To Parents of Young Adults
Our grown children will always want us. They will always love us. We can love them forever. As our children grow into pre-teens, teens, young adults, and older adults, our relationships with them will change. However, our love for them, and their love for us, remains.
Also, we must remember that we are good parents, and our young-adult children are good, too.
As our children grow, our role changes. When they were younger, we provided their basic needs and a safe environment. We provided closeness, connection, and love. We set up the conditions that made it possible for them to play, learn, build relationships, and figure out how the world works. We tried to give them a picture of reality they could use to understand the world, and they used it as a basis for building their own picture of reality. We listened to them. Sometimes we set limits.
As young people grow older, they can increasingly take care of themselves and explore the larger world. We become more a consultant and less a manager. They are constructing their own picture of how things work. They go after [pursue] bigger dreams. They do things we don’t have a say in [a role in determining]. Other relationships become more central to them. They develop relationships with people who can act as guides and reference people for them. If they stay in the RC Community, they Co-Counsel with many more people.
In some ways we are still in a parent role, and in some ways we are now equal partners in the world. We teach them things; they teach us things. We sometimes have opportunities to work with them as equal partners. Sometimes they lead us, and sometimes we lead them.
They may come closer for a while. At times they may go away for a while. That’s okay. We can discharge on how much we miss them and miss the old relationship with them. I suggest not skipping over this and taking a lot of time to do it. There will be many goodbyes, and we get to feel them fully.
As young adults, they may use us as counselors, or they may not. They often come to us with big problems, when they are desperate for help and there’s no one else who knows them as well or they feel will be there for them. They know they can count on [depend on] us. They will come to us for our knowledge and wisdom. We can also be their biggest cheerleaders.
I think we can consider asking our adult children to give us support or listening time if they are coming to us for support and counseling. It doesn’t have to be exchanging counseling every time. But expecting that they will support us recognizes their adulthood. It validates who they are. It helps them come out of any feelings of victimization they may have from having been oppressed by us as younger people. It also helps us articulate what we would like for support instead of hoping they will figure it out.
We need to discharge on what it was like to be a young adult, as we have had to do on every age as our children grow. The more we can discharge on our young adult years, the more we can enjoy our young-adult children and offer relaxed support.
They will get angry at us sometimes, both because we are so safe and because we were central in laying in their chronic material [distress]. At the same time, we can require them to treat us well. We are not there for them to aim their hard stuff at in the same way they did when they were younger. It’s okay for us to be treated with respect, even if we were enormously deficient as parents. (All parents are deficient, given the oppressive society, and all parents are good parents.) They may still blow up [express anger] at us at times, and at times we will have fights. That’s okay, but it’s best if all parties understand that it’s really a session. I think of those fights as “love fights.”
Fights with our children can bring up heavy distresses for us. That is a great opportunity to discharge on early times when we were attacked or criticized. The more we can discharge on the feelings from back then, the more we will be able to listen to other people in our lives and not get restimulated. This is a powerful ability to have.
We can support our adult children’s decisions and offer our perspective when they ask for it. Sometimes we can say that we think they are going in a direction that is either dangerous or will have long-lasting bad repercussions. But we have to give the advice wisely and in small amounts. The more we offer, the less valuable it becomes. Our adult children will need to make mistakes and learn from them, as we did.
We will get restimulated by their culture and their generation. Every generation both improves the world and makes mistakes. In order to be good allies, we need to discharge a lot on what restimulates us about their generation.
Now is a really hard time to be a young adult. The society is fraying, and the future is uncertain. Our children will make decisions about their lives that are based on completely different conditions than when we were young. With a collapsing society and economy, a climate emergency, and COVID, they need to figure things out in ways that past generations did not have to. Their choices about education, work, family, and activism will be very different from ours. We can figure out how to back [support] them and appreciate the lives they are building. We can discharge on our worries about them and the decisions we made as younger adults, so we can support them better. We can also reach for a perspective that this is one of the most interesting times to be alive and be excited with them about what is possible in the coming years.
Somerville, Massachusetts, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of parents
(Present Time 204, July 2021)