Preparing for the Next Chapter
The conveyor belt that once transported adolescents into adulthood has broken down.
Yes, there is another chapter. It’s called extended adolescence, which transitions into emerging adulthood. Nobody knows exactly how long it lasts, but researchers and parent groups agree that in the United States, it goes on into their children’s twenties, and in Germany and Italy, possibly into their forties. In the United States, according to the latest findings, one in five people in their twenties and early thirties currently lives at home, and 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from their parents. This is a huge increase over only one generation ago, when 1 in 10 young adults moved back home and very few received financial support (David, 2014). Apart from cultural issues, neuropsychology explains this. The amygdala (the part of the brain that deals with judgment) is not fully developed until the midtwenties. These young people may not have good judgment and/or fully understand consequences. Once again, when we say, “Parenting is never over; it just changes,” we’re not kidding. We have written an entire book about this: Mom, Can I Move Back in with You? (Gordon & Shaffer, 2004). We felt we had to write that book, because after the soccer games and plays are over, there’s no natural chatroom where parents can go to talk about this. Parents are on their own.
Acknowledging this transition from childhood to adulthood and the need for continued parenting can hit like a lightning bolt. Just when you think you’re done, you realize you aren’t. To accept the concept of extended adolescence, you must recognize that your children aren’t quite ready for adulthood. Research tells us that the journey from childhood to adulthood takes longer and is less defined than in previous generations (David, 2014; Gordon & Shaffer, 2004). Parents are fellow travelers in this newly recognized developmental stage.
Our children appear to be more sophisticated at younger ages, but often this is a superficial maturity. They have such easy access to information and are so facile with it that we assume they know more and can do things before they are actually ready. We assume they are adults because they talk somewhat like adults and are physically large. As a result of social change, most colleges have eliminated the rules they had in the past, like curfews, report cards that went to the parents, mandatory meal cards, and single-sex dorms. Students are left to parent themselves before many of them are actually ready.
Having more sophisticated experiences at a younger age doesn’t mean a person is more grown-up. Marlene, a five-foot-one-inch mother, is more than a foot shorter than her 22-year-old, six-foot-three-inch son, Robby. She said, “My son looks like he should command authority. Robby is not only tall, he’s really big. I have to remind myself he’s still the same boy who is scared of spiders. Sometimes he gets the broom and clears the spider webs before he walks through the archway on our porch.”
Older teens and young adults still need the encouragement and support required by all children, yet the type of encouragement does differ. Parenting at every stage requires the ability to adapt. The need for these skills is even more important during extended adolescence because parents’ role shifts from that of a benevolent dictator to that of a Yoda-like guide. In Chapter 1, we introduced you to the characteristics of adulthood as guideposts for parenting teens. In this chapter, we focus in greater detail on five of them for parenting during the period of extended adolescence and emerging adulthood. As you encourage your children to develop these characteristics, be mindful of the fact that children will integrate the qualities of adulthood incrementally. As one mother said, “Life is not a race.” Understanding this will enable you to be more patient with an emphasis on thinking long term.
This transition in parenting continues to require connection as well as a keen sense of restraint. With older teens and adult children, we must stand back, except when it’s necessary to ensure that they have learned the characteristics of adulthood. In doing this, we are still going to be perfectly imperfect. The truth is, like all of us, our children are a work in progress. During this period, they may seek advice, and they may need advice, but most important, they must make their own decisions, learn the consequences of these decisions, and build their self-confidence by making good decisions or correcting bad ones.
Parents can help their adult children feel less anxious and less pressured by acknowledging and praising each successful step they take toward independence. At the same time, parents need to continue to be loving and supportive but honest when their adult children stumble or make mistakes. Two questions are important to ask: What can I do to support my teens’ development of the characteristics of adulthood and related skills? What do they need to take care of themselves, encourage a sense of well-being, and simultaneously sustain a positive relationship based on respectful and mutual interdependence?
