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

Product Information

Are you struggling to connect with your child now that they've left the nest? Are you feeling the tension and heartache as your relationship dynamic begins to change? In Doing Life with Your Adult Children, bestselling author and parenting expert Jim Burns provides practical advice and hopeful encouragement for navigating this tough yet rewarding transition. For more on this thorny topic, read our article, Giving Money to Grown Children: When to Stop and How to Break the Habit. Top Concerns of Parenting Adult Children Oh and this thirty seven year old soon to be dad….rides a bicycle….can I get some real advice. I do not want to raise a baby. I worked hard and wanted to enjoy retirement. Lately I’ve wondered if adult children sense we need them and they don’t need us and painful ouch don’t want us or the thought of having to be around for us? But they don’t consciously face this? They rant, evade with blame and smokescreen us basically to force a distance hoping we will go away. Or they yell rudely to make us go away. But we still can’t condone obviously bad treatment or accept blame that’s not ours when accusations aren’t even factually accurate! Adult children don't distinguish between what we consider an innocent remark or desire to fix a problem, and parental control." This one felt odd to me, probably because I seldom, if ever, felt controlled. [One of my sisters felt differently here, so there's a difference in personality coming into play.]

This is where I'm at in my life. My kids are now adults. One has a family of his own in a little apartment not too far from his childhood home. The other still lives at home while he completes his college degree. They both have significant others and the oldest has blessed me with my first grandchild. This book was written by a white, wealthy Christian boomer for other white, wealthy Christian boomers who do American things like 'paying for college', talking at length about 'living by biblical money management and stewardship principles' and having existential crises when their children do things like 'cohabitation' and 'promiscuity'. It encourages parents to reconnect with their adult children by paying for their wedding, doing grandparenting, listening and 'being fun' so that they can happily put off interrogating any of the common reasons their millennial children are avoiding them (homo/transphobia, supporting Trump, being racist). Carrie Krawiec, a licensed marriage and family therapist at Birmingham Maple Clinicin Troy, Michigan, advises parents to take an inventory of what they can control and what they can’t. “You may not be able to control how late your adult child stays out or sleeps in, but you might be able to control their resources like money, use of the car, etc.,” says Krawiec. “Create rules for adult children living at home and expectations for the things you can control and avoid what you can’t.” What to Do About Adult Children Who Expect Money What are you doing to maintain your [own] emotional, physical, relational, and even spiritual health?" I remember, in the events following my dad's death, watching as my mom did things for herself in each of those categories, perhaps more reflexively than intentionally, but consistently nonetheless. And although I loved on her, I remember thinking that was exactly what I needed from her at that moment - the knowledge that she was taking care of herself, and the example that she set in taking care of herself. I took time to inwardly focus on how much I love her and how much I wish for her. Then I talked to her with as much intensity and gentleness as I could, telling her the story about the day she was born, and how I burst with love and commitment for her, and what my wishes and hopes were for her then and now. I didn’t say anything about the matters which had been in contention. She cried and said, “Now I don’t even feel like keeping that plan…” and I won’t ramble about details, but there was a change.

Failing to recognize this comes into play in preparing a child for society, but also, failing to recognize this may place more blame on the parents of a wandering child than is warranted. As the old saying goes, God is the perfect Parent, but look at how His children turned out! But I also think of Matthew 7:6 where Jesus said, "Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces." NIV. Sometimes we need to refrain from casting our pearls of wisdom around because it only aggravates them - as painful as it is to compare them to swine or to dogs. It's not that we are classifying them as pigs, but that their own behavior in their reactions to pearls - acting like this - classifies them. If you’d like some specific ways to pray for your adult children’s needs–whether it’s a marriage concern, a crippling addiction, or they’re just in a lonely place where you want God to bless them with friends–you’ll find encouraging stories and hundreds of prayer prompts in my book, Praying the Scriptures for Your Adult Children. Automatically feeling like someone's trying to control me is a foreign concept to me. Or automatically trying to do things differently just to be different, either.

Featuring: Transition Parenting, Enabling, Letting Go, Expectations, Grace, Bible Verses, Apologies, Being The Bigger Person, The Advice You Don't Want To Take, Keeping Your Mouth Shut, Failure To Launch, Boomerang Kids, Emerging Adults The first thing I'd like to say to parents reading this book is "Love ... always hopes." - 1 Corinithians 13:7. Hello. My observation is that we all form habits with folks, good habits and bad. And hang in there with people who aren’t good to us. Yet some relationships are still important to us so are worth keeping the door open with. Except patterns develop in how we treat them and how they treat usI So, now, when there are new rivals on the scene, in this case her daughter’s husband and his family, she can see that she may lose out. ‘They’ can send you away and you will only be able to see the new happy family from afar; the outsider looking in,” says Byford.

Join my PATREON squad for special perks, including bonus podcast episodes, exclusive posts, and resources. I thought there were some good tips to help if your adult child is "failing to launch", and the chapter about entitlement and enabling was also particularly good (how could I get away with handing this book to a certain few people, I wonder. . .NO! Mind your own business, Shonya!) There were also some excellent tips for adding in-laws to the family and being being both fun and God-honoring in the grandparenting season. 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. What has changed and can someone get a mental illness but it only seems to be against parents, however dating or making new friends is not happening either. Thoughts. Thank you I have three adult children.They are all living on their own and have families.The situation is two of the children are totally excluding one son out.Are not communicating or any type of a relationship.This is over a family gathering that they were helping my husband and I at our house.There was the situation where the son was over stepping his authority and he was very bossy and wasn’t afraid to give directions when nobody was doing anything.It been about 4 years now I am so troubled because this son is going through some very hard times and needs to know his family is there.He’s just lost a very important person in his life and he’s having surgery and the two haven’t called him or made any atemped to.It does bother him that they don’t want to have a relationship with him .But it’s really bothering me right now because I’ve been taught you be there when family needs you.I want to say something but am feeling like I should stay out of it.I’ve told them all I sorry this happened at a time when they were helping me.I don’t feel this should be going on so long I feel as it’s also because the ousted son sober up and the others haven’t and this has a lot to do with it.