How to Prepare Your Kids for Roommates

Roommates take your food. They borrow your clothes. They’re loud at 2am. Teaching your teen to handle this now (before they’re living it) makes all the difference. Here’s how to prepare them to be — and survive — a great roommate.

Someday, your teenager is going to move out of your house. When that day comes, there is a very good chance they will have a roommate. Whether that is because they are in college or because housing costs are so high they need to share rent with someone, a roommate is likely in their future.

Because of that, you want to spend time in the teen years preparing your child to have a roommate. You want to prepare them for the difficulties that might arise with roommates. You also want to prepare them to be a good roommate. Here are some things to teach your kids! Remember, we are raising future adults. The time to start is whatever age they are now.

Post Contents

• How to Be a Good Roommate
• Difficulties of Having Roommates
• How to Handle Roommate Conflict
• Talking About Rent, Bills, and Shared Expenses
• Setting Expectations Before Move-In Day
• The Bottom Line

How to Be a Good Roommate

You want your kids to be good roommates. Here are some things to make sure they understand before moving out.

1. Not Everyone Has the Same Cleanliness Standards You Do

This can go both ways. If your child likes things really clean, there is an excellent chance their roommates will not have that same desire. If your child tends to be messy, chances are they will have roommates who want them to be cleaner.

Brayden is a very, very clean person. He has very high cleanliness standards. I taught him throughout his teen years that he could not expect roommates to keep his same standards. If he wanted things to his level of clean, he would have to be the one to do it. That helped him immensely on his mission, where he typically had 5 other roommates at a time while living in Africa for two years. He had roommates from all over the world from multiple continents. There were a lot of cultures to mesh together. He was also living with other 18-21ish year old young men. Not typically a super-clean demographic.

He just accepted that if he wanted things at his standard, he had to do them. He couldn’t demand others clean to his standard. This carried over into his first year of college.

If you have a child who doesn’t mind a mess, teach them to be mindful of shared spaces. Require that mindfulness at home and teach them to develop habits to keep common space clean. Make sure they know to clean up after themselves. They can keep their own space in whatever shape they want to, but it is unkind to leave a trail behind themselves in space everyone shares.

This is really just an extension of the chore habits you’ve hopefully already been building for years. The teens who grow up doing their own laundry, cleaning bathrooms, and picking up after themselves at home are the ones who walk into a shared apartment already knowing how to keep their half of the bargain.

>>>Read: How To Teach Children Life Skills: 10 Steps

2. Communication Solves (and Prevents) Most Problems

A huge amount of roommate friction comes down to one thing: nobody said anything out loud. Your teen isn’t a mind reader, and neither is whoever they end up living with. Teach your kids to talk about problems directly and early, rather than letting resentment build silently until it explodes.

This is a skill you can start building at home right now, in the low-stakes disagreements you already have with your teen. Teach them how to bring up something bothering them calmly, how to listen when someone brings a concern to them, and how to stay respectful even when they disagree. Those are the exact same muscles they’ll need to say, “hey, can we talk about the dishes,” instead of just quietly stewing about it for three weeks.

It is also good to teach your teens that different people have different personalities and tolerances. We are not all the same human.

>>>Read: How To Best Handle Teen Backtalk

Difficulties of Having Roommates

There are many difficulties with roommates. You all come from different backgrounds. You all have different personalities. Just think of how hard it can be to share spaces as a family where you have someone in charge (a parent) who is directing the standards, curfews, noise levels, and chore lists.

As young adults, no one is in charge. You are each in charge of yourself. What seems like the obvious right way to be for one person might not even cross the mind of another person. Here are some realities of having roommates that can be hard to deal with. Not every one of these things will happen, but they have each happened to at least one of the four of us in my house who have had roommates in college (my husband, Brayden, Kaitlyn, and me).

