Your Grown Children Can Break Your Heart

But only if you let them.

Photo by Blake Cheek for Unsplash+

In your head, you know you need to treat your grown children as fully matured adults, independent actors who have their own lives to live and have every right to make their own decisions.

And yet – they can break your heart by doing something so contrary to your own values, , leaving you shocked, dismayed, angry, or profoundly sad.

Something such as:

• Choosing a partner who, you can clearly see, will only bring them misery.

• Making a career decision that you believe is a huge mistake.

• Relocating (for work, naturally) to a home far away, making your visits to them (and theirs to you) expensive, inconvenient, infrequent, or even impossible.

• Rejecting your family’s faith tradition.

• Putting barriers between you and your grandchildren.

• Rewriting the past to blame you for their mistakes and problems.

Here’s an example of how this plays out: Friends of ours were over the moon when their oldest son announced his engagement. But emotions turned south suddenly when he told them the number of family members and friends they could invite to the wedding. To the son and his intended, the limit was necessary to keep the guest list contained – and the couple, after all, were planning and paying for their own wedding. But to our friends, the limit was a slap in the face. Their wide circle of friends is like family to them – and having been guests at their friends’ weddings and other joyous occasions, they are embarrassed that they cannot reciprocate.

The son says it’s his own wedding, not theirs, and it’s not about them. The parents say how can he turn his back on his extended family and the values they lived by?

What’s going on here?

Different Rules

You could chalk it up to the differences between Baby Boomers and Millennials, and you would not be wrong, but it goes much deeper than that.

Rachel Glik, a counselor specializing in family dynamics, believes a shift in American family values is one cause of tension between parents and their adult children. “The pursuit of personal growth among millennials is empowering the breaking of cycles and setting of new boundaries,” she writes. While younger generations challenge the status quo, “the older generations struggle with their place and value and are often unprepared for the kind of challenges their sons and daughters are presenting to their dynamic.”

To put it in a different perspective, the family dynamic is in flux. Both adult children and their parents are reshaping their identities. Adult children expect to be treated as adults, while parents are finding that the parenting behavior that they have been accustomed to for decades doesn’t work anymore.

Author and life coach Christine Field concedes that it can feel overwhelming to transition “from an identity centered around motherhood to a broader, more self-focused role.” She advises parents to practice “healthy detachment” from their adult children so that their choices and behaviors don’t drive the parents crazy. Part of that process, she writes, is for parents to examine how they look to their children to satisfy their own unmet needs – to be needed, to nurture someone, to see love returned by a child who loves them back. They also must recognize that they can’t control their children’s actions. “We surely have influence over our children, but we do not mold them like clay,” she writes.

When parents don’t adjust to the new family dynamic, they run the risk of estrangement from their children (a subject I covered in detail here.) Fairly or not, it is up to the parents to take the initiative in resolving the conflicts that arise. Why? Because the adult children hold all the cards.

How to Respond

Here are suggestions from psychologists and family counselors to keep in mind as you learn the new dance steps:

• Forget about quid pro quo. You might think that your children owe you respect, consideration, and affection for all you do for them and have done in the past. It’s likely that your children don’t see it that way. It’s even likely that if you insist that they give you something in return, they will see this as manipulative, or loving them only conditionally, or attempting to bend them to your will. These days, that is not a good look.

• Respectfully disagree. In the heat of an argument, you may be tempted to say that your child is being disrespectful. Having an opinion you don’t like is not the same as disrespect, and insisting that it is telegraphs to your child that you do not take his opinions seriously when they don’t line up with your own.

• Stop Rescuing. It’s natural for parents to want to protect their children from harm. But when adult children want to stand on their own two feet, you need to let them, regardless of the consequences. (Besides, if you continue to protect them from their own mistakes, how will they ever learn to accept the consequences of their actions?)

• Listen more, advise less. After being burned once or twice on this one, I have learned never to offer advice unless it is requested. Criticism – of their spouse, their diet, their work, their housekeeping – goes in the same bucket. Keep your lips tightly sealed unless they ask for your opinion. What adult children say they need, more than advice, is to be heard. Practice being a great listener.

• Negotiate boundaries. It may be necessary to reach agreement on where to draw the line on such things as babysitting grandkids, family dinners, spontaneous visits, and more, if these matters are causing friction. Approach the discussions looking for win-win.

Changing your habitual style of parenting to one more appropriate to your children’s stage of life may take a lot of soul-searching over a long period of time. The rewards of a successful transition are two-fold. First, you get to enjoy more harmonious relationships with your children and grandchildren. Equally important, letting go of the responsibility for your children’s lives frees you to enjoy more freedom in your own life. Maybe, just maybe, if you continue to grow and engage in new interests, your children will come to regard you as more than a frozen figure from their past.