00:00 

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 318, "The Challenge of Parenting Adult Children." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale, and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright, my sweet friends, welcome to the podcast. As always, just so glad to have you here, so glad to get to share some of my journey with you as I continue to learn and grow in the space of middle-age and so glad that you are striving as well to move into a better place. Gosh, that gets me emotional every time because this work is so worth the effort and make no bones about it...it is work. It can be difficult. It can be hard to see your shortcomings and your failings, and see how you have contributed to the misery of others. And yet until we have the courage to do that, we do not grow into something better. 

01:06 

And I have seen the fruits of this work in my own life. I cannot imagine a better life than what I'm living right now. And that's not to say it's not without challenges. But gosh darn it, this is a beautiful, amazing space to be and to be creating the kind of relationship with Sione and the kind of relationships with the people in my life that I want to create. Regardless of how they show up, just feels so powerful and is so beautiful and fulfilling. And this is what I just hope to share with you on this podcast. So thank you for showing up. Thank you for looking at yourself, doing the internal work to create an incredible life. Promise you this is all worth it. It is is so worth it. Whatever price you're paying to show up here and to make the changes you need to make, it is worth it for sure. 

02:09 

Okay, a couple of things just right before we get started. I am going to be doing some classes starting in September, some group coaching, which is going to be amazing. I have loved the group coaching I've done before and I've learned a lot more about just how to make it a better experience for you. So if you are interested in that, please, please, please go to tanyahale.com and check into those classes. I am far enough ahead in recording these podcasts that by the time I put the information out for signing up for the classes, you may not hear it here on the podcast just because of the timing. 

02:50 

So go to tanyahale.com, go to the "contact me" tab at the top, scroll down just a little bit and there will be a place for you to sign up for the "weekend win." And this is a quick email that I just send out every week, meant to be read in less than a minute or so. They're great. I love them. And that's where I'm going to be putting the information out to the people who are on that email list. So if you are interested, go there, get that done. 

03:18 

Next thing, for those of you who have been sending me in some reviews on the podcast, thank you, thank you, thank you. Those make a big difference on helping other people find the content and find information that's going to address their concerns and help them figure out this growing up into middle-age process as well. And so for those of you who have taken time to do that, so much gratitude for helping other people to find this as well. This is life changing for me. And I know that it's been life changing for the people that I've had an opportunity to work with one-on-one. And I get enough emails from people that say this has been life changing for me as well. And these are people that I've never worked with and never even done a consult with. So this is good stuff. I'm a big believer in what I'm doing here and would love to have you share it. 

04:10 

So let's step in today. We are talking about the challenge of parenting adult children. So I talked to and work with a lot of people who struggle with being the parent of adult children. And part of the reason for this struggle is because we think we should still be parenting them. Notice the "sh" word we should not use. We should not use the "sh" word, okay? "Should"  needs to go away. So the title of this podcast is a little misleading because we aren't supposed to be parenting adult children. They are adults. They no longer need or want parenting. Okay, well maybe some of them still want parenting, but it's our job to stop parenting them anyway and allow them to grow into adults. 

04:58 

So I often refer to this as the difference between being a noun parent and being a verb parent. You will be their parent, the noun type. Even if they disown you and don't talk to you ever again, you will still be their parent, the noun parent. The challenge many of us have with our children growing up into adulthood is that we still want to be a verb parent. So if you recall from your language arts classes growing up, a noun is a person, place, or thing. You are still a parent. A verb is the action word. It is the doing of the thing. When your children become adults, you are no longer a verb parent, meaning it is no longer your responsibility to parent them, to teach them, to guide them, to direct their behavior in the best way you know possible. Your job is no longer parenting. Your job at this point is to stand back and let them be adults. When they were small children living in your home, your job was to train them to be adults. Now your job is to let them be adults. And that can be super challenging sometimes. We're gonna talk about five reasons why. 

