LETTING GO OF OUR ADULT CHILDREN
Introduction
BY ARLENE F HARDER, MA, MFT
Letting Go of Our Adult Children was created out of personal and professional experience.
See Better Tomorrows for information on a program of healing for strained and broken relationships.
Letting go of adult children. It's something parents do all the time. At least we're told that's what parents are supposed to do about the time their children turn eighteen. Whether our children stay under our roof longer than we want or strike out earlier than anticipated, we are told we need to cut the apron strings that have kept us focused on our child.
In other words, when our children reach the age of maturity, we are expected to make a major change in our relationship with them- to transfer responsibility for decisions concerning their lives from us to them. If we successfully complete this transition, we will, says conventional wisdom, accept our children as independent individuals just as they are, including imperfections, values that conflict with ours, and different needs and desires. And they will accept us in return. We will communicate openly and share our values and experiences with one another without believing we have the right, or the power, to change the other person.
Sound easy? Not if you're the parent of a grown child who marches to a drum very different from the one you played for your child when he or she was young. You know it would be better for both of you if you could let go. But you can't. You remain uncomfortably, perhaps painfully, "stuck" because things haven't turned out the way you expected.
Being stuck and unable to let go can arise from minor, irritating differences between you and your child or major obstacles that appear to be intractable.
For example, you may be unable to get past frequent arguments over relatively unimportant issues that both of you always seem to turn into contests of who is right. Or while you and your daughter don't often disagree, you can't shake the disappointment you feel when she loses yet another job. You want to accept the fact that how well she does at work is her problem. But you know she doesn't demonstrate the commitment to work that employers want. How can you let go when you blame yourself for not teaching her responsibility? Or perhaps you need the money from the sale of a family house your thirty-eight year old son has been living in rent-free for Fifteen years. The only "problem" is that he doesn't have money to move else- where; forcing him out would make you feel like Simon Legree. Or while you may realize that there is probably nothing you can do to prevent your son's divorce, you remain entangled in accusations and defenses with your son's in-laws because you're afraid you will lose contact with a precious grandchild. And sticky in-law problems are legion in complicated stepfamily configurations.
Even if your children are happily married, however, you may have a hard time understanding and accepting in-laws who are of a different race, religion, or social group. You hadn't thought of yourself as prejudiced, but you are having a hard time adjusting. And what if your child is single and living with a member of the opposite sex — ; or has chosen a member of his or her same sex as a life partner? With less than 25 percent of families made up of father, mother, and dependent children, family constellations aren't what they used to be.
Letting go may be particularly difficult if the problems you face seem highly resistant to change. This is especially true when your child is mentally ill or is in serious trouble with the law. And if your child is like my son, whose difficulties in relationships and jobs have been compounded by drug and alcohol abuse, the road to letting go can be extremely long and trying. Yet your situation may be even more painful if your child died before you were able to work out the issues that kept you from letting go; all that unfinished business leaves you with pain you are sure will never go away.
You may be a parent who claims you have no choice but to let go when your child refuses to have any contact, or has extremely minimal contact, with you. Don't kid yourself. On the surface you may look as though you have let go, but anyone probing a centimeter deep can see that your hurt in being excluded from your child's life penetrates deep into your heart. This may be especially difficult if you are at a loss to understand what went wrong.
Yet the situation isn't any easier if you recognize all too clearly how you contributed to the rift that has torn the family fabric in half. For example, perhaps you abused alcohol or drugs when your children were small. Today, although you are now clean and sober, your child is unwilling to forgive you, despite your apologies. In that case you may be paralyzed by guilt — ; concluding that you have permanently injured your child and that the gap between you can never be bridged.
On the other hand, you may be a parent who is perfectly satisfied with how your child has turned out and who thought you had a good relationship with her. Recently, however, she has accused you and her father of being "dysfunctional" and perhaps even "abusive." Even though you realize you weren't perfect parents, you are saddened by alienation created by her anger and your hurt.
If you see yourself in any of these situations (or ones uncomfortably similar), you realize that you've been unable to let go no matter how hard you try. This is what is meant by the subtitle of this book, "When What We Do Is Never Enough." No matter what we say, think or do — no matter how hard we try — until we let go with love we remain uncomfortably bound to a child who is legally old enough to make his decisions without parental interference or approval.
