeat things with subsequent generations because they were positive and productive, not because they were done to you. We don’t always judge the effects of our upbringings perfectly, but it’s worth more than a cursory try.

Last thing. Even if you see your home as your children’s home as well, at any age, it is generous of you to open your home again to your adult daughter. This arrangement also is some bonus time with her in your day-to-day life that you probably didn’t expect. And I’m guessing it’s an anxious and undefined period for her, after her graduate program but before she can live independently.

And so on: The more comfortable you can get with flipping all these perspectives around, the more flexible your thinking will be throughout this time of transition. You can’t model anything better than that.

Q: My couple friends have always just split the bill. But I’m no longer “a couple.” Should I still pay 50%?

— Anonymous

A: That’s insane, no. Unless you’re ordering for two.

Please tell me your “couple friends” aren’t really so bad at math and humanity that they can’t divide by three.

• Email Carolyn at tellme@washpost.com, or chat with her online at 11 a.m. Central time each Friday at washingtonpost.com.

© 2025 The Washington Post