06:11 

One reason is because you are used to having a say. For 18 years they have been your responsibility. It has been your job to teach them good values, to help them understand the correlation between behaviors and consequences, to teach them the skills they will need to survive as an adult. Part of that process is helping them to reevaluate some decisions that they chose to make. And to even discipline at times when their behavior falls outside of what we feel is appropriate for our home life. For years we have had a say in what clothing they wear, what language they use, what they eat and drink, whether they come to church or not, how clean they keep their rooms and on and on, right? We've had a say in all of the things. When they become adults, we no longer have a say. I know that for some of y'all, that's hard to hear. But it is how it's supposed to be. In fact, if you continue to interject yourself into their lives by parenting them, you will keep them from growing into the adults they need to be and, or you will break down the relationship that you have with them. 

07:25 

And that feeds into another reason, the second reason many of us have a hard time letting go. We have come to believe, many of us, that parenting is the only important role in our lives. That being a parent is what we were created to do and that our lives are only meant to be a life of service to our children. Okay, so that may be a little extreme for some of y'all, but I know that there are many of you who feel very comfortable with that line of thinking, and I'm not saying that our role as a parent isn't incredibly valuable and that the service we offered over the years wasn't impactful. I do see that when we believe that parenting is where all of our value lies, that when we are no longer verb parents, that there is a lot of floundering. There is a lot of running to and fro and seeking to find value by, to be frank, by meddling in our adult children's lives. We are unnecessarily interjecting ourselves into their lives, into their decisions, into their marriages or their work decisions or their parenting, and it is not helping to create the relationship we want. 

08:44 

But when we don't have a healthy sense of self, when we don't see ourselves as individuals outside of our role as a parent, when we don't have other interests and goals and desires or dreams, we can find ourselves fixated on our children's lives and expecting them to fulfill our sense of self. We feel needy and desperate and clingy because, oh gosh, who are we without our children? It's a scary feeling to be floundering in our life purpose and in our role in this life. And because we don't feel whole or complete without our children, we continue to pursue them in their lives and in what are often very unhealthy ways. Ways that actually push them away from us rather than creating deeper and more emotionally intimate adult relationships, friendships, if you will. 

09:44 

And this is the third challenge of being a parent to adults. When we push our way into their lives, we actually push them away. When we don't ask for permission to come into their lives, when we have expectations that don't align with adult behavior, when we give unsolicited advice, when they ask for advice and we get angry or frustrated when they don't do what we advised, when we don't move into a friendship role, we will start pushing them away. Parenting adult children is the process of no longer verb parenting. Of instead loving them like crazy because you are their parent and also treating them like an adult. 

10:32 

And that also means that when they show up behaving as children or having childish expectations, we still need to treat  them as adults. When they want you to fork out the money like you did when they were children. When they expect you to pay for things like you did when they were children. When they expect you to cater to all of their wants and needs. When they come over like you did when they were children. It is your responsibility to treat them like adults and not as children. This can be super hard. Especially because often adult children don't realize when they go to their parents' house that they slip back into comfortable childlike behavior. And it is our responsibility to ask for adult behavior from them. Oh, the coaching I have done with parents who have children who demand to be treated like adults when it's convenient for them. But also want to be treated like children when it's convenient for them. 

11:37 

And many parents acquiesce to this desire because either they miss getting to verb parent their child and their heart wants to do that or they are afraid of the child's response to not getting what they want. Raising children into adults requires that both parties grow up into adulthood. Supporting our children showing up as adults rather than as children and the parents growing up into no longer verb parenting. It can have a learning curve for sure. We are establishing new roles, new responsibilities and often it requires that we as the parents set boundaries, sometimes boundaries with pretty challenging consequences that we've never set before. And that can be very uncomfortable and sometimes feels a little risky because we don't know how they're going to respond. So go back to podcast 314 from just a few weeks ago when where I talk about when setting boundaries is hard. I did give an adult child example in this but if you haven't listened to that one and you're wondering about boundaries with kids, that's a great one to go back to. 

12:51 

So alright, here's the fourth reason being a parent to adults is challenging. often they have a lot of commentary and judgment over our imperfect parenting. Of course they do. You have a lot of commentary and judgment about your parents' parenting. Am I right? Let's give a little bit of background for how this works. So all of us were raised by imperfect parents. Sometimes the negative effects of this imperfection are really glaring. For example, if you were overtly neglected or abused in some way. Other times the negative effects are not so glaring, but they start to rise to the surface in our poor patterns of behavior as the years go on. 

13:37 

One of the huge parts about growing up is coming to peace with our own parents' imperfect parenting. Realizing that, of course, they made mistakes. They were humans who were not meant to be perfect. They didn't have tools and understanding about relationships that we have now, and often the consequences of their behaviors reach deep into our emotional and intimacy struggles today. Getting to a place, though, where we can truly understand that in most of these cases our parents were doing the best they knew how. They weren't intentionally working to mess up our lives. They just didn't know what they didn't know, and they were adults with their own marriage struggles and work pressures and parenting concerns. They were humans who were struggling along, figuring it out, all along the way, having no idea what "good parenting" meant. And it's a huge part of our own emotional maturity when we, as we become adults, learn how to forgive our parents for things that happened or didn't happen that impacted us in negative ways. This is when we can really start taking responsibility, because it's when we stop blaming them for where we are now. They may be to blame for things that happened when we were younger. But we do come to a point in our lives when we are responsible for moving our own lives forward and letting go of the anchor that is our parents' imperfections. So we have to come to terms with our own parents' imperfections. 

15:18 

Now the next step in this process is making peace with our own parenting imperfections in our children's lives. Because guess what? We weren't perfect parents either. But that doesn't mean we were horrible all the time. Yes, we were horrible sometimes. We were also really great sometimes. We were both. But we were never perfect. It just means that we have been humans who were doing the best we knew how with our limited experience and knowledge. We were figuring out the parenting thing as we were doing it. I've heard it referred to before as building the plane while you're flying it. We didn't know what we were doing much of the time and were making it up as we went along, as every other parent in the world has done, right? 

16:05 

But we didn't wake up and plan our day around how we could mess up our kids. We didn't intentionally try to figure out how to make their lives miserable for today and all the days. We really did do our best. Even on the days we lost it and yelled and were impatient and frustrated, we really did do our best on the weeks they ate PB&J every night for dinner and never ate a vegetable all week long. We did our best on the days that we were sick and they fed themselves cold cereal and they watched TV all day. We were all humans. We all made mistakes as parents and a huge piece of our growth and development at this stage is coming to terms with our imperfections and not continually beating ourselves up for them and blaming ourselves for all of our children's ills. 

16:58 

Now of course our actions impacted our children's lives. Of course they have struggles today because of how we parented. That is all part of the "imperfect people parenting imperfect people" part of God's plan. And though we can feel remorse and sadness that our children may have things to work through because of our failings, we can also give ourselves grace for doing the best we knew how and then offer support in whatever ways we can to help our children to grow and move forward. 

17:33 

For me, this conversation has happened when my children and I have had frank discussions about my feelings as a mom to teach them healthy emotional engagement because I didn't know it myself, right? And they have also brought up certain disciplinary actions that honestly, I don't recall, but they are convinced that they happened. And guess what? They very well may have happened. And they've brought up a lot of other things because of course, guess what? I had a lot of failings as a mom. Their whole lives, I was in a difficult marriage and struggling to survive there while trying to shut off my emotions in my marriage so I didn't cry every day of my children's lives, and trying to stay present with them while I was hurting in my marriage. Of course I wasn't always fully president. Of course I let my frustrations overcome me and I didn't always treat them with the loving kindness that I look back and wish I would have. 

18:37 

So when I've had these discussions with my kids, all I've been able to do is express my deep sorrow for my own failings as a mom, let them know that it wasn't on purpose, that had I known better, I would have done better more often. All I can do now is create a safe space for them to tell me all the things about how I have made their lives more difficult and how my imperfections failed them and offer support as they work to move forward. That's what I can do and that's what I'm responsible for at this point. They are responsible as adults for moving forward and learning from those experiences what they need to learn in order to grow mentally and emotionally and spiritually at this point in their lives. 

