“It’s a scary feeling, starting off on my own—making a life for myself without any map for getting it done. Knowing that what I make of my life depends so much on me. Living up to that responsibility. I’m not a kid any more, free to play around. Good-bye to those good times and not-so-good times! Times when my parents and I didn’t get along. They wouldn’t leave me alone and I couldn’t leave to be left alone. We were stuck with each other. Then I finally moved out, only to move back in after a year, then out again once I got some mistakes straightened out, at last able to barely make it. Living at home is history now. They don’t try to run my life anymore and I don’t run to them for help. Our relationship is different now. We’re all adults now, person to person, equals that way, even though I’m still their child. They just love me and cheer me on, and I’m appreciative of them. Last time we got together, my mom said, ‘We sure have been through a lot together!’ My dad laughed at the truth of that. And I did, too.”
When an older adolescent moves back home to live with parents after some adversity, this creates a great opportunity for all concerned—to pull together and strengthen their relationship during a time that can be hard. Then while your son or daughter is working to regroup and move on, you also have your share of work to do—to anticipate further changes in your parenting after adolescence is done. This final chapter suggests some helpful, albeit difficult, shifts in parenting that can happen next.
First, parents need to understand one thing about parenting: it never stops. As the great baseball poet Yogi Berra said: “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Once you become a parent, you remain a parent for the rest of your life. So the end of your child’s adolescence is not the end of parenting; it is only a transition point. But when adolescence is over, what comes next? And then, how does parenting change?
The last stage of adolescence, what I call trial independence, ends in the early to mid-twenties, when young people become psychologically, socially, and economically independent:
When adolescence is over, young adulthood begins. Roughly spanning the early twenties to about the age of thirty, this period ends when the young person becomes anchored in adulthood in at least three ways.
Over the course of this progression from childhood through adolescence to young adulthood, the relationship between parent and child keeps changing. And at the end, parents must come to terms with the journey taken, the outcome reached, and how to adjust to having an adult child in their life. In the process, parents must accept how they are evaluated in the their child’s eyes, resolve any disappointment or guilt they feel, and understand some of the new constraints that govern their relationship with an adult child. Thus, there are three challenges that parents must meet during this time:
Children observe their parents more closely, appraise their parents more carefully, and know their parents better than parents do the child. This may seems surprising, but it is true. It comes naturally from the fact that, as the child grows to adulthood, the parent is the one in charge.
When someone has more power than you do in a relationship, for your own survival, you tend to scrutinize that person in greater detail to get whatever edge of understanding and influence you can to indirectly manage (or manipulate) the other person. So in organizations, the subordinate knows the superior better; in peer groups, the follower knows the leader better; in society, the minority knows the majority better; in families, the abused knows the abuser better; in prisons, the captive knows the jailer better; and so on.
Parents vastly underestimate how deeply known and constantly evaluated they are by their child. In the vanity of their superior position, parents prefer to think that they know the child best and are the best judge. And perhaps this is for the best. Otherwise, being the object of such keen and relentless observation might make parents too self-conscious for their own comfort. But regardless of the perspective, it is the parent who is under the greater scrutiny and evaluation of the child.
From childhood to adolescence to young adulthood, however, the judgmental thrust of this evaluation tends to change. The child tends to idealize the parents, the adolescent tends to criticize the parents, and the young adult tends to reconcile him- or herself with the parenting received. Here’s how this often works.
The child (up to age 8–9) admires, even worships, parents for what they can do and for the power of approval that they possess. The child wants to relate on parental terms, enjoy parental companionship, and imitate the parents where possible. The child wants to be like and to be liked by these adults, whom he or she mostly positively evaluates (assuming that they are not damaging or dangerous to live with). A child identifies with parents because they provide the primary models to follow and to live up to. So childhood evaluation of parents begins with idealization. At the outset, parents are usually too good to be true in a child’s eyes.
Then comes adolescence (beginning around age 9–13), when parents are kicked off the worshipful pedestal that the child created. Where before parents could do no wrong, come adolescence it seems they can do no right. What causes this sudden fall from grace? Have parents changed? No, but the child has, and with cause. To begin the separation from childhood (and from parents and family) that starts adolescence, the young person has to reject some of the old role and lifestyle that branded him or her as child, to free up growing room for the journey to independence ahead. Through attitude and actions, the young person is saying, “I no longer want to be defined and treated as a child anymore.”
To this end, part of adolescence is about letting the “bad child” out. Bad doesn’t mean evil, immoral, or illegal; it simply means more abrasive to live with—becoming more critical, dissatisfied, argumentative, passively resistant, moody, distant, and noncompliant. This transformation, however, cannot be accomplished without a negative change in the reputation of parents as well. Like it or not, parents who have grown accustomed to being perceived as having a positive role by the adoring child must now accept being cast in a more negative one by the faultfinding adolescent. The early adolescent particularly needs to have “bad” parents to justify letting his or her “bad” child out: “Well it’s not just me who’s become hard to live with, you have too!”
And in this stage, parental company in public becomes more problematic. To be seen in parents’ presence by friends diminishes adolescents’ sense of social independence. And parents’ habits and characteristics can be personally embarrassing to them: “Do you always have to dress that way?” So adolescent evaluation becomes more critical of parents and, with increased conflicts over freedom, remains that way through the rest of adolescence, partly to justify the independence from parents being sought. After all, if parents weren’t considered difficult to live with, why ever leave?
Then, in the early to mid-twenties, adolescence ends and young adulthood begins, bringing with it a period of self-evaluation for the young person that soon implicates parents. The young adult question is simply this: “Why did I turn out the way I am?” In answering this question, the young person looks back over personal history and begins to identify significant events and particularly influential people that shaped his or her development. This is where parents come into close focus. By commission and omission, how did parents contribute to the young person’s growth?
The answer is “Both positively and negatively.” No matter how well-intentioned, the best parents can ever provide is a mix of strength and frailty, wisdom and stupidity, consideration and selfishness, good choices and bad. At stake for the young person is coming to accept having imperfect parents who provided not just help growing up but also hurt and hindrance. The purpose of this reflective process is to come up with an adult perspective of parents that the adult child can honestly live with—creating an understanding and acceptance, as one young person put it, “of my parents, warts and all.”
The hardest part of this process, both for young people and for parents, is the beginning. This is because before they can claim positive parental influence, young people must acknowledge the negative influence, and this requires some rationalization. They have to construct an understanding that realistically encompasses the mix of positive and negative influences that parents provided.
In counseling, a young person described the early part of her parental evaluation this way: “My parents sure weren’t perfect. Love me as they did, they made a lot of mistakes. Caught up in themselves, they weren’t always there for me when I needed. And they made some decisions, like divorce, which really hurt and have had lasting effects.”
During the negative acknowledgment phase of this evaluation, it is not uncommon for young people to pull away and reduce communication with their parents, in order to evaluate the painful history. They then resume contact when the positive evaluation is at last put in place, and they can now acknowledge the significant contributions that parents made. So after some counseling sessions down the road, the young woman concluded: “But you know, they worked hard to take care of me, hung in there with me when the going got tough, shared some good times worth remembering, and I know they tried their best.”
The negative phase of young adult evaluation can be scary for parents, especially when contact and communication fall away. But if you can be understanding and patient, and hold yourself in loving readiness, your child’s evaluation usually leads to reconciliation, and the return to a meaningful adult relationship carries on.
In my book The Connected Father, I wrote about one such reconciliation:
“A father at a workshop of mine many years ago explained it this way: ‘One rose at a time,’ he called it. ‘She was about twenty-three, our daughter, when without explanation, she cut off all communication with us. Stopped coming to see us. Rarely answered our phone calls, and when she did abruptly told us that she’d call us when she felt like talking, and to please not call her. At first we felt really hurt, then really angry. What had we done to deserve such treatment? Then my wife said something really important: ‘Suppose this isn’t something painful she’s doing against us; suppose it’s something painful she needs to be doing for her.’ So that’s what we decided it was. And to let her know we loved her and were thinking about her, every week I sent her a single red rose with a card that read: ‘We love you.’ And I did this for about seven months until one day she called, said she wanted to come over and see us, and she did, and we’ve been lovingly back together ever since. Of course I asked her about the roses, curious to know what she did with them. ‘At first,’ she said, ‘I threw them away. Then I gave them away to friends. And finally I started keeping them, signs that you were keeping me in your heart, one rose at a time.’”