Guideposts for the Transition from the Teenage Years to Adulthood
Based on our professional and personal experience and the wisdom offered by the parents, teens, and adult children in our focus groups, we have identified several characteristics as primary guideposts for parenting during extended adolescence:
Developing respectful and mutual interdependence
Becoming personally responsible
Setting and keeping appropriate boundaries
Obtaining cultural competence
Every family is different, but these guideposts are essential for all adults and transcend differences in race, gender, culture, language, socioeconomic status, and religion. Consider them when making decisions during these transition years.
Being an Adult Is Developing Respectful and Mutual Interdependence
Albert Einstein spoke of human relationships when he wrote, “Separation is an optical illusion of consciousness, and … if we see things only in that framework, we become locked in a prison and lose that capacity to be intimate, compassionate, to know ourselves in the larger sense.” Adults understand the importance of being both independent and connected. The goal of parents, therefore, is to encourage our children to use opportunities to be independent and autonomous without disconnecting.
Individuals within a family can remain autonomous and still be connected through dialogue. Family members can demonstrate this by being tolerant of others in the family, without necessarily agreeing, and by being open to different points of view. Love should not be equated with agreement. Families can take pride in being able to discuss controversial subjects openly without children worrying about parents’ withholding approval. Independent thinking is essential for our children to become confident adults. Parental openness and ability to communicate advice and opinions, without conditions, contributes to the development of a healthy, interdependent relationship with adult children.
Connections can come in life’s small moments in a variety of ways, as evidenced by the following story told by Bob, a 54-year-old father:
I love talking with my adult children. There is a really big difference between saying, “You’re wrong,” and saying, “I disagree.” I have strong opinions, and so do my kids. My late father always said, “Your judgment is no better than your information.” My kids, Sara and Matt, and I can have heated discussions and still respect each other. I don’t treat them like little kids because they disagree with me. There is a wide spectrum of ideas that are OK. Most things don’t matter in the long run.
Debating ideas is our family’s way of staying connected. We love bouncing ideas off one another. Whether it’s discussing a movie, debating an issue, or arguing over religion, my wife and I love watching Sara and Matt become independent thinkers yet still wanting to share their ideas with us.
We want our children to flourish as adults, but we also want them to enjoy the connection with their families. This respectful interdependence between adult children and their parents is fuzzy and imprecise and takes on different meanings and challenges for various types of families.
Often when famous people accept awards, they use the occasion as an opportunity to publicly acknowledge the connection they have with their parents. When Sidney Poitier won a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, he said, “My art portrays the dignity of my parents.” Accepting his Most Valuable Player award in 2014, Kevin Durant spoke of his connection to his single mother: “I don’t think you know what you did; you had my brother when you were eighteen, and three years later I came out. The odds were stacked against us. … When something good happens to me, I tend to look back. … You made us believe, you sacrificed for us, you’re the real MVP” (Schwartz, 2014). These people modeled the idea that being an adult means realizing a sense of family and community as well as independence. As Teddy Roosevelt said, “Connections we make reverberate long after we make them” (Morris, 2001).
Parents must understand that, during extended adolescence, parenting is more about support and respect than about protection. Diane, a 58-year-old mother of two grown sons, said,
You know, I introduce the idea of a patchwork quilt to the foster children I work with. I tell them I don’t want to build a safety net for them. Instead, I want to make a tapestry, with all the pieces stitched together with love. This quilt will embrace them and provide them with warmth when they need it. For me, this is a more comforting image than a safety net with holes in it.
Mutual interdependence enables both parents and adult children to protect themselves and to state their needs while respecting each other’s needs and remaining connected by both giving and receiving assistance when appropriate.
