It's Not the Punishment

Post Reply New Topic

At least a day.

Today I decided on Monday I gotta do this and Tuesday I'm going to do this.

I usually need a week's warning. A day's warning is likely to cause panic attacks.

For me no warning would be sufficient. My mother would know better than to mess with my internet and if she was foolish enough to try anything she thinks would be accomplished by shutting it off would not be done by me. I'd be too busy complaining about my lack of internet and wanting it back on and I'd probably play The Sims since I don't need internet to do so.

Luckily for me my mother doesn't try to make me do stuff but there have been a few occasions over the years when my internet had problems and wasn't working. Those were bad times.

The above was warning I need for anything. Disconnecting my internet doesn't mean I'll have no choice but to be productive. I'll read books or play video games that don't require me to be online.

It kind of weirds me out that Pandora_Box's parents would "punish" him like this, though, as he's an adult.

I grew up without the internet. I don't need it, strictly speaking. I sometimes feel like I do, but I know I don't. It couldn't be used as leverage against me.

I grew up without it too. I didn't get internet at home until I was 23 and I didn't get my first computer until I was 33.

Seems a drastic way to get you to do a bit of housework. Especially as you're not a child. I always allowed my son to keep his own room in whatever state he wanted to, as long as he didn't fill it with explosives or something really crazy. Depends on how well you've played your part in communal chores. It seems rather insensitive of him if he's not given you any warning of turning the Web off. Even if it's been distracting you away from the chores and he's at his wits' end aboout that, I don't see why he couldn't give you half an hour to check your emails and then turn it off. It looks like he's got control of the switch, so he could probably afford to stretch his style a bit without everything going chaotic.

I guess a lot depends on the previous history of the problem.

No wonder I freak becuase of an internet outage. I once got slapped hard becuase of my mild panic when the internet was not working. i was upset, the NT was angry at my upset. I got belted. i ended that relationship.

At least now I know there are other people who get concerned enough to say something or feel something when the internet is out.

He may be an adult but adult children still have responsibilities at their parents home like picking up after themselves, help clean up around the house so they are not a burden to them. That's the way it works in the real world. Contributing to the household. Plus since the father owns the home and pays for the internet service, he can actually turn it off anytime he wants. Just like parents can decided if their children can use their car or not or their computer. That is like a loophole for punishing the adult child because their item so they can decide "You can't use it anymore" because they want them to help out around the house lets say so they decide "Fine, if you want to be lazy, then we won't be nice anymore so we won't let you use our internet." No different than going to someone's house and they say you can't use their internet. But lot of people are nice to share it with their guests or visitors. We share ours with our neighbors. We don't care if he uses it for free while we are the ones paying for it.

I am an adult living with my parents. I know how that works.

I also do not recall that Pandora_Box said he was being lazy or was accused of being lazy, and I am suspicious of accusations of "laziness" because numerous disorders can give the appearance of laziness, even when the person in question is pushing their abilities harder than is healthy for them.

Anyway, punishing an adult is treating them like a child, and that's really not appropriate. Parents shouldn't feel entitled to continue treating their children as literal children just because they live in the same house. As I said, I live with my parents and they do not typically treat me like this. When I've needed to do stuff, they just asked me to do it and I did it. Sometimes I did not understand they were actually asking me to do something because the request was too subtle, but I do not need to be coerced by turning off the internet or other aggressive tactics.

Even though I spend a lot of time on the internet, for me it doesn't seem to actually be the internet but rather sitting down at the computer, so if for some reason our internet gets shut off (which it does occasionally, and has done for months at a time) I simply do something else on the computer.
If I couldn't go on the computer at all for any reason, I tend to get agitated and fidgety, mainly because it helps with a lot of my tics and idle thoughts that tend to send me into a nervous breakdown since my brain goes into "hyper-drive" when it isn't stimulated.

Either way, perhaps you could integrate cleaning your room into your routine? Pretty much as soon as I wake up, I get out of bed, turn the computer on, make my bed and quickly organize my room. If you don't do it regularly, then you'll end up with a big uncomfortable mess. Even we aspies should follow certain rules, which aren't there to jilt us out of our own order, but to make sure we take care of ourselves and our environments. Pretty much just like anyone.

If you do clean your room in your own time, then why would your Dad feel the need to cut off the internet? Usually we only ever hear one side of the story on the internet.

So what is a parent supposed to do if they have an adult child who is trashing their home, always bringing friends over and they don't like having all those people over all the time and they don't like it when their adult child leaves messes around and never picked up after themselves? I am not saying this is what Pandora_Box is doing. Kick them out perhaps or set limits for them? Wouldn't not letting them have people over all the time be treating them like children? I wouldn't think so because their house, their rules and it be no different than them renting a room in someone's home and the owners also have rules so they also don't allow their renters to bring people over to their place.

I would hate to have my son living with me as an adult and always leaving messes and never picking up after himself. When I lived with my aunt and uncle, I had to always wipe crumbs off the counter and put the dishes in the sink or dishwasher and not be on the computer so late at night because the typing kept them up so I was always upstairs in my room using the laptop my dad loaned me. I also had to keep the bathroom clean to. Were they treating me like a child? It was their house so I had to follow their rules.

It's possible to resolve these potential conflicts as adults, though. It's not necessary to treat adults as children in order to achieve harmonious cohabitation. The situation you're describing with your aunt and uncle is pretty standard in that it was similar to expected behavior whenever I've lived with roommates, let alone with relatives.

There's no need to use coercive or punitive tactics in order to force cooperation, and I can guarantee that my family gets further with me because they typically treat me as an adult. Treating me as if I am a subordinate and a child goes nowhere. I can't speak for anyone else, obviously, but I can't really speak to hypothetical situations, either.

I do not think parents are justified in whatever actions they choose simply because they're parents. I have already had the experience of one parent insisting that I had to live by very strict rules just because I lived under the same roof, so I moved out immediately. Of course, that parent is a psychopath* and my mother divorced him after I left.

I've seen too much of parents being overly strict, overly critical, abusive, and controlling to take the idea that they're entitled to take any action they deem necessary as a valid approach, or to use extremes as the yardstick by which to measure what is reasonable. I don't see any reason why parents should treat their adult children as if they're still children.

* Thank god he's not biologically related to me

Well I probably would be treating my own kids as kids when they are adults because I do not know how to treat them like adults if they are acting like children. Apparently telling someone to pick something up is treating them like a child. My husband used to say "yes mommy" when I tell him to clean this or that up he left. But I backed off after I finally started to understand how hard it is for him to pick up his clothes and stuff because his feet stop him from doing it and his bad eye sight makes him not see the crumbs he leaves on the counter tops. But if he didn't have bad feet, then I would still be "treating him like a child." Now I pick up after him than waiting for him to do it when he can because I know he won't take advantage of me. Only way for me to not treat someone like a child is if they pick up after themselves and don't do what I dislike such as smoking indoors or keeping me up at night or not bringing over friends because I do not like lot of people over and be in my personal space.

What do you do if they decide to not live by your rules like let's say my son decided to start smoking and I told him I don't want him doing it in my house nor near it and he would have to stay at least twenty feet away from it or do it out in his car. But he hates that rule I have so he does it anyway. Okay I can tell him to move out then if he doesn't like my rules. I do always think if kids don't like their parents rules, move out.

I do not mean to treat anyone like children but it's so hard if they are acting like one.

Last edited by League_Girl on 17 Jul 2012, 2:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

Very much the same here, but you know ... before I ever had a computer (do I ever feel old saying that), that anxiety was absent. I still had anxieties of course, and computers have definately benefitted me in a number of positive ways, even relieved certain anxieties and provided opportunities for personal growth and connection with others that might never otherwise have existed.

But. Someday my computer will break down. At first I will be agitated, but I think, I will try to wait til I'm not, before replacing it. There is a certain balance and ease I remember without them, that I'd like to return to at least for a short while. In this age it is not really practical to live without one for long, but this just contributes to the sense of enslavement they sometimes give me.

There are too many hypotheticals in this. I know my living situation and I know what Pandora_Box has said about his living situation, and I feel that taking punitive measures as one might take toward a child is inappropriate when dealing with adults, even when the adult may be deemed to be acting like a child. When my sister was hooked on meth and not taking care of her children while living with my mother in the 1990s, my mother didn't send her to her room or shut off the cable until she cleaned up, she got custody of the children and told her what she'd have to do in order to have the opportunity to have custody back (as in, the kids would choose whether they went back to her). And my sister eventually did those things.

There are times she did act like a child and sometimes an extremely poorly behaved one (as throwing plates of food at the ceiling behavior), but she wasn't grounded or banned from phone privileges or had her TV taken away or had the cable shut off because she was "misbehaving." My mother responded to her behavior as she would to any other adult doing the same. And I know this is true because she's raised one other woman's children while that woman was in prison and detox, and took care of another woman's children for a couple of years after she dropped them off here for a night of babysitting and didn't come back for several months.

I just don't think there's any reason to treat adults like they're children. Whatever they're doing, treating them like children is generally condescending and patronizing, and I think most adults react fairly badly to it. If I had children, and I wanted to passive-aggressively push them away from me, I suppose insisting on treating them as if they were children when grown adults would be one way to achieve that. Just because what they do may seem childish does not mean that the situation cannot be handled as if they are adults.