In truth, know that when it comes to how adult children finally evaluate parenting, parents were never as wonderful as their child wanted to believe or as lacking as their adolescent frequently complained they were. Mostly parents turn out performing about as well as one young adult, after some hard reflection, suggested: “My parents weren’t perfect, but I’ve decided that’s OK. After all, I wasn’t perfect either.”
If your child chooses to share with you his or her assessment of your parenting, you are not obliged to agree with it, but you should not defend or argue against it or try to correct it. Instead, knowing that your grown child honestly feels the evaluation, you should empathetically listen and accept what he or she feels was true The rule is this: if you want your grown son or daughter to affirm the positive influence you provided, you must first be willing to acknowledge that, at least in his or her eyes, there was some negative influence as well.
It is not just the child who must evaluate parenting during this time, though. Most parents have some unfinished business within themselves that they need to close out to become open to a healthy relationship with their adult child.
Two great emotional burdens that parents often carry into a son’s or daughter’s adulthood are disappointment (the problem of parental investment) and guilt (the problem of parental implication). Both can severely affect the relationship with their adult child.
Let’s begin with the issue of disappointment. Parenting is a process of investment. Parents invest not only their care, energy, and resources in their child but also their assumptions, ambitions, hopes, and even dreams about how this person will turn out when grown up. The more investment parents make, the more invested they feel, and the more they cherish the notion of a deserving return. An extreme investment is often made by parents of an only child, sometimes with an extreme expectation of return. “We worked so hard and sacrificed so much for her, the least she can do is give us some of what we hoped for back!” one couple complained after their daughter had strayed from the path in life they had chosen for her. They were treating their daughter as if she were supposed to fulfill whatever promise they thought she owed them.
So what happens when parents, who assumed their adolescent would pursue a conservative lifestyle similar to their own, hear that their child is moving into a commune-like house with other young people committed to living an alternative lifestyle? Or what happens when parents, whose ambition was for the adolescent to go to college, have a son who decides after high school to scrape together a living making a go of it as a musician? Or what happens when parents, who hoped their children would choose to return to their home city after college and live close by, have a son or daughter who decides to move much further away? Or what happens when parents, whose dream for their adolescent included launching a career and remaining single until it was established, have a daughter who gets pregnant, gets married, and gives up the profession they were wishing she’d pursue?
“Of course, we’re disappointed,” one set of parents told me in counseling. “This is not what we planned for a child of our own! And we told her so.”
“And how did she respond when you told her that?” I asked.
They replied: “She acted really hurt, like we had let her down, when the reverse was true! And she hasn’t talked much to us since.”
Then I suggested that if they wanted a close and loving relationship with their adult daughter, they needed to ask themselves whether their daughter was supposed to fit their expectations, or whether their expectations were supposed to fit their daughter? Their answer makes a profound difference. If they believe she should live up to their expectations and she is not doing so, they will feel disappointed, and communicating that disappointment to her will, to some degree, alienate the relationship. If, however, they believe that for the sake of acceptance they must adjust their expectations to fit the path and lifestyle their daughter has independently chosen to follow, then they will affirm that relationship.
It can be hard for parents to remember that when a grown son or daughter disappoints their expectations, it is their expectations, and not the child’s conduct, that is to blame. The parents have chosen to hold a set of expectations that do not fit the choices their adult child is making. When the child and adolescent lived dependently on their care, part of living on the parents’ terms was meeting their expectations. But once grown into a young adult, a son or daughter is living on independent terms. Now, for the sake of enjoying an ongoing relationship, parents must adjust their expectations in recognition that the life they gave their child, and how he or she chooses to lead it, belongs to the child, not to them. The grown child is not in this world to live up to parental expectations; the parents are in this world to accept how the grown child chooses to live her adult life.
What can help parents adjust their expectations to fit the emerging life of the adult child is to ask questions about changes they did not expect, asking help to understand what they were not prepared for. By doing so, they will come to appreciate the richness of the growing differences between themselves and their grown child, and the young adult will also come to value parents’ interest and effort in return.
