Doing Life with Your Adult Children: Keep Your Mouth Shut and the Welcome Mat Out

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Thank you for any help you can give me for knowing how to handle these conflicts and make our relationship more respectful. Your post was helpful and made me feel a little more normal in my feelings and situation. My oldest is 41, unmarried and had two sons she’s 19 and 10. Last year she got an apartment with a man she met on the internet. He lived in another state and after meeting him just twice he moved here and they moved in together. I begged her just to date him until they knew each other better but she wouldn’t listen. I told her if she and the boys left my home this time she could not return and she agreed. A few months ago he left and they had both just signed a new lease. She can’t afford the rent and is begging to come home. This will be the 7th time she had done this and I feel like my house has a revolving door. My husband died 7 years ago and our 38 year old son with Muscular Dystrophy lives with me. I feel torn and beaten down as she says hurtful things now that I’m not bending. I also worry about my grandsons. I’m at my wits end. I want her to learn to be independent. I don’t want to enable her. What to do? Be a consultant, not a CEO.Tess Brigham, an LMFT (licensed marriage and family therapist) from the Bay Area, says this phase of parenthood is not about running the company and being in charge of their life as you were when they were a dependent but, instead, parenting adult children may mean offering expert advice and guidance that adult children can implement. Great insights and advice! I think this is particularly helpful for those with children navigating into young adulthood, but anyone with adult children could use it. Why not read a book from a completely opposing perspective to yours every so often, that was absolutely not intended for you, for the sake of curiosity? To give the author due credit, this is the sort of book would have appealed to the bible bashing elements of my family, and if they read and followed the advice in there, a lot of problems could have been avoided. The advice within is mild, generic, peacekeeping and in alignment with the general inoffensive pop-psychology guidance that you would find in a typical airport bookstore, just with an added bible verse here and there. Such as:

Enabling behavior shields people from experiencing the full impact and consequences of their behavior.

Tensions show in each family, across generations, dividing parent from child and prospective in-law and every permutation in between. There are many beautiful and touching moments in these events, but weddings are also a powder keg of potential bad feeling. i don’t understand where i went wrong. ……after reading the definition of an overwhelming mother….may be that was what i was and am….I am seeking for help for me to have better relations with my daughter. Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thank you

However, after she met her current fiance we have constantly fought and I really felt that she turned away from me. I realize that she loves her fiance and I really have tried to get along with him. I really feel that my daughter loves me but is abusive towards me. There may be overlap and outliers in these decades—for example, more than 10 million millennialsare currently caregivers for a parent or grandparent—but these are among the general milestones and markers for young adults:There's a couple other comments I've heard on that proverb (22:6.) One is that while the proverb talks about what the child will do when he/she is old, it doesn't mention anything about the middle years. It includes many who wander and who do return to faith. I find it interesting that after I wrote the above book review, I listened to a podcast about pitfalls in reading the Bible. #2 on the list talked about treating Proverbs like promises and even listed the "Train up a child ..." Proverb discussed above. Anyway, it's worth listening to and probably said it better than I did: