Women with irresponsible adult siblings, how does this affect your relationship with them?

Same, my parents "protected" my brother to the point where he is emotionally and mentally crippled.

It's like watching the parent of a baby/toddler who is learning to walk. The child will fall. He will bump his head and scrape his knees. He will cry. He will be uncomfortable. No parent is happy about the pain and discomfort, but every child who has ever learned to walk has experienced this -- it's damn near impossible to learn how to walk without falling or making mistakes.

If you decide you will "protect" your baby from those falls by strapping him into a wheelchair and pushing him around, whelp, eventually you will have a 10yo child who cannot walk and never will -- the muscles have atrophied beyond recovery.

It is possible to love your child to the point of crippling him. My parents crippled my brother by allowing him to NEVER face the consequences of his actions and now he is crippled -- 35 years old and never had a full time job or a roommate or even taken the fucking bus!

I've made well over 100k/yr for the past 10yrs and (pre-COVID) I still rode the bus! The bus gets its own lane on the highway where I live so it saves me at least 60min/day to ride the bus than drive.

I had a good job immediately out of college and yet I still had roommates till I was 29 because I was single in an extremely high cost of living area and the savings were enormous -- each year I had over $15,000 in cash MORE in my pocket than the people who lived alone.

And yet here is my spoiled brat of a brother -- never had a fulltime job and has never ridden a bus (mommy and daddy make sure he always has a car!), never had a freaking roommate, never cooked a meal for himself (mommy and daddy bought him fast food until he was over 300 fucking pounds!).

And here he sits, 35 years old, still living in his childhood bedroom and whining about the flavors of yogurt my mom buys. I regularly meet 13yo boys who are more mature and have better emotional control than my brother who is nearly 3 times their age. It's just . .my god. . the enabling! It's sad and infuriating at the same time.

/r/AskWomen Thread Parent