Weddingbee boards

The divorced aunt should be addressed as Ms. Jane Smith.  The daughter would be Miss Caroline Smith.  Technically persons over the age of 18 get their own invitation, but I am not doing that either...  At over $7 per invitation, if you want your own invitation you can get your own apartment! 

In fact, if you want to include one invitation for all the people living together under one roof, you can probably just put both FMIL and FH's aunt's names as you would for an unmarried couple living together (LOL!)

Actually I do understand Niki - at least a little.  But, speaking as someone marrying a man with a 20-year old daughter still living at home (IMO) if your parents are still supporting you, you are not really "an adult in your own right."  You might like to think that you are, but that doesn't really start until you are paying your own rent, doing your own cooking, washing your own clothes, and all that.  And I do agree that if its only one invitation, its not a big impact on your budget. 

In our case, we are inviting only the kids of our friends whom we feel are also our friends or friends of FI's kids, and that adds up to 16 kids between the ages of 18 and 21, all of whom are still supported by their parents and live at home at least part of the year.  By the time we send out invitations, most of those at college will be back home for the summer - we did consider sending separate invites to dorm rooms and college apartments, if only because we remember how nice it is to get that kind of mail.  In the cases where kids will actually be living at a separate address (a couple will be taking summer classes) we are sending a separate invite. 

Niki - I should thank you for challenging me to think about this a little harder.  FI and I talked about it this afternoon while working on the house.  Like most of the general etiquette rules, I think general application can be a mistake, but we decided that there are some 18+ year olds on our list who would probably appreciate their own invitation.  A lot probably not (we have a number of young men in that category, and I don't think any of them want their own invite) but some probably yes.  So we are going to send them on sort of a case-by-case basis.

Every situation is different.  I have friends who despair of getting their kids to leave home and be responsible for themselves.  My and my friends mostly picked up and left, and were pretty much on our own after high school, or at least after college.  I do have two friends who stayed with their parents for years - in both cases, they had a parent who was very ill and while they could have easily afforded their own place they were needed to help out.  I know they certainly envied us our relative freedom, and it must have been frustrating for them that there were people who assumed they were just losers who wouldn't get their own place.