Parenting Your Emerging Adult Read online

  Riding a Bicycle

  In teaching a child how to ride a bicycle there is a terrifying moment. You have to let go and trust that the child will be okay. At that moment of letting go, you may be panicking. You may imagine your child being rushed to the emergency room. Yet you somehow get past your fears by trusting and hoping that your child will be okay. If she or he falls down, your child will get up again. Maybe there will be bruises, but in the process your child will learn to ride the bicycle.

  Riding a bike is something you cannot do for your child. Children must master the task on their own. They do this best by knowing they have a cheering squad behind them, knowing that a parent will pick them up and reassure them if they fall.

  And they will fall. Some of the falls will be painful. But parents need to believe that children will get up and ride their bikes more skillfully the next time. Parents cannot protect children from the pains of the mastery process, a process that involves experimentation, testing limits and occasional failure. They must trust that children will pick themselves up and learn from those experiences.

  Believing in emerging adult children—that they will be okay, that they will heal, that they will skillfully “ride their bicycles”—helps parents work through their own anxieties and let go. At some point, blind faith comes into play. There is no other way. But the process is self-correcting. Emerging adults will fail, they will learn from the failures and mastery will emerge. A parent’s job is to be there emotionally once a child “falls off the bike,” not to catch the child or to cushion the fall. There are exceptions. If you anticipate that the fall will be life-threatening, catching your child or cushioning the fall is warranted. Your judgment as well as previous experience with your emerging adult will guide you.

  Watering Plants

  Here is another way of thinking about the care parents provide for their emerging adults:

  In my private practice, I counseled an emerging adult client, Deborah, who entered therapy because she was having trouble launching a career and felt quite anxious. Swamped by student loans and with limited financial resources, Deborah had moved in with her parents. The relationship between mother, father and daughter was a loving one, but Deborah felt suffocated. There was a good deal of what therapists call “enmeshment,” the blurring of healthy boundaries.

  One day Deborah’s mother commented on the plants in my office. “They look so lush and healthy. What’s your secret?” I responded, with honesty and a tinge of guilt, that I wasn’t quite sure, but I thought it might have something to do with benign neglect. I told Deborah’s mother that I sometimes forgot to water and mist the plants or to give them proper nutrients. I had learned through trial and error what each plant needed in order to thrive, but sometimes I was forgetful or distracted. The interesting thing was, the plants appeared forgiving, despite periods of mild negligence. I had learned to depend on that flexibility. But more important, I had learned to believe in their inherent resilience and to respond accordingly. The environment I provided was “good enough.” It was not perfect, but perfect enough.

  Deborah’s mother was intrigued by my response. She reported that in her desire to have healthy houseplants she meticulously overwatered them and they regularly perished. We didn’t speak about the plants again, but Deborah’s mother changed her way of relating and stopped “overwatering.” Deborah thrived under these new conditions. Benign neglect did its job.

  Too Much Parenting?

  Given the lack of adequate social and structural supports, parents of emerging adults are increasingly being asked to assume responsibilities they had not envisioned. Two such examples are: parents of emerging adults assuming responsibility for grandchildren, particularly in the case of an emerging adult struggling with the emotional and financial sequelae of a divorce; parents of emerging adults overextending themselves and assuming financial responsibilities for their emerging adult children. Let’s take a closer look at these issues that parents of emerging adults are now facing.

  According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study, the economic downturn has contributed to a growing phenomenon: grandparents raising their grandchildren.8 Working women find themselves seeking their parents’ assistance in raising their children. It is an immediate, viable fix to a problem, an alternative to expensive, dependable child care. Reliance on grandparents, usually maternal, can be understood in the context of a public policy on the part of the government to transition women, particularly single women, from positions of dependence to independence without the necessary accompanying structural supports.9 Therefore, we have seen an increase in grandparents’ primary caregiving responsibilities.

  Grandparents who serve in the role of caregivers tend to be women. Sixty-seven percent are younger than sixty years of age; they also are likely to be in this role for an extended period of time. Fifty-four percent of grandparents who serve as primary caregivers have done so for more than three years. They are also likely to assist their children financially (50 percent) and help with errands, housework and home repairs (31 percent).10 Research conducted by Gillian Douglas and Neil Ferguson of Cardiff Law School suggest that these arrangements may well be exploitative.

  …even these grandparents may resent the extent to which they have come to be relied on by their children, and to rue the loss of their own active retirement…Moreover, given the matrilineal bias in grandparenting, and the gendered nature of grandparent involvement, what the call to mobilize grandparents would actually mean is likely to be the further feminization of caring and the further alienation of paternal grandparents…This is not a recipe for strengthening ties with the paternal grandparents in the post-divorce family.11

  Grandparents are being beckoned to assume responsibilities for their grandchildren’s emotional, social and physical needs. The dynamics of families vary, as do the solutions. The possibility of exploitation, however, needs to be considered. In some cases, this may be one manifestation of parents continuing to overextend themselves on behalf of their emerging adult children.

