Dear Richard Madeley: ‘How do I tell my lazy brother he has to change?’
telegraph.co.uk— M, via emailForgive the cliché: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. You and your parents have done all you can to persuade your brother to get off his backside and make something of himself, but he stubbornly refuses to abandon his lazy lifestyle.
To his way of thinking, why should he? Three meals a day, a roof over his head, computer games to while away the hours… he’s in clover, isn’t he?I don’t think there’s a thing that you, a sibling, can do to get him to buck his ideas up.
You say he’s not depressed, so he’s clearly made a conscious decision to be a constant drain on his parents. Only they can turn the tap of misplaced generosity off, and it sounds as if they’ve decided to go with the flow, however reluctantly.
What you can do is set down a clear marker for the future. I think you are perfectly entitled to spell out a few home truths to this workshy brother of yours.
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