The other big emotional burden parents carry during this time is guilt. Just as parental investment can lead to problems of disappointment when expectations are not met, parental implication can lead to problems of guilt when parents hold themselves accountable for personal hardships that the young person carries into adult life. So a child of divorce keeps bolting from romantic relationships for fear of a partner’s breaking commitment the way his or her parents did. Or the young person runs into problems with substance abuse just like a parent, who finally got sober and found recovery.
It’s easy for parents to feel implicated in their grown child’s travails when they believe that there is a connection between their past conduct and the adult child’s present behavior. The more deeply implicated the parents feel, the more susceptible to guilt they tend to be.
Most parents have some guilt about something they did or didn’t do that caused temporary or lasting hurt for the son or daughter, some acts of commission or omission for which they blame themselves:
The potential for parental guilt is endless.
Does guilt serve any good? Well, in one sense, the parents are not totally removing themselves from assuming responsibility for their own behavior in relation to their child. After all, whether a parent hugs or hits, loves or resents, approves or abuses, nurtures or abandons a son or daughter can make a formative difference. The child who is hit, resented, abused, and abandoned is likely to have a less trustful response to parents and people in general than a child who is hugged, loved, approved, and nurtured does.
However, even with these extreme distinctions, parents who automatically implicate themselves in a grown child’s failings and woes, or successes and joys, make a fundamental error. Although parents are absolutely responsible for how they treat their child, the child is absolutely responsible for how he or she adjusts to that treatment. Thus, the child of divorce is not responsible for the parental breakup but is responsible for his or her choice in adjusting to this difficult history.
This is why different adjustments can be made by different children in the same family to the same family event. One grown child looks back and says, “When my parents divorced, I lost all faith that loving relationships could ever last, so it’s their fault that I have been distrustful of commitment ever since.” Another grown child of the same divorce, however, comes away with a different choice for adjustment: “When my parents divorced, I was hurt and sorry for them, but I learned how important it is to communicate better in my relationships than they did in theirs.” To the same adversity, people can make different choices for adjustment. This is why the child’s responsibility for that adjustment must be respected. In any healthy relationship between parents and grown children, this division of responsibility needs to hold.
When parents blame their grown child’s trials on themselves, they commit three errors:
I recall the parents of a twenty-two-year-old who described in counseling how they feel impelled to take responsibility for paying their daughter’s credit card debts, because they never taught her how to manage money. “She says it’s partly our fault,” they confessed. “And she’s right. We’ve always covered her expenses, no questions asked, so how else should we expect her to act?”
When parental guilt and a child’s blame come together, the result can be mutually disabling—the parents take on too much responsibility, and the child does not take on enough. The resolution, of course, is for the parents to forsake their guilt by ceasing self-blame, and in the process emotionally disentangling the relationship. They need to be able to say to themselves, “How she conducts her life is not our fault; it is her choice.”
So, for example, the parent listens empathetically to the young woman describing how frequent geographical moves—attending eight schools in twelve years—created instability in the family. It left her with anxiety when confronting further changes in her life, like the change she is facing upon graduating from college and stepping off on her own: “If my home had been stable I wouldn’t lack the confidence that I feel now.”
“Maybe so,” agrees the father. “I know all those changes must have been pretty painful, and that some of that pain carries on in the insecurity you feel. I certainly take responsibility for creating the hard circumstances you describe, making so many job moves. But at this independent stage of your life, blaming family history for what feels hard only gets in the way of owning how you responded to these unhappy events. That is your responsibility to take. To free up your future, you must accept the family hand that you were dealt. How you play that hand is not up to what I did or didn’t do; it’s now up to you. You need to focus not on what I did but on what you want to do. My acting guilty and inviting further blame will only slow you down.”
It is hard to be emotionally attached to your grown child and not become unhappily entangled with disappointment and guilt in the process. To avoid these burdens at the end of your child’s adolescence means facing the hardest act of parenting there is— letting be and letting go. But that is what you have to do.
At the beginning of childhood, a stranger was born into your care. At the end of adolescence, an independent young adult departs from your care. In between these two events, a loving connection has been established that hopefully will sustain and nourish your relationship through the years ahead. A healthy parent– adult child connection requires having an adequate separation of responsibility, one that declares psychological independence between you both. When parents and child are both able to achieve independence, as a parent, you can honestly say and mean this:
“Our grown children are not meant to be ourselves, to repeat ourselves, to reflect ourselves, to affirm ourselves, to complete ourselves, to carry on ourselves, to repay ourselves, or to fulfill ourselves. They are simply meant to become themselves. And our job is to respect and accept and value them for the individuals they turn out to be.”