Being an Adult Is Becoming Personally Responsible
When our children are older, indulging them is counterproductive because it doesn’t teach personal responsibility. Regardless of circumstances, this is a time for setting limits and encouraging our children to assume responsibility for themselves, including living within their means. The 51-year-old mother of 21-year-old Stuart said,
Give me a scratched knee anytime; dealing with my son now is much more complicated. Stuart has champagne taste when it comes to eating out. He will fall in love with a trendy new restaurant and think nothing of charging his meals and his drinks to us. It’s usually a restaurant that we would think was too expensive for ourselves. Stuart knows that his spending is over the top, but he chooses to act irresponsibly and satisfy his immediate desire, no matter how often we ask him to watch his spending. Last month we canceled his credit card. Now he will have to experience more of the real world by resisting his impulses and adjusting his spending to what his finances can afford. We hope that, in a way, he might feel relieved.
Not all parents can afford to give their children credit cards during this time, but the same principles of fostering personal responsibility apply.
Parents overindulge their children in ways other than giving them money. One father said, “I was furious at my wife when she gave our son, Noah, a wake-up call before a job interview. She was scared he’d sleep though his alarm and miss the appointment. I yelled, ‘At some point, he has to care more than we do. It’s his job interview, not ours!’” We do a disservice to our emerging adult children when we overdo. Besides creating dependency, we undermine their ability to trust that they can function without us. When parents make decisions based solely on what their children want, the power shifts inappropriately to the children. When children have too much power, they develop a sense of entitlement that may continue into adulthood.
The antidote to a misplaced sense of entitlement and lack of responsibility is to set limits on what we will do for emerging adult children. Many parents talk about making their children happy and are reluctant to set limits. Parents often feel insecure and worry about establishing limits because they don’t want to face their children’s anger. Young children push against their parents’ rules until it may feel as though limits have evaporated. When parents defer to their children, the children suffer because they fail to learn they are not the center of the universe. Some kids resist the process of becoming personally responsible. Parents must be resolute and not overindulge lifestyle, which is different from need. It’s one thing to support needs such as health care and some education costs; it’s another to pay for expensive restaurants, health clubs, and designer clothing. This discourages personal responsibility and encourages dependence. Accepting personal responsibility means that our older teens and young adults hold themselves accountable and accept limits. Without limits, they have a hard time accepting the world as it is.
Growing Up Is Becoming Resilient
Emphasizing effort rather than outcome early on protects young adults as they manage a challenging and competitive world. We hope focusing on effort will allow you to cope better with your children’s disappointments and failures. When children come up short, great antidotes for disappointment include laughter or humor and sharing your own experiences. As comedian Louis C.K. said in an interview with David Letterman, “You aren’t going to get what you want most of the time. If you can learn to be OK with disappointment, if you can survive disappointment, then nothing can beat you” (The David Letterman Show, January 5, 2014).
As parents, we can start to encourage resilience at an early age, and this role continues throughout the teen years into early adulthood. However, the challenges are more complicated and have greater consequences as children become adults. Remember, bigger kids, bigger problems. But we can help older teens and emerging adults to cultivate the capacity to better manage their lives. Resilience includes social competence (empathy, caring communications, sense of humor), problem solving (critical thinking, creative planning, asking for help when necessary), independence (self-efficacy, task mastery, self-control/management), and sense of purpose (goal direction, educational aspirations, optimism, connectedness) (Tough, 2012). Practicing these skills needed for long-term resilience begins in childhood, and parents can certainly foster these positive traits. No matter how talented your children are, they have to experience both successes and failures. While successes can build their confidence, that confidence will not be sufficient to lead them to a mature adulthood unless they have practiced coping with obstacles within the safety of their family.
Being an Adult Is Setting and Keeping Appropriate Boundaries
One of the important tasks of growing up is learning to set boundaries. Parents can best teach this by example. Knowing how to maintain appropriate boundaries is essential to becoming a mature adult. This characteristic is integral to creating privacy, building personal integrity, setting protective limits for ourselves, and engaging in appropriate behavior with other people. In dysfunctional families, boundary violations can produce barriers between family members or a complete disregard for privacy and personal space. Parents can demonstrate respect and appropriate boundaries by permitting older teens and adult children to express their opinions freely and by showing consideration for their privacy.
