Having roommates is pretty easy when you’re young and single. Everyone has a rotten apple in the bunch, but designing your life around sharing living spaces with one or more other adults is not that hard in most cases. You might have to ask your 23-year-old roommate to do the dishes and they might get angry at you for that, but at least they won’t throw a tantrum and break the dishes. If you have a roommate like that, you might as well have a toddler.

It’s a lot harder to be a good roommate if you have kids. In a sense, the kids are your roommate’s roommate, too, and getting them to respect their things isn’t easy. I understand that times are tough; single parents being roommates with other single parents gives them the stability they would not already have, but it’s often a recipe for disaster, depending on the kids.