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Four years later and your son or daughter has walked across the stage, taken a diploma, and tossed their cap into the air. Congratulations! Your child has successfully earned a college degree and is now ready to set off on his or her own. Unfortunately, your child is about to enter the real world, a world in which the unemployment rate in the United States averaged 9.6 percent for the year 2010.

What happens, then, if your happy son or daughter successfully graduates from college only to find themselves simply another number in that unfortunate statistic?

Home They Come!

A year ago, My Life ROI published a post devoted to five financial tips for parents whose high school graduate was leaving for college. In the same spirit of that post, I’d like to offer to parents four tips to help them properly welcome and support their unemployed son or daughter upon his or her returning home after graduation day.

1) Have Another Talk

If you’ve offered your son or daughter a place to stay after college, then it’s important to have another talk with him or her to establish good communication. During this talk, you and your child should set out an agreement as to how everyone will behave in the house. Try to respect your son or daughter’s wishes; after all, you’re the parent of a college graduate now… an adult! Likewise, ask him or her to respect your own sanity as well. Figure out ways that you can accommodate him or her, and in return he or she should find ways to help out around the house.

Finally, you should encourage your son or daughter to come up with a plan for finding a job and eventually moving out. Try to establish a timetable by which you and your son or daughter can check each progress towards an ultimate goal: your child’s complete independence.

2) Keep Each Other Accountable

As you get used to living again with your son or daughter under your roof, you should make it a habit of keeping him or her accountable for the agreement you made. Politely ask how the job search is going. Ask to help connect him or her to your acquaintances that might be able to pass around a resume or two. Of course, you don’t want to pester anyone, so try to do this as casually as possible.

Show interest in your son or daughter’s predicament, but not so much as to make the situation uncomfortable. If you feel tension, don’t hesitate to encourage your child. You should remind him or her that you have the best of intentions.

3) Lead by Example

Because your child doesn’t have any income, you’ll be providing him or her with relatively free room and board. This is a wonderful way to help your son or daughter gain insight into the family financial situation, but it certainly doesn’t mean you can’t turn it into a teaching moment. Ask if your son or daughter would be willing to handle balancing the checkbook or sorting the bills.

This will involve your boomerang child in the financial situation at home, thus showing him or her how much effort goes into properly managing the family’s money. Hopefully, seeing these costs will encourage your son or daughter to double his or her efforts at finding a job.

4) Adjust the Relationship

One thing you should keep in mind is this: just because your son or daughter is back in the house, it doesn’t mean you have to resume your old roles as parent and child, whatever those roles were. Here’s a chance for your relationship with your son or daughter to grow in new ways. You can try to become an advisor to your child, an old friend, an expert in certain life areas. Likewise, so too can your son or daughter teach you a thing or two about life.

This doesn’t mean you cannot expect your child to respect your values in your own house, but that you should expect it as you would expect it of an adult to be welcomed as a guest, rather than a child to be disciplined.

But Have a Backup Plan

So, what happens if your son or daughter’s plan fails? Say your child had planned to move out within a year, but fourteen months have passed and he or she has no job leads? How do you handle that? You have some options, sure, and you should definitely talk them over with your child.

Some parents have offered to help their son or daughter find a cheap apartment by ‘loaning’ money on the grounds that the son or daughter take a part time job and pay back the money plus interest. Others act like benevolent landlords and extend their son or daughter’s ‘lease’ for a few months.

Whatever you do, you should make sure that it is supportive of your son or daughter, as long as he or she is being responsible and actively trying to improve the situation. The important thing here is that everyone is patient with one another.