A Parenting Coach Says You Can Search Your Adult Child’s Room If They Live At Home

Whether your adult child has always lived at home, or just moved back in, it can be difficult to work out boundaries. Yes, they’re your child, but they’re also not a kid anymore. At some point, there should probably be a discussion about what rules are fair for an emerging adult living under your roof.

Once you get those rules in place, another question arises: what can parents do if they think their agreed-upon boundaries have been crossed? Can you then break a boundary yourself, and search your grown-up kid’s room? Parenting coach Kim Muench says yes, you can — but as an adult living in my parents’ house myself, I have some questions.

First, let’s set the scene. In a video posted to Instagram Reels, Muench explained that her client’s son had come home after college didn’t work out for him, and was not paying rent, so the family put a living agreement in place. One aspect of the agreement was that the son would not have any vape materials in the house — the parents understood they couldn’t stop him from vaping entirely, but they could control what went on inside their home.

“Shortly after he willingly signed an agreement that said he would not have vape material in the house, pods were found in his room, in a desk drawer,” Muench said. “Parents found them while looking for some keys to the family car.”

One little note here... why were they looking in his desk drawer for car keys? That doesn’t exactly sound like a place you would put them. I’ll admit, I’m starting off a little suspicious of the parents’ motives. But, moving on...

Muench said that the parents threw away the vape material they found — “Consequences work best when they relate to the behavior”— and would do it again if they found more in the future.

Ultimately, her stance is that, if your adult child is living at home, not paying rent and otherwise financially dependent on you, you are well within your rights as a parent to search their room. She says it’s a matter of boundaries — if you set a boundary, you have the means to enforce it.

“You don't have to be an a**hole about it, because, again, you're trying to rebuild a relationship with this kid who's come home from college,” Muench said. “But, on occasion, if you feel like looking through that room to see if there's any vape materials there, you can absolutely do that. This is a time in their lives that they are working on becoming independent. This is a time that your relationship is shifting. You no longer control them, but stop compromising your personal values in your home and disempowering yourselves.”

The comments were pretty split. Plenty of users agreed with Muench’s take.

“I think if you tell the kid beforehand that you’re going to do random searches, it’s fine,” one user said. “They understand the terms and by continuing to live at home, they agree to those terms. The way I look at it is, if you’re not financially independent, and you are living somewhere and not paying rent, technically you are not really an adult.”

“Yup. Your house, your rules. Respect goes both ways,” said another.

“Every tenancy comes with rules. Welcome to real life,” another commented.

But, there were also plenty of users that felt like a boundary was crossed here — and it wasn’t the parents’.

“I strongly disagree,” said one user. “I’d never search an adult child’s room. I’d never want them rifling through my things, so I’m not going to go through theirs unless I suspect something illegal is going on.”

“Going into his room if you smell vape and asking him to stop, great. But entering his room with the intention to snoop around can break the trust between the son and parents. Especially when he keeps his part of the contract of ‘no vaping in the house,’” said another.

“As a Greek parent, mother, i simply can not imagine that there is this discussion!!! To rent a room to your kid?? It's her/his home also!! Equal member of the home,” another user said.

I have to side with the second set of users here. Your adult child isn’t entitled to do anything they want in your home, but it is also their home, and they’re entitled to privacy and respect. Searching through their room — on some pretty questionable grounds! — is as much of a violation of trust as breaking the agreed-upon rules.

Am I a little bit biased towards the kid in this scenario? Perhaps! But, as someone who has maintained a pretty solid relationship with their parents while living at home, I think this is one issue you can trust a 20-something-year-old on.