March 2005
by Linda Gordon
These days, the journey to adulthood is often more circuitous than it was in previous generations. The markers of adulthood that were once self-evident-- getting married, having children, finding a job that might last a lifetime, becoming economically independent, and owning your own home--- are more elusive and harder for many young adults to achieve. The average age for first marriages is now closer to 30 than to 20, and many young adults delay having their own children until they're in their mid-thirties. Satisfying, career-track jobs are also more difficult to find, and changing jobs is more common. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person now holds 9.2 jobs between ages 18 and 34.
Job insecurity, unemployment, and other social factors account for the fact that 62 percent of adult children today expect to live at home for extended periods of time after college or between jobs. As a result, parents who think that their empty nest will allow them to turn that unused bedroom into a gym or home office often have to think again! In fact, many find that their nests are even fuller, often cluttered with girlfriends and boyfriends. They also have to learn a new balancing act between too permissive and expecting too much too soon that can be extremely challenging.
Today's twentysomethings, oscillating back and forth between child-like dependency and sincere efforts to negotiate the hurdles to more self-responsibility, often see themselves as victims caught in today's uncertain economy. Parents may be unsure of how to draw the line between being too soft when their child needs tough love and too withholding when their child needs time-limited parental support. With such families, therapists can play a crucial role in helping everyone understand what adulthood really means. The following case illustrates the struggle one family had with what I call "adultesence," an ambiguous developmental stage bridging adolescence and adulthood that's one of the great challenges of 21st-century parenting.
Ben is a 22-year old who came to see me because he was feeling depressed and embarrassed about moving home after college. He was worried that he didn't know how to get out from under his parents and move on. He'd never successfully held a job, had college loans to repay, needed his parents to bail him out of credit-card debt, and felt that he was a failure already at 22.
He was stuck between feeling guilty for asking his parents for assistance and relieved that he had such a willing safety net. Filled with self-doubt, Ben was uncertain whether he could find a job and what he had to offer any potential employer. Therapy began with his venting and discussing his inability to get his life started, but the focus soon shifted to how he contributed to keeping himself stuck. It became clear how, like so many young people I see in similar situations, he kept relying on his competent, high- achieving parents to serve him. He habitually called his mother from downtown to ask her to go on the computer and read him the movie schedule, and often phoned his parents for driving directions rather that checking a map.
Baby boomer parents are usually more indulgent than parents of the 1950's. They were raised in the era of rigid feedings, no pacifiers and sayings such as “children should be seen and not heard”. Partly in reaction to the culture of the 50's, their generation was determined to do it differently. Their children were fed on demand, not by a strict schedule; they encouraged them to express their feelings, worried about their self-esteem, and they divorced in record numbers. As a result of these and other societal changes, baby boomer parents coddled their children more than previous generations. So, even though many twentysomethings benefit from a deep connection to their parents, they also struggle with the downside of over involved, indulgent parenting.
When I counsel twentysomethings, I like to meet parents to help me assess how they are helping and/ or hindering their child's maturation. So I decided to invite Ben's parents, Mark and Stacy, to see me. My goal was to get a clear picture of how they viewed Ben's moving back home--as an opportunity to provide welcome support or as an indication of their son's and their own failure.
Ben's parents expressed a lot of resentment about the continued conflicts in their home and their loss of privacy. Stacy said that after her other kids left home, she and Mark regained some intimacy and reignited a spark that she'd longed for. Now she felt like her needs were once again on the back burner. She'd slipped right back into her role as mother, making sure that there was food in the house, organizing dinners, and expecting Ben to be home to eat them. Mark said that it drove him crazy that his son sat around the house and did nothing.
Mark and Stacy had clearly neglected to establish appropriate boundaries for their adult son when he moved home. In my experience, most parents in this situation find this difficult because they simply aren't clear on what these boundaries should be. As a result, they usually slide right back into old patterns, confusing their 22-year-old with a 17-year- old, unsure how to parent the child they had always anticipated would be more independent at this age.
