How to Communicate Better With Your Adult Children

Good communication can revive your relationship with your adult children

To communicate better with your adult children you have to recognize and respect their independence as well as realize that they will still be dependent on you for emotional and sometimes financial support. The key is to cultivate a relationship of interdependence where each party is independent but where they still rely on each other for certain kinds of support. Unless your relationship has been strained to the point that you or they need to seek professional counselling to mend past wounds, it can certainly be improved.

Instructions

1. Re-evaluate your parenting style. Your parenting style may have caused your children to withdraw from or become combative with you. If you were either aloof, reactive, or generally uninvolved while your children were younger, or if you were overbearing, dictatorial, and imposing, they will be used to dealing with you in a certain way. To change that dynamic you will have to change your parenting style. You will have to strike a balance between the two styles by listening to them with full attention, coming up with strategies together, teaching them good principles and allowing them to manage themselves.

2. Define your expectations of each other. Get together with your adult children and talk about your expectations for communication and involvement in each other's lives. Try to reach compromises on such issues as how much communication you would like from each other and how much responsibility you will have in each other's lives. The subject of the discussion will be up to you but the idea behind the talk is for you to establish respectful boundaries and begin to nurture a more mutually fulfilling relationship.

3. Be generous with praise. Focus more on the positives about your adult children than you do on the negatives. Your communication with them will improve when you become more supportive than critical since they will be more comfortable opening up to you. Focusing on the positives does not mean that you ignore wrongdoings. It only means that you learn to criticize constructively and dwell less on their perceived flaws.

References

• Brigham Young University: Respectful Communication With Adult Children