It is difficult for a parent, after having been involved in the details of their children’s lives when they were younger, to stay in their own lane. Sometimes we have to learn boundaries before we can teach them. Anna, mother of 23-year-old, Rachel, recalled one such challenge:
When Rachel moved into an apartment, I automatically offered to help set her up. I had done her previous apartments and every dorm room she had lived in. I just assumed this was my job. My problem is that Rachel assumed this as well. On moving day, I found myself on the floor, scrubbing the grime off of the linoleum in cracks you don’t want to know about. I didn’t mind pitching in, but I really minded working like a dog when Rachel was making plans with friends for dinner. In the middle of backbreaking Cinderella work, I stood up and decided I was finished, even though the work wasn’t done.
I realized that this wasn’t my job anymore and that I had contributed to Rachel sitting on her rear while I was on my hands and knees. I had not set appropriate boundaries as the mother of a 23-year-old. How was she ever going to learn to take care of herself, if I didn’t stop doing for her?
Parents must also demonstrate the importance of good boundaries by showing respect when their adult children create boundaries for themselves. Josh, a 23-year-old graduate student, said he didn’t want his parents to drop by his apartment unannounced. His parents let him know that they understood his request and promised to respect his privacy by calling before they came over. Appropriate boundaries require balance. All mature adults need to establish suitable boundaries for themselves as part of the process of learning to respect the boundaries of others.
Another father said, “My son works as a paralegal in a prominent law firm. He has been there for a few years, and they’ve never given him a raise. He thinks he’s paid fairly and has been highly praised at his annual review. I’ve been hounding him to ask for more money, and he’s told me to back off. It’s hard for me, but he’s made it clear: this is his job, and any job-related decision is his alone to make.”
Boundaries can be set like fences. They can be tight and not let any light through, or they can be loose like lattice. They might be placed too close to the front door or too far away, leaving the occupant feeling open and vulnerable. To be effective, boundaries must be flexible enough to change, depending on the child, period of development, and situation. When they work, boundaries provide limits, and with limits come safety, trust, and privacy for both parents and children.
Being an Adult Requires Obtaining Cultural Competence
One significant skill adult children need to be successful in this diverse, multicultural society is cultural competence, the ability to understand and acknowledge one’s own cultural background as well as others’. Becoming knowledgeable about and taking into consideration different standards and operating principles enables older teens and young adults to be successful in the world of work and in the community in which they live. Whether adult children will acquire these skills depends largely on the lessons they learned from their parents. Children will adopt the values of inclusion and appreciation for diversity if their parents model these behaviors at home. One mother of an adult son related the significance of acceptance:
Yesterday I went to the baptism of a beautiful baby girl. Surrounding this baby were her African American mother and Caucasian father. Also there were multiple friends of their parents, representing diverse backgrounds. This baby girl and others of her generation will grow up in a world much more accepting and tolerant of racial and cultural differences and be enriched by them.
Adulthood and independence may be defined differently in different cultures. For example, European Americans define adulthood in terms of independence significantly more often than do people of color. Other racial and ethnic groups define adulthood in terms of both independence and interdependence: children are expected to assume greater personal responsibility, while at the same time, allegiance to family remains the priority and does not stop with adulthood.
We are aware that different cultures operate under different assumptions, but parents and children have the opportunity to move forward together to create social justice and to celebrate the richness of living in a diverse society. Without the ability to operate in a multicultural society, our children will be less prepared to function well as adults in the workplace and in their interpersonal relationships. These are skills (openness, inclusion, acceptance) that everyone must embody. So we have to parent our teens and emerging adults for their future.
Your adult children will probably make different lifestyle or career choices from the ones you made. At this stage, parents must learn to express their uncertainties and anxiety clearly and tactfully. It’s important to understand that the manner in which you approach your adult children will influence your relationship positively or negatively. This doesn’t mean you can’t be upset. Try to ask questions that help you better understand rather than blame. They are growing up in a different world, and so are we.