19:30 

So I have to make peace with my imperfections as a parent, and as alluded to just a second ago, the next step of this is that our children get to make peace with our imperfections as a parent. Now this, we don't have any control over. This is theirs to figure out and they may not want to figure it out. They may love being in a space where they get to blame us for many of their problems as an adult and they very likely won't be wrong on that. But as an adult, it is their job to step in and start controlling their lives living the way that they want to. Just as we did with our parents, in order to move forward we had to make peace with their imperfections and forgive them for the harm those imperfections did in our lives. And our children get to do the same thing with us. Just as we finally had to decide that we were in charge of moving our lives forward from our past and take responsibility for whatever cards we were dealt, our children get to do the same, or not, if they choose. But we don't get to tell them what they need to do. We don't get to make them do it. We can offer all of the self-aware apologies that we want and they don't have to forgive. They can continue to blame. They can continue to stay in victim mentality. They don't have to forgive us for our imperfections, and some of them won't want to because blaming us for all of their problem seemingly absolves them from responsibility for their lives and the problems that those things are causing. 

21:19 

Now, we may be to blame for them having the problems because of what happened when they were children, but they are responsible for taking those problems as adults and cleaning them up, just as we have been with our own parents' imperfections. So we can control whether we forgive our parents and take responsibility for the lives we've been given. We can also control how we take responsibility for acknowledging our role in many of the difficulties our children experienced while they grew up in our home, and the continued impact that those experiences have in their lives. 

21:57 

What we're not responsible for is how they move forward as adults. We are not in charge of fixing them or showing them where their work is. We are not responsible for taking blame for their current behavior or for negating consequences that they entail from their current behavior. Our responsibility at this point is to learn to fiercely love our children in their struggles, to allow them to to figure out how to grow into adulthood, to be there to emotionally support them in their journey, and to offer compassion, validation, and empathy. This can be tough because often this process will require that we have appropriate boundaries. But our children coming to terms with our imperfections is their journey. And we just get to learn to offer a lot of grace if they are struggling with that. 

22:58 

So the fifth, the last concept about how it can be so challenging to have adult children, they are not you. They will do things differently. They will parent differently, partner differently, have different ideas about right and wrong and maybe have very different values than you. They may choose to live a very different life than the one they were raised in. And this can be really hard for many parents because we very likely don't understand these differences. How can someone raised in our home believe so differently and live so differently than how we do, how they were raised? This is just a huge piece of the agency puzzle. We all have our own experiences, our own personalities, preferences and perspectives based off of millions of pieces of input in our individual lives. And then we have the agency to put them into practice however we see fit. 

23:59 

Someone was telling me a few weeks ago about a new mom who had had a baby and wouldn't let anyone outside of her and her husband see or hold the baby for eight weeks because they felt that they needed time to bond. Now for many in our generation, so I'm 56, for many in our generation we might be very inclined to roll our eyes and get all judge-y about how ridiculous that behavior and thinking is. That's because from our perspective and how things were when we were raising children that wasn't a thing. I took all four of my children to church the first Sunday after we were home from the hospital and passed them around like a sign-up sheet for the next potluck. It didn't even cross my mind that there might be dangerous germs out there to be aware of, or that some peaceful bonding time might be appropriate. Wasn't even talked about back in the 1990s right? Like it wasn't even talked about. But just because it's not understood by us doesn't make this mom's desire any less valid for her. If she wants eight weeks to bond that's none of our business. It doesn't matter if she's our daughter or our daughter-in-law or our best friend's daughter, whatever, she gets to choose to parent and show up for her baby in the way that she wants. If she wants to bottle feed or breastfeed, if she doesn't want anyone around who isn't vaccinated, if she will only buy organic food, if she hand washes all the clothing, guess what, none of that matters. It's just different ways of doing things. There is no right or wrong way. 

25:45 

We have to realize that we don't hold the "right way" trump card. There are just different ways. In this example, our responsibility as the grandparent is to learn to accept how she wants to parent and get out of judgment about it. Just because it's different than how we did it or we would do it doesn't mean it's wrong. Just because we don't understand it doesn't mean that it's wrong either. What they choose to do as adults might be very different than what we had planned for them, but that is not their problem. It is ours. We are the ones who need to let go of expectations and hopes and dreams about how and who they would be. Our responsibility is to learn to let them be adults who live their lives the way they choose to live their lives, to learn to love and support them in whatever course they choose. 

