How to Get Along With Grown Children

Many parents today find themselves over-involved in their adult children's lives. This is often attributed to baby-boomers' attempts at avoiding perceived child-rearing mistakes of the previous generation, as well as the current cost of living keeping adult children at home. However, baby-boomers often end up over-indulging their children in trying to avoid a generation gap. Encourage independence and respect to get along with grown children.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Appreciate the fact that your kids are grown. Understand you will always be their parent, but their adulthood changes the dynamics of your relationship. Consider the idea that to get along with grown children you may still offer advice but now more as a friend. Allow your children to be grown and respect their rights as adults.

2. Listen to college instructors, advisers and other professionals when they discourage you from making college, career and other adult decisions for your kids. Steer away from the helicopter parent syndrome and from hovering over every move your adult child makes. Let him or her grow from making even the tough adult decisions.

3. Encourage adult children to move on and out on their own if they live at home. Empower them with positive motivational words that promote confidence and reward adult-like behaviors. Emphasize how learning to get past hurdles in life, like graduation, divorce or job loss is a natural part of adulthood and that staying with parents long-term to avoid coping is not healthy.

4. Set dates and determine phases and steps for gaining independence if adult children have lived at home too long (or if you've lived with them too long). Check in and evaluate progress toward independence and long-term goals along the way. Push toward sustainable independence to get along with grown children.

5. Emancipate yourself from your dependence on your young adult children. Realize your dependence on them may be holding you and them back in life. Understand also having lives of your own promotes growth and self-fulfillment. Develop more friendships of your own if you hang out with your adult kids and their friends. Let go of your own early adulthood years and let adult children enjoy theirs.

6. Identify ways you may be enabling their immaturity and dependency on you. Squelch your desire to bail adult kids out every time they mess up. Keep yourself from trying to protect them when they face consequences. Demonstrate the importance of budgeting funds so that they don't continually come to you for easy money when things don't add up.

7. Emphasize the importance of your saving retirement money during your empty-nest years. Explain how you now need a period of time to grow as an adult and enjoy your own life during your non-parenting years. Move on and grow up; take time to reflect on your life and accomplishments. Embrace the next phase.

8. Control your urges to put off change in your own life. Gravitate toward your own goals as you move into the next crucial stage of your adulthood. Respect your own well-being and demand respect from all others to get along with grown children. Set an example.

9. Allow adult children to live their own lives. Emphasize your friendship, and let them get to know you as an adult. Share hobbies and other interests with them to get along with adult children. Listen and take advice from them sometimes without allowing them to rule your life. Express love for grown children by showing appreciation for them as capable adults. Let them know you want what's best for them in life.

Tips & Warnings

• Start encouraging adult children in their late teens and early twenties to make independent decisions and to own the consequences of the choices they make.

• Consider family and individual counseling if you discover challenging dependency issues and/or co-dependency problems within your family, especially if your family has suffered from the effects of alcohol or drug abuse by one or more family members. Check out Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Al-Anon/Alateen support groups also.

• Realize that in situations where parents or adult children are ill and unable to take care of themselves, it's obviously not appropriate to force adult children out on their own (or parents). Maintain respect and allow for as much independence as possible, even if you do have to live together.

Resources

• Discover useful information about relationships with grown children.
• Discover support groups at Al-Anon/Alateen.