Strategies for Parents of Older Teens and Young Adults
To meet the challenges associated with this new developmental stage, you may need some additional parenting strategies beyond the ones we offered in Chapter 8. The focus of these additional strategies is the same: building characteristics of adulthood.
1. Let your older teens and young adults speak. Then have faith they’ve heard what you’ve said.
Try not to give advice unless you are asked. Do more listening than talking. Don’t react until your child has finished describing the problem. Suspend judgment. Remember, being invited to give information does not mean your child will use it. As hard as it may be, as parents, we have to learn to let go of the outcome.
Tell the truth. A certain amount of exploration is appropriate for young adults. Be supportive of and encourage experimenting with new jobs and adventures. It is our job to help our children distinguish the difference between “meandering” and “exploration,” but try to remember that it is our children’s job to make the choice. This demonstrates mutual respect. Once you have told them the truth as you see it, you should have faith with their decisionmaking, even if you disagree. As emerging adults, it is up to them to make their own choices.
Don’t assume your adult children have not heard you. Many parents feel they are not being listened to because they don’t get a timely response from their adult children. But your children do listen, and you may hear about it indirectly in random conversations or see it in decisions they make.
2. Coach your older teens and adult children, rather than doing for them.
Let them do for themselves. By doing things for our older teens and young adults, by always fixing their problems, we run the risk of affirming their lack of confidence. We deny them the opportunity to learn from their own successes and failures and to develop needed skills.
Be mindful that when you rescue them, making things easier for your adult children doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making things better for them. If you rescue them, this encourages them to depend on you.
Teach children about accountability, personal responsibility, and boundaries. Provide children with as many opportunities as possible to practice the skills they need to take care of themselves.
3. Be the best adult you can be as a parent. Make good decisions in your own best interest, not just your children’s, by setting good boundaries.
Continue to feel good about participating in your children’s lives while also respecting your own boundaries and their privacy.
By all means, remain available. Your older teens and young adults still need you. Be available to listen when they’re ready to talk. However, it’s important for both parents and kids to set boundaries, because with limits come safety, trust, and privacy for parents and children. You’re not required to bend yourself into a pretzel for your adult children.
Be clear about what you can and cannot contribute, both financially and emotionally. Come to a mutual understanding that includes your adult children’s own responsibilities.
Provide only appropriate help. Safety is the overriding consideration when determining whether to get involved in the lives of your adult children when they haven’t asked you to do so. If your children are in an abusive relationship or are addicted to drugs or alcohol, you can support your children best by getting them appropriate help and not enabling destructive behavior.
4. Trust your instincts about what you know is right for your children. Be prepared that, however right you are, they may not agree with you.
Update your parenting advice to match this stage of development. This doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to rely on guideposts that have worked for you in the past and have faith in what you know about your children. There will be new challenges, so take a breath, give yourself time to regroup, think the problem through, and then respond. If you follow this process, your guidance will be more appropriate for this stage.
Be mindful that you can choose to support or not support your children. Expect adult children to live with the consequences of their decisions and actions, so they can learn from their own mistakes.
Give “guilt-free” advice or support without conditions. If we choose to give support freely, there shouldn’t be any strings or an “I told you so,” especially when emerging adult children make decisions with which you disagree.
Avoid asking loaded questions. One mother said, “My son laughs at me and says, ‘Mom, is this something you need to know, or is it another life lesson disguised as curiosity? If it’s a life lesson, I’m putting it in my pocket with all the others. You can’t stop yourself from asking!’”
5. Flexibility is better than hard-and-fast rules.
Count on change. Acknowledge that it’s normal for parents and children to feel confused during this period. Acknowledging this can normalize this stage of development and help to make this time less overwhelming for parents, older teens, and adult children.
Don’t misinterpret this transition as a crisis, like a midlife crisis, which is more myth than reality.