As parents of children whose values and lifestyles are in conflict with ours — whether we experience a fairly small amount or a great deal of disappointment in that fact — we have probably already discovered that heavy-handed bullying and significant bribes cannot make our child become what we had hoped he would become. Money may work in the short run, of course, but in the long haul it can't buy the integrity, honesty, determination, and responsibility we desire for our child. Yet masking our attempts to change our child through less obvious measures is not unlike trying to run him over with a fuzzy bulldozer; it only leaves him, and us, bruised. Let's face it — as long as we keep trying to get our child to live according to our values, we don't stand much chance of having the kind of adult-to-adult relationship we all deserve with our children when they grow up.
The first part of the book, "Getting Caught up in Our Expectations," deals with what happens when parents discover their child is marching to a different drummer. In it I offer a path to letting go with love and to forming a more positive relationship with your adult child, a path involving five stages of healing. In these chapters you will see that your disappointment and pain are not unique; nor is it unusual for you to keep trying to get your child to change. Most important of all, you will realize why it is essential for you to shift your attention from your adult child to yourself.
If you already know you must change your focus away from whatever stands between you and your child, you may want to go directly to the second part of the book, "Finding Peace by Letting Go." These five chapters offer suggestions for healing the pain caused by the realization that your child does not share your values or cannot live up to the expectations you once had for him or her. Here you will find motivation to explore the issues that keep you pulling on your end of the rope in the family tug-of-war, to grieve your unfulfilled expectations, to forgive yourself and your child and, finally, to let go with love. And if differences between you and your child are still irreconcilable, you can learn how to bring closure and healing to that situation as well.
The concept of a path of healing for parents first arose for me during the painful years when I struggled with great disappointment in a child who was not living the kind of life I envisioned for him. Gradually I realized that I was moving through a series of stages and turned my attention from my son's problems to those which I needed to address in my own life. I continued to observe this process and to further develop my theory in working with disappointed parents as part of my practice as a licensed family therapist. Later these ideas were reinforced in interviews with over seventy-five parents, both those who were disappointed in how things have turned out and those who were very satisfied.
To protect confidentiality in sharing the stories of others, I have changed names and identifying characteristics. In a few instances I have combined several elements from more than one situation to emphasize a particular point.
Letting go can be difficult for parents whether they are married, divorced, or widowed; adoptive or biological parents; single or step-parents. Since the specific circumstances in everyone's life are different, and since we all have somewhat different expectations for our children, we will each experience different reactions to our adult children if those expectations are not met. Consequently, the act of letting go with love will be easier and go more quickly for some and be more difficult and take longer for others. Yet this book offers to every parent the evidence that it is possible to let go and find peace even in the most difficult of circumstances.
A brief word about the use of pronouns in the text. The title of this book contains the words "our children" because I have walked the same path to letting go that the reader is also walking. And because this book is a road map based in large part on my personal and professional experience, I also use the words "me," "mine," "us," and "ours." I probably have experienced many of your struggles, and I believe we can more easily learn to let go when we see that our problems do not fall only on our shoulders but are shared by millions of others.
I have generally found that mothers experience more guilt than fathers over a child who hasn't met the family's expectations or lived up to family values. Fathers can also have a difficult time in letting go of their adult children, but they have not been conditioned to feel as personally responsible as do their wives. Therefore, in an attempt to avoid the him-or-her, his-or-hers dilemma, I use "she" more frequently than "he" when I refer to an individual parent. In discussing children, however, I have attempted to use "he" and "she" in equal amounts. I don't want to create the impression that only male children are embroiled in the kinds of generation gaps that pull families apart.
It is my hope that this book will guide you in moving past your disappointment and pain into peace, healing, and acceptance of your child, even if he or she continues to make choices that have, until now, driven you up a wall.
We cannot change our grown children. But dealing honestly and openly with our disappointment creates an opportunity to change ourselves — and in the process to let go with love so that our disappointment no longer causes us pain.
Begin Chapter 1
© Copyright 1994, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT, Reprinted with permission
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