Dear Bess,

I need to get this off my chest before I say something I regret.

My daughter, her husband and their four children have recently moved in with my husband and me. It hasn’t been easy – eight people in one house means everyone has had to compromise on space and privacy – but we’re making it work because family is family and we love them.

What I am struggling to make work is the behaviour of my son-in-law’s parents.

They have taken to walking through my front door – my front door, in my home – without knocking, without calling ahead and without so much as a by-your-leave, simply because their son and grandchildren happen to be living here at the moment. They march in, make themselves comfortable and act as though this is a shared family residence rather than someone else’s private home that they have been absolutely not invited to treat as their own.

I would never dream of doing this to them. The thought wouldn’t even cross my mind. And yet here we are.

I don’t want to cause a scene or create tension in what is already a complicated living arrangement. But I am a woman at the end of her tether, Bess. What on earth do I do?

– At My Wit’s End in my Own Living Room

Dear Wit’s End,

Oh, I feel this letter in my bones.

You have opened your home – genuinely opened it, in the fullest and most generous sense of the word – to your daughter and her family at what sounds like a genuinely difficult time. You have rearranged your space, your privacy and your daily routines to accommodate eight people under one roof. And in return, you are now finding that another family entirely has decided your home is simply an extension of wherever their son happens to be living at the time.

It is rude. Let’s say that plainly and get it out of the way. Walking into someone else’s home without knocking is rude regardless of the circumstances, and the circumstances here make it considerably more so.

But – and I say this gently – the people most able to fix this are not the in-laws. They are your daughter and son-in-law.

Here is the thing about uninvited guests: they rarely know they’re unwelcome until someone tells them. His parents may well come from the kind of family where doors are always open and nobody knocks and that’s simply how things are done. It doesn’t make it acceptable in your home, but it does mean they may be genuinely oblivious rather than deliberately inconsiderate. A quiet word from their son – “Mum, Dad, this is still her house, you need to knock and check first” – will land very differently than any amount of pointed looks from you.

So step one is a calm, private conversation with your daughter and son-in-law. Not a complaint session, not a list of grievances, but a practical discussion about how visits from his parents should work now that the living arrangements have changed. How much notice would you like? Where are they welcome to sit? How long is comfortable? These are not unreasonable questions and the answers will give everyone a framework to work within.

Step two – and I cannot recommend this highly enough – is to start locking your front door.

I know it sounds almost too simple. But a locked door is a locked door. It requires someone to knock. It requires you to choose to answer. It restores, in one small physical act, the boundary that has been quietly erased. If anyone asks why the door is suddenly locked, you are welcome to cite security, habit, or – as one rather inspired soul suggested to me recently – the fact that you and your husband occasionally appreciate some private time on the sofa. I’ll leave that one to your discretion.

You have taken on an enormous amount. Your home, your comfort and your sense of peace in your own four walls deserve to be protected. That is not selfish. That is simply the reasonable expectation of anyone who owns a front door.

Lock it, love. And then have the conversation.

Warmly, Bess

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