Try to remember what it was like for you to live with the uncertainties of emerging adulthood. Be mindful that your children have grown up in a world defined by ambivalence.
Share concerns about your adult children with friends and family. This can be comforting and increase your capacity to be flexible and respond appropriately to your children’s issues. Discussing common experiences will help to lessen the anxiety and self-doubts you and your children may be experiencing.
Tolerate differences and be flexible. Parents may help to create adult children who are more self-directed and are not defined by one rigid set of cultural values or expectations.
Don’t hesitate to treat each of your children differently, as long as you are sensitive and fair. Children take different paths and require different forms of guidance and support.
Don’t sweat the small stuff. One father told us, “I never worried about anything that wasn’t permanent. So when my son had his initials carved into his hair by the barber, I couldn’t care less. It didn’t bother me.” Said another parent, “My daughter lives in a pigpen. Just spending time in her apartment could trigger an asthma attack. But it doesn’t seem to bother her. I’m tempted to bring my vacuum next time I visit, but I know better!” And from another parent: “I told my son to limit his tattoos to places on his body that won’t be visible at work. But I’m braced and ready for when I see one creeping out from his shirtsleeve.” This advice works for children of any age.
6. Have reasonable expectations for their achieving independence.
Expect an extended period of dependence. This transition period will be less problematic, and you can approach it more objectively and diplomatically, if you know it’s only temporary.
Respect and appreciate that your children have grown up and have the skills to figure things out for themselves. As one parent explained, “Trust that they can figure things out, and be supportive and nonjudgmental when they hit snags.”
Acknowledge and praise each step toward independence. This will help your older teens and adult children to feel less anxious and less pressured. Try to remember that, even as adults, children tend to seek parental approval.
Relax! Understand that the process of becoming independent occurs in stages and takes time.
7. Prepare your older teens and young adults for the cultural changes they will face in their lifetime.
Accept gender role changes in your children. Mothers no longer are solely responsible for nurturing and taking care of the children, and men are increasingly focusing on their families. In most cases, men and women work outside the home, so the skill sets of both home and work are critical to their family’s future well-being.
Adopt the values of inclusion and tolerance, and model these behaviors at home. If they lack the ability to operate in a diverse society, your children will be less prepared to be high-functioning adults in the workplace and in their interpersonal relationships.
Teach tolerance and tell your children about the harm caused by the intolerance of others. For children who choose to live with or marry someone outside their faith or from a different racial or cultural group or choose a same-sex partner, parents do them no favor by trying to insulate them from the perils of intolerance. First, give them your support. Second, the most you can do is to talk honestly about problems they may face and give them a heads-up if you see potential conflict with extended family members.
8. Measure maturity based on the acquisition of emotional characteristics associated with adulthood, rather than the traditional milestones of past generations (graduating from college, getting married, or owning a home). These characteristics include:
Besides the characteristics defined as guideposts earlier in this chapter, characteristics that signal adulthood includes empathy for others, the confidence to do things on one’s own, financial independence, and the establishment of competent marriages or partnerships and raising children.
Understand the emotional characteristics of maturity. Parents can determine the extent to which their children have internalized these characteristics by observing whether their children have established personal identities, developed reasonable and rational judgment, become able to make independent decisions, behave in a purposeful and responsible manner, and are self-reliant and self-confident.
Be patient. Maturity comes in increments and may be packaged differently from what we expect. Also, the time frame varies from person to person.
Teach empathy by “holding,” which is staying present and communicating that you understand your children’s experiences. Holding is unconditional. We have to hold our children in a way that demonstrates we can stay present while they express their discomfort. This is tricky when they’re in pain, when it’s even more important that we are able to manage our own feelings.
Don’t jump in too early with advice and problem solving. Guide your children to figure out for themselves how to solve their problem, issue, or concern.
Be responsive to your children’s needs and pace. Unlike our relationships with young children, where we direct the process of growing up, our relationships with older teens and adult children require that we be responsive to them.