No matter how grown-up they become, your adult offspring forever remain your children, just as you forever remain their parent. And the relationship will always be challenging because, like the rest of life, parenting demands constant change and accommodation. What makes this accommodation hard with adult children are several adjustments you must make: to tolerance, to reversal, and to demotion.
Let’s start with tolerance. If you are in the sandwich generation, positioned between having older parents and adult children, you can learn to understand how your children sometimes still struggle with you by thinking about how you sometimes still struggle with your parents. You can see from becoming impatient with your own parents’ ways how your adult children can get impatient with yours. You can recognize that when the values of one generation are discarded by the next, inevitable incompatibilities, conflict, and even estrangement can ensue. Intergenerational differences can be hard to tolerate.
Bridging these differences with acceptance, as you have learned to do with your own parents, is what you must learn to do with your grown children and what they must learn to do with you. You must lead the way. If you want them to accept your individual ways, you must accept their individual ways first. So you accept that you did not have perfect parents, that you were not a perfect parent yourself, and that your grown children were not and do not need to be perfect either. And you can hope they come to accept the imperfections in you. After all, at our best, all of us are only human.
Adjusting to reversal can be challenging as well. When the child is young, parents’ task is to get the girl or boy to fit into their lives, to learn what they think is important, and to fulfill their agenda for what needs to happen. When the child becomes adult, however, to a significant degree, parents’ roles reverse. Now the task is to fit more into the child’s life, to understand what the grown daughter or son believes is important in life, to respect the adult child’s agenda for what needs to happen, and to conduct the relationship more on her or his terms. Where once getting together meant the young person’s coming to your home, now it more frequently entails your visiting them at their home.
Loss of traditional influence can be hard for some parents. In cases where parents still domineer their adult children or adult children still consent to submit, not daring to displease or challenge parental authority, it often takes bold acts of independence to break the situation. Sometimes for adult children this means waiting until their thirties to break this dependency. Then adult children stubbornly embrace a new life path, adopt a new lifestyle, or select a new life partner of whom parents disapprove. And when their parents question, criticize, or oppose this decision, the young people finally stand up for themselves with a defiant statement of independence: “It’s my life, and I will live it as I please!” And now the old observation rings true: “In the struggle over independence, parents never defeat their grown children; grown children always defeat their parents.”
The final reversal of the adult child–parent relationship plays out during the parents’ older age, when the adult child begins taking care of the parent. Here the responsibility dramatically shifts, and the dependency reverses. At the beginning of childhood, the old take care and charge of their young; but at the end of parents’ lives, the young take care and charge of their old.
The last adjustment parents must make in their relationship with their adult child is to accept their demotion in a child’s life. When adult children become established in the world, preoccupation with managing their separate life can take precedence over being involved in parents’ lives. When adult children marry, parents become less important than the new partner. And when adult children and their partners become parents, their parents become less important than the new child. Less important doesn’t mean less loved, only less of a priority. As the adult child’s life becomes more rich and complex, the role of parents becomes less central and more peripheral.
Then there can be the demotion from devoted to dutiful attention, when the weekly phone calls or occasional visits from an independent adult child, or remembering of special occasions, may feel more obligatory than heartfelt. But as one mother put it: “If dutiful is the best I can get, then I’ll take it. Lesser caring is caring nonetheless.”
This is the blessing and the curse of doing the job of parenting well. When parents succeed in helping their children grow up to independence, these new adults will act more independently of them.
So does parenting end with parents not mattering? Not at all, if parents remain mindful of their primary roles. Remember how your little child called “Watch me!” “Listen to me!” “See what I can do!” and “Let me tell you what I did!” What was it the little child wanted? The answer is parental attention, interest, and approval. These are needs the adult child never really outgrows. So when, as a parent, you continue your roles as emotional supporter, as rapt audience, and as tireless cheerleader, what you have to offer your adult children never goes out of style and never loses its lasting value.
Finally, as a goal for you and your grown child, consider how the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke described the optimal caring relationship in Letters to a Young Poet:
“Once the realization that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”
PARENTING PRESCRIPTION