  Another context in which parents of emerging adults are placing themselves in vulnerable positions in relationship to their own future financial and emotional well-being concerns the finances of their emerging adult children. Parents of emerging adults are the fastest growing group accruing college debt, with serious consequences for many.12 The 2.2 million individuals over the age of sixty who accrue college debt on behalf of their emerging adult children has tripled since 2005, a staggering rate of growth. Due to a variety of reasons including job loss, parents of emerging adults might find themselves in the position of not being able to honor their loan payment commitments.

  Why would parents place themselves at financial risk? After all, employment opportunities for those over sixty diminish in the marketplace. What are the emotional costs to emerging adult children, knowing that they are in part responsible for their parents being in this untenable position?

  Many parents “overwater” in response to the anxiety-provoking world their children are navigating. They want to get it perfect for them. But it is hard, if not impossible, to perfectly “titrate” children’s environments. And it is not helpful, even in the long run. Anxious parents end up teaching their children to be unduly cautious (or to rebel by throwing caution to the wind). Overwatering is a posture that paints the world as a dangerous place that cannot be mastered without the help of significant others. I suspect that this is not the message that parents want to send.

  When thinking about what “good enough” parenting means, under-watering, at least some of the time, is the best way to go. Create conditions that allow your emerging adult to thrive, but don’t obsess over the maintenance program. Believe in his or her ability to thrive under less than ideal conditions. Build on your emerging adult’s inherent resilience.

  Reason to Believe

  Both of the metaphors I have suggested carry an underlying faith that emerging adults will figure things out and that they will do so on their own timelines and th
eir own terms. They will create lives that are meaningful to them if parents let them. That means allowing them to feel their parents’ faith in them. It means backing off and giving them space to make their own decisions, whether or not parents think their children are right.

  Children are masters at reading their parents’ anxieties. And so parents need to focus their energies on trying to get those anxieties under control. They should try to learn to sever their attachments to things going the way they want. Parents need to trust that their emerging adults will master the task of carving out their own identities in their own ways, building on their strengths and gifts. There is no better approach.

  Here are anchors to help you tweak or revamp your way of thinking about this developmental period:

  •On average, emerging adults take five to ten years longer to make the transition to living in their own homes compared to their baby boomer parents.13 Although they use their parents’ homes on a revolving basis, they do make the jump to living on their own: 55 percent of the eighteen-to twenty-four-year-olds, 85 percent of twenty-five- to twenty-nine-year-olds and 91 percent of thirty- to thirty-four-year-olds are not living with their parents and are no longer attending school.14

  •Emerging adults do commit to relationships and aspire to traditional goals such as marriage, children and home ownership. For example, among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, only one-fourth (24.6 percent) of emerging adults are married or cohabitating. In contrast, 60 percent of twenty-five- to twenty-nine-year-olds and 77 percent of thirty- to thirty-four-year-olds are married or cohabitating. These statistics are similar among developed nations such as Canada and Germany.15

  •The majority of emerging adults report finding satisfying work by their late twenties. They report finding work that they want to do for the “long run.”16

  Taking the long view rather than a snapshot view of your emerging adult during this developmental period can be helpful. You probably should expect a period of “waiting,” a Launching Pad period that will likely be longer than yours was. That means you may need to recalibrate your timelines for your emerging adult. At the same time, have faith that your son or daughter will move on and assume the roles and responsibilities of adulthood when the time is right, developmentally speaking. Hopefully this belief will help you find it easier to manage the difficult process of standing by, letting it be and letting go.

  Chapter 7

  STANDING BY, LETTING IT BE AND LETTING GO

  Wise parents of emerging adults realize the importance of standing by, letting it be and letting go. However, this is hard for many. Parents are socialized to be action-oriented. Standing by and letting it be runs counter to everything they know. It suggests passivity, which is an anathema to the can-do mode of being. Many parents find it difficult to provide their emerging adults the space to be, to make choices that parents would not make and to stumble and fall along the way.

  What drives parents to be “proactive” when it comes to emerging adults is the recognition that there are inadequate supports built into the systems that their sons and daughters are attempting to enter. Many raise their children to believe in The Dream and they are desperately trying to mesh the optimistic beliefs they were taught with the harsh realities emerging adults are facing. Traveling alone and “privatizing” their perceived failures and successes, they may likely have encountered few constants and much debt along the way. Given the lack of available structural supports, it is not surprising that over 50 percent of emerging adults connect with their parents on a daily basis.1 Emerging adults value the connection and support that parents can provide. Taking a phone call or responding to a text and offering words of encouragement and engagement is not coddling, nor is it helicopter parenting.