Assist in the process of their becoming adults by helping your children understand that they have the competency to take responsibility for their own lives.
9. Guide your children toward becoming financially literate and independent. This gives them the opportunity to know they can take care of themselves, which builds authentic self-confidence and resilience.
Before lending or giving money to your adult children, ask yourself, Do you feel comfortable (not should you feel comfortable) with this decision? Give assistance when it makes sense to you, such as contributing toward health insurance or augmenting rent to help your children live in a safe neighborhood.
Teach them to live within their means, rather than your means. If you continuously subsidize your children’s lifestyles or bail them out of debt, you give them false expectations about what they can afford.
Guide your children toward making a distinction between wants and needs. You might contribute if they ask for help with insurance, rent, and health care but say no if they want help with paying for lifestyle “needs.”
10. Know that they may come back!
If your adult children come home to live for a while, they will do well if they are assured of your love and support during this transition. Know why they’re moving back home. If your children don’t have any goals, help them to set some.
Be explicit about your expectations. Tell them what you need them to do. Mutual respect, cooperation, and compromise are essential. Uphold whatever agreement you reach between yourselves and your children.
Reframe the old house rules of childhood and early adolescence to meet the changing needs of an emerging adult.
Encourage independence.
Distinguish between serious problems and irritations. Some issues require intervention; others don’t. If your children seem depressed, sleep all the time, demonstrate dramatic changes in eating habits, or don’t experience pleasure from the things that used to please them, they may have a serious problem that requires intervention. Many other things fall under the category of annoyances, however, such as leaving the outside lights on, ignoring dirty dishes in the sink, or keeping Count Dracula’s hours. These are irritants that may improve or may not. When your adult children move out, it ultimately is not your business if their electric bill is large or if they run out of clean dishes. Take a deep breath and acknowledge that they won’t be living with you forever.
Permit yourself to ask your adult children to make “courtesy calls” if they’re coming home for dinner or are going to be out exceptionally late. Everyone in the family is expected to do the same; adult children should not be treated any differently.
Keep your sense of humor! Enjoy the time you have together.
11. Convey to your children the value of establishing a community that includes both family and friends.
Connections with family and friends enrich our lives; they don’t detract from them.
Value connection. Avoid making your children embarrassed about feeling a continued need for their family.
Expect a more mutual and equal relationship. This adult relationship should bring pleasure to both you and your adult child. As one 21-year-old told us, “I don’t feel like a little kid in my parents’ house anymore. When I go over to their house and I’m cooking dinner, my mom will ask what spice she should put in something. It’s a different relationship in a really fun way.”
Enjoy them. One mother suggested, “I think it’s very important for us to gather as a family on a regular basis. We do it with family trips, and we do create a lot of hoopla when they come home, even if it’s just for the weekend. It’s always obvious to them how happy we are to spend time with them.”
12. Communicate, communicate, communicate … by email, texting, cell phone, letter, telephone, and visits.
Keep the lines of communication open. How you start the conversation sets the tone for the interaction that follows.
Talk to your children as you would talk to a friend. One mother explained, “I always talked to my four sons like I would talk to anybody else. If my friend came into the house with muddy boots, I wouldn’t say, ‘What are you doing walking around with those muddy boots?’ I would use more tact.”
Stay calm and get a grip on your own intensity and reactivity to pave the path for conversation. Being less reactive gets better results.
When you talk to your adult children about your concerns, identify feelings and talk with “I” statements, such as “I am frustrated,” rather than “you” statements, such as “You make me nuts.”
Assume that what your children have to say is as important as what you have to say. Learning is a two-way street. Paying attention to what our children are telling us can help us guide them in a more appropriate way. It also helps us continue to grow.
Stay in the present and avoid reverting to dated behaviors, rekindling past hurts, and unpacking old baggage.
Let them know that you also need them.
Continue to look for teachable moments.
13. Don’t forget to keep your sense of humor and enjoy them—you’ve earned it!