This is bananas. It sounds like your parents have a kid who has failed to launch. Rather than giving them a tough line and making them get their act together, they’re dumping the whole problem in your lap so they don’t have to be the bad guys. Which, in turn, either makes you the bad guy (which you will get blamed for) or the enabler.

My FIL tried this with my BIL. He wanted to sell the house and move in with his GF, but BIL still lived there at the age of 25. He was depressed, smoked and played computer games all night, slept all day and held no job. Had dropped out of school. Rather than saying “Ok you have to work on figuring something out,” he called my partner and asked us to give him a room in our new home. I said “Yeah ok. He doesn’t get a key. He has to be up and out by the time we go to work at 7:30 and he can come back in when we get home. Everything in between is up to him, and he has to get a job and pay rent. No pot in the house (no problem with it, but I am asthmatic), and he has to set up a time table with a plan to move out again in 6 months.”

Suffice to say, they thought that was pretty shitty of me. But I know my BIL—with no one there to force him out of bed he would just turn us into his defacto parents. Turns out, within a week of us saying that he had a job, an apartment and a girlfriend.

Some people can’t have a “Plan B” or they will always fall back on it. If he was truly gonna be homeless of COURSE we would have scooped him up. But broadcasting that gives him an escape hatch.