  Parents serve a vital role at this stage in their children’s lives, because modern society has failed, in my opinion. Parents need to offer their emerging adult children a sense of comfort and predictability to help offset feelings of hopelessness. Emerging adults are being asked to go it alone, without adequate social scaffolding. In the job market, they are expected to demonstrate a high level of self-motivation and identity capital—self-understanding, self-discipline and planning. Those who lack identity capital find themselves unprepared to deal with an economy that doesn’t square with the view of unlimited possibilities in which they were raised to believe.

  Many parents are trying to assume exclusive responsibility for “fixing” this problem. They are also going it alone. But it is too mammoth a job and the term helicopter parenting must be understood in that context. The solution requires community and societal interventions. The rush to judgment of emerging adults and their parents is premature. The issues presented in this chapter suggest a far more nuanced and complex narrative.

  Earlier, I commented on the importance of evaluating these parent and emerging adult interactions in context. I invite you once again to view the material we will be exploring together—standing by, letting it be and letting go—in context. You know your emerging adult and your family best.

  Letting Go

  Only in an accepting, secure environment that allows emerging adults to be who they are (not who parents want them to be) do individuals become free to explore and define themselves. Letting go of one’s children is a profoundly difficult thing to do. Parents have ample opportunities to master it. If they miss one opportunity, another will soon come along. Any opportunity they seize can be a new start. Suzuki Roshi, a Buddhist monk and teacher, wisely stated, “We don’t need to learn how to let things go; we just need to learn to recognize when they’ve already gone.”2

  Karen Coburn and Madge Treeger, authors of Letting Go: A Parents’ Guide to Understanding the College Years, urge parents to keep in mind:

  Young men and women ask for little more…than a steady and rooted home base to return to, just as they had many years ago when they hurried back from their adventures across the playground to find Mom and Dad sitting on the park bench where they left them. To provide this sanctuary and still stay out of the way is an artful balancing act.3

  If parents can learn to let their emerging adults be while the emerging adults are still in their parents’ homes, then letting them go becomes a relatively easy step. There is a hidden benefit to this allowing that parents may not realize: In giving space for children to be, parents also give themselves space to be and, in the process, become more self-accepting. When parents stop holding themselves accountable for everything that happens to their sons and daughters, their anxiety levels plunge and they can relax into the flow of life. Parents can start to enjoy parenthood more.

  Finding Balance

  It is very difficult to find balance between encouraging emerging adults to “lead their own lives” while also continuing to provide parental support. Given how difficult this process is, parents may vacillate between doing too much and not doing enough.

  The nature of balancing is that it is an ongoing process. It is not something parents get right once and then walk away from. It is a zigging and zagging affair. Parents notice they’re doing too much of this, so they try more of that. A freeze-frame at any single moment can show that things appear to be unbalanced. But as long as parents are constantly correcting and adjusting, they are probably keeping balance enough. And in the end, that may suffice.

  Co-Creating a “New” Relationship

  In my conversations with parents about their emerging adult children, many of them stressed the importance of seeing the larger picture, of looking beyond one’s own identification with one’s children. With a wider lens, one is able to acknowledge that talking about one’s children is not the same as talking about oneself.

  Many parents spoke about the need for guarding against confusing their own issues with those of their children and using their emerging adult children to meet their own unresolved needs.

  Parents are not their children. Learning to strip themselves from the identity of their children takes tough, conscious effort. But it is w
ell worth the work. Only then are parents able to co-create new, adult relationships with their grown children. When parents “dis-identify” with their sons and daughters, they stop taking what their children do so personally. They stop seeing their children’s decisions as reflections or comments on themselves. With that comes a new respect, a new freedom and a new level of adult communication. Old rules of engagement become less entrenched, leaving space for new boundaries and roles. Many parents never take the conscious step of dis-identifying with their children and, as a result, their relationships never mature into rich and mutually satisfying ones.

  Parenting an emerging adult is a job that can produce a lot of inner turbulence. It often involves holding contradictory feelings toward emerging adult children. The main challenge, I believe, is to express actively the loving aspects of the relationship while simultaneously working with the negative feelings. It may sound simplistic, but let the positive aspects dominate. It is very easy to let shortcomings that parents see in their emerging adult children—such as lack of career direction or financial immaturity—begin to define the entire relationship in a negative way. Communication then devolves into constant criticism, nagging, sniping and defensiveness. If parents let their positive perceptions of their emerging adults take priority, however, the relationship has room to grow and blossom and the negatives can fix themselves.

  Parents of emerging adults are exploring terra incognito. It is not that there are no rules; it’s that the rules are obsolete. They no longer fit today’s realities. For reasons we have mentioned (and for others that we will discuss), it is just not as easy for emerging adults today to jump into adulthood as it was for previous generations. That means parents are likely to remain active parents for longer than ever before. And most are pretty clueless about how to make it work.