Dad forces 21-year-old daughter to pay $1600 in rent, despite only charging her sister $400: 'I have the smallest room in the house.'

Is it wrong for a parent to charge their adult child rent to sleep in their childhood bedroom? Does said child being in college and having a job complicate the matter? 

49% of adults under 30 live with their parents. In 2019, only 37% of adults under 30 lived with their parents. One might see this and assume it's due to a bad economy or Gen Z being incapable of holding down a full-time job, but that's not the case. 70% of the 25- to 34-year-olds living with their parents are employed. They live at home to get ahead economically, whether that means paying off student loans, saving for a down payment on a house, or investing aggressively instead of giving all their money to a landlord. 

It remains to be seen whether these young people will regret the time they spent sleeping in their childhood bedroom instead of spreading their wings. They may look back on this time as a prolonged adolescence, when they didn't learn important adult skills like cooking for themselves, forming romantic relationships, or managing their money properly. Although many young adults living at home say they do it to save money, there's no concrete way to track whether that is actually what they are doing. If you don't have rent, groceries, or utilities to pay for, it's pretty easy to blow $500 on concert tickets. If you're saving a specific amount of money you need to move out, that can motivate you to avoid wasting it. But if you're living at home indefinitely until something amorphous, like "cost of living," goes down, you're going to be living at home for the rest of your natural life. 

A lot more parents charge their adult children rent to live at home than you'd assume. Anywhere from 48-73% of parents do this, but it varies by region. In stories like these, parents charge their kids only $200 a month to live at home, which is cheaper than renting anywhere in the United States. It forces their adult child to stay employed, which many parents prioritize because they don't want to subsidize a NEET into their late twenties and early 30s. If you agree that it isn't morally wrong to charge your child money to live at home, you might disagree with overcharging them to live at home as a means of controlling them so they can't afford to move out.