• Roommates might take your food
• Roommates might use your stuff (without asking)
• Roommates might wear your clothes (also without asking)
• Roommates might break your things (and they will not offer to replace it)
• Roommates might not clean on a regular basis
• Roommates might not help clean when you move out
• Roommates might be really loud when you are trying to sleep
• Roommates might not come home at night and you won’t know why

None of these things mean your child has a bad roommate or a bad living situation. They’re just part of sharing a small space with another human being who grew up in a completely different household than yours, with completely different unspoken rules about what’s normal. The goal isn’t to prevent your teen from ever experiencing any of this — it’s to make sure it doesn’t blindside them when it happens. This can help them know it is normal to have things like this happen.

How to Handle Roommate Conflict

Since some friction is basically guaranteed, it helps to talk through how to handle it before your teen is actually living it. A few things worth discussing ahead of time:

Encourage your teen to address small issues while they’re still small. It’s a lot easier to say, “hey, could you ask before borrowing my clothes?” the first time it happens than after it’s happened a dozen times and resentment has piled up. Make this the culture of your home so it is not foreign when they move out.

Talk about the difference between things worth addressing and things worth letting go. Not every irritation needs a confrontation. Help your teen think through which battles actually matter to them. For example, Brayden just always took out the garbage. Could he have asked everyone else to help? Yes. And that would have been reasonable. But he chose to just look at it as a way he could serve his roommates.

Remind them that a written agreement — even an informal one, like a shared note in their phone about chore rotations or quiet hours — heads off a lot of “well, I didn’t know that was the rule” conflicts down the road.

And if a roommate situation truly isn’t working, it’s okay to say so and make a change. Not every mismatch can be talked through, and your teen doesn’t have to stay somewhere unsafe or miserable just to avoid an uncomfortable conversation. They do not have to live with them again the next year. They can move on.

Talking About Rent, Bills, and Shared Expenses

Money is one of the fastest ways roommate relationships go sideways, so it’s worth a direct conversation before your teen signs a lease with anyone. A few things to cover:

Make sure they understand exactly how rent and utilities will be split, and get it in writing somewhere — even a simple text thread everyone can refer back to. Talk about what happens if someone is late on their share one month, because it will happen eventually and it’s much easier to handle if there’s already an understood plan.

If they’re splitting groceries or household supplies, help them think through whether they want to share everything or keep things separate. There’s no one right answer here, but it needs to be decided rather than assumed.

In student housing, typically each person pays their rent directly to a landlord, so in college, this is not usually an issue.

Setting Expectations Before Move-In Day

A lot of roommate conflict can be headed off entirely with one honest conversation before anyone unpacks a single box. Encourage your teen to talk with a future roommate about things like:

Sleep schedules and noise tolerance, especially if one of them is an early riser and the other stays up late. Guests over — how much notice, how often, overnight or not. How shared spaces will get cleaned, and on what kind of schedule. Whether food and toiletries are shared or separate.

It might feel awkward to bring these things up with someone they just met, but it is far less awkward than living with a stranger’s assumptions for a full year. It is easier to have one slightly uncomfortable conversation up front than a slow-building conflict that could have been avoided.

In reality, they probably will not have the conversation beforehand–at least not their first year moving out. Do not step in and take control. Let them decide whether or not to have it and let them deal with the results. They are now young adults. Let them do it.

Conclusion

Roommates are one of those life experiences that can’t really be taught in the abstract — your teen is going to learn a lot of this by living it. But the habits you build now, during the teen years, make a real difference in how smoothly that transition goes. Teach them to keep shared spaces clean without being asked, to speak up calmly when something’s bothering them, and to go in with realistic expectations instead of assuming everyone operates the way your household does.

It won’t prevent every roommate headache — nothing will. But it will mean your kid walks in prepared instead of blindsided, which is really all any of us can hope to give them before they head out the door.

And also, roommates can be so much fun! They can turn into lifelong friends. It isn’t all doom, gloom, and difficult. But it is good to be prepared for difficulties when they happen.

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