26:47 

Now obviously I'm not talking about if they're abusing their children in some way, right? But most of us are not having to work through that challenge. For most of us, our challenge is stepping out of judgment and embracing them, who they are, how they are, what they are choosing to do, and how they are choosing to live. I know that when I had children, I created in my mind a life path for them of how I wanted them to live their lives, of how I thought they would be when they grew up into adults. I wanted them to be model students to get a certain type of job and marry a certain type of person, have a certain type of marriage, belong to a certain religion and be a certain way within that religion. I had dreams about how I would get to engage with them and their children and where they would live. And when our children don't want to live their lives according to our plan, it can feel very uncomfortable for us because we think we know what's best for them. We really believe that if they live our plan, their lives will be much happier than their lives will be living their plan. 

28:02 

And yet we have zero proof of that. We actually have no idea how they need to walk their path because that information is not ours to have. That is between the them and God. It is only ours to learn to love and support the best way we possibly can as they figure out their own lives, their own paths, their own values and desires and dreams. They may be living far below what we would think their potential is. And it's not our responsibility to try to fix that. It's our job to learn to be loving and kind and accepting of who and how they are, of what they are choosing to do and of how they are choosing to live. 

28:50 

I get it. It can be tough to let go of your hopes and dreams for someone with whom you love so much that it aches sometimes. And yet our greatest growth, their greatest growth, will happen when we both stay in our own lanes. That means we not only allow them to be adults when it's convenient for them and for us, but also when it's inconvenient for them and for us. There will be times when your adult children want to show up as little children asking you to take care of their adult needs. That is not your job. Your job is to let them be adults. And there will be times when you want to treat your adult children like children and take care of all their adult needs. Also not your job. The challenge of adult parenting is learning to allow them to be adults and to treat them as such, even when it's hard. 

30:01 

I do a fair amount of coaching around this. Even people who come to me just for marriage or divorce situations, we often have a couple of counseling or coaching sessions on adult children. I do a fair amount of coaching on this and if you feel you're in struggle over not seeing what you need to see and not knowing how to engage in healthier ways with your adult children, reach out to me. Go to tanyahale.com, my website, and sign up for that free consult coaching thing. It's 90 minutes long. We will talk about how you're showing up with your adult kids. I will help you see where you're crossing into their lane, because most likely you're not seeing it. I'm always super, super nice and kind. I never call you out. Now, I'm honest and I'm truthful, but I'm never mean about it. Go there. If you need some help with this, it is worth the investment in time and energy and money to clean up these relationships, to clean up your thinking around your adult children. 

31:09 

So also, I have several other podcasts on parenting adult kids that will be helpful. And I will put them in the show notes so you can just go to the notes that are there, like where I talk about the podcast a little bit and you can check them out there. But in case you just have a pencil and paper handy and you want to write this down or even on a notes page or whatever on your phone, here we go. Here's some podcasts just specifically around parenting adult kids. Numbers 99, 129, 157, 180, 182, 202, 237. And then of course this one, which is 318. Okay, so check those out if you need to wrap your head around parenting adult children a little bit better. 

31:59 

I think our relationships with our adult kids can be one of the sweetest relationships in our lives. Of course, relationships take two people to really step in and create that. But when we push them away with some of our own dysfunctional behaviors, we're never going to find that because they will push against us. They will not want to engage with us. But when we show up treating them like adults, when we show up having appropriate boundaries, when we show up loving and supportive and kind, we create a space that makes it a whole lot easier for them to come in and be in relationship with us. And figuring this out and learning how to be a parent to adult children is a beautiful part of growing up. I love it so much. 

32:59 

Okay, again, check out tanyahale.com if you want to talk about this, and let's chat. Let's get to work. Let's clean this up and let's get you some better relationships with your adult kids. This is what we do. This is the work that we do here. And it's brilliant and it's amazing and it's life changing. Invite you to join me on this journey. I could not have imagined five years ago living the life that I'm living now. It just changes everything. So, my friends, that's going to do it. I hope you have a really, really spectacular week, and sign up for my email if you're not getting it, if you are interested in the classes. Okay, have an awesome, awesome week and I will see you later. Bye. 

33:48 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email, a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.