LETTING GO OF OUR ADULT CHILDREN
Chapter 8: Letting Go With Love
Page 26
BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT
Continuation of Chapter 8 of Letting Go of Our Adult Children, in which you learn how to truly let go with love.
Letting Go of Adult Children Living at Home
When we were young, we would probably have assumed that a book entitled Boomerang Kids (by Jean Davies Okimoto and Phyllis Jackson Stegall) was about young Australian aborigines. Today, however, that term is applied to those adults, primarily in their twenties and thirties, who either return home temporarily or postpone leaving because of economic pressure, emotional upheavals, and a reluctance to sacrifice material comfort provided by parents for financial independence. Increasingly parents are discovering that they're unprepared for the phenomena that is hitting homes across America.
Letting go doesn 't mean our children can't live under our roof, only that we no longer take responsibility for their lives. However, it is very hard not to slip back into the parenting role when children return home (or don't leave home in the first place). Our guilt and parenting instincts become hooked all too easily.
The following are some of my suggestions, based on ideas from Okimoto and Stegall's book, for letting go of adult children living at home.
Establish ground rules before allowing your child to come home. Expect the child to become a fully functioning member, to pull his own weight.
Duplicate conditions in the real world as much as possible at home. If the child has no money, demand household chores in lieu of rent.
Parents and children should draw up an agreement or contract that stipulates how the family will function together, such as deciding that the child will mow the lawn once a week and that there is a limit to how long she may stay.
Once your children have jobs, they should be expected to pay rent on a gradually increasing scale.
Just as important as allowing children to return home is being able to lock them out. Refuse to admit boomerangers who are addicted to drugs or alcohol or who abuse family members.
Do not permit your child to live at home when there is not enough money or space.
We All Regress During Visits Home
Once you decide to treat your adult children more like friends than like offspring for whom you are responsible, you will want to put that resolve into action. What better time to do that than when your children come and visit. Right? Well, yes. But watch out. There's a fly in the ointment.
Do you remember what it was like (and perhaps still is) when you went to visit your folks? You had expectations that Mom and Dad would be there for you just like they were in the old days. In fact, part of the enjoyment of anticipating a return to your parent's home was the fun of knowing Mom would cook the dishes she knew you liked. Dad would tell his old jokes and everyone would still laugh. And even though the old days were chaotic, whenever you returned home you assumed they would continue to be the way you remembered.
Unless parents experience major changes in their children's personalities, they usually continue to relate to their children in ways they've always related. The same is true for children. They expect us to act in ways we've always acted, to think as we've always thought, to hold the values we've had for years.
The consequence of these expectations is that everyone in the family seems to regress when they get together. On the one hand, there is comfort and strength in experiencing the stability of loving relationships over the years. On the other hand, we can be so convinced that things will remain the same that we don't notice the situation is different, that members in the family have developed new attitudes and are able to handle situations they previously could not. In other words, it is very easy to live in the past during family get-togethers and not in the present. And our children can easily continue replaying the old sibling rivalries that in the past kept things stirred up.
If you have reached this last stage on the road to healing and are ready to practice letting go with love, there is, fortunately, a way out of your dilemma, an outlook that can ease the transition between old behavior and new. Expect your next few visits to be somewhat uncomfortable — ; new ways of relating are unfamiliar, and what is unfamiliar can be uncomfortable. Expect that your children will attempt to put you into a box — ; they probably still see you in the light of your old attitudes and behaviors. If you can remember that the phenomena of regression is an almost universal experience and not peculiar to your family, you will be able to smile and keep carrying on.
Tell Your Children You Love Them
Grace Walls came to see me because she was having a hard time letting go of a beloved sister dying of cancer. After the funeral, she sent me an essay she had written entitled, "The Importance of Sharing Loving Feelings." It began with a brief quote from Rainer Maria Rilke and continued with Grace's plea that people express their love before it is too late.
I close this chapter with her advice (printed with her permission), because I believe it is very important that we let our children know we love them. We should not tell them we love them in the hope that we can better manipulate and control them, but simply to let them know they are loved because they are part of the human race, and part of us. Letting them know we love them - freely and without strings attached - allows us to let them go without guilt or expectations that they meet our standards.
For one human being to love another,
That is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks
The ultimate, the last test and proof,
The work for which all other work
Is but preparation.
Loving and expressing that loving is truly one of our most important "tasks" in this life. The only things that are really worth anything ultimately in life are our caring relationships, our emotional, mental, and spiritual growth, and the work that we have accomplished. Everything else — status, wealth, fame, power, ego, etc. — is worthless.
Please, tell all those whom you love, all those whom you respect and honor, your feelings. Write those caring letters to family members and friends far away, call those people you've been meaning to call, do that kind task, say that kind word TODAY. Tomorrow may be too late. And you may leave a hole in the universe that only your caring and your loving could fill.
—Grace Walls
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© Copyright 1994, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT, Reprinted with permission
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