With such clients, it can be very helpful to offer a coherent template laying out the behavioral characteristics associated with adulthood, emphasizing the last parental lessons they can offer to move their child in that direction. With confused parents like Mark and Stacy, I may even write down a list like the following to clarify fuzzy concepts like “maturity” and “personal responsibility”:
Empathy
Independence
Financial responsibility
Appropriate boundaries
Respectful interdependence
We then go on to a concrete discussion of each of the characteristics and how they apply in the life of a young person still struggling to leave the nest. So when the inevitable question comes up of whether the parents should charge rent, I refer to the list and highlight the types of actions that characterize these different qualities. If a twentysomething is missing job interviews, sleeping late, lying around like a couch potato, charging rent is a useful means to promoting responsibility, both personal and financial. However, if an adult child is spending a year in an unpaid internship that’s providing needed life experience and will help build his resume, why charge rent if you don’t need the extra income?
Using this template, I pointed out that while Ben expected to have the same freedoms he had while living on his own at college, it was appropriate to require him to participate in household tasks. Stacy and Mark agreed and said they wanted Ben to start sharing responsibility for food shopping, keeping his room relatively clean, doing his own laundry, exercising their chocolate lab at the park, and taking the trash to the sidewalk.
Parents of adultescents must work hard to avoid the trap of reverting to expectations from an earlier stage of parenting. Stacy struggled to stop fixing things for Ben. Each time she made a phone call to cancel a doctor’s appointment for him or make an airplane reservation, she continued to keep him stuck in a dependent mode. While Mark and Stacy talked a good game in my office, they continued to take the trash out after Ben forgot and kept believing the excuses he made for not having the time to exercise the dog or pick up food form the grocery store. I kept my focus on Mark and Stacy’s lack of follow-through and their attachment to old parenting patterns that were no longer appropriate.
I became a coach for both Ben and his parents in helping all three negotiate the hurdles of “adultesence.” That role was highlighted when I received an angry e-mail from Ben and a frantic phone call from Stacy the day after they’d had a major fight. Two days later, Ben came in for his individual session still furious, raging that his mother was totally out of control. I scheduled a session for all three of them, to get to the bottom of the anger.
Stacy began by describing how, the previous week; she’d gone to bed early because of an important meeting at work the following morning. At 2:00 a.m., she was awakened by the telephone. Ben was outside calling from his cell phone; he’d forgotten his key, was locked out, and had brought a few friends home with him to watch a movie. Stacy was furious that Ben had forgotten his key again, and felt insulted by his inability to understand the impact of his forgetfulness on her. Ben was surprised by the intensity of his mother’s reaction.
In our next individual session, I helped Ben to fully understand how his behavior impacted his parents. My work with Ben’s parents focused on empowering them to be able to hold back in order to permit Ben to flourish in their vacuum. It was important to differentiate between what they feared was “tough love” and sending Ben the intended message that they had faith in him. While Ben’s actions were often selfish, he was also struggling with moving through the threshold of adulthood. Less self-absorption in his overall behavior would lead him to become a more empathetic and compassionate adult.
My clear understanding of this new developmental stage, the effects of the changes in how we now raise our children, and my knowledge of realistic characteristics of adulthood, provided me with a foundation to draw from in guiding this family. I normalized what I believed they shared in common with most other families, assisted in assessing how much of the safety net Mark and Stacy should remove and helped them recognize which features of their parenting inhibited their son from growing into a mature man.
While most therapists know the value of stressing the importance of boundary setting, the characteristics of adulthood also highlight the importance of other behaviors that should be emphasized as well. In the previous example, Ben was insensitive to how his 2:00 AM phone call impacted his mom. He demonstrated a real lack of empathy for the impact of his behavior as well as tuning her out when she expressed her annoyance.
As we continued with family sessions, Ben, Mark and Stacy identified and explored many grievances. Ben asked his parents to stop prying into his private life with their leading questions about everything he did. His parents told him that they could no longer tolerate open Doritos bags and half-finished bottles of flat Pepsi on his nightstand. Ben asked his parents to stop calling him to make sure he was awake on the mornings when he had a job interview. His parents asked him to let them know whether to expect him for dinner.
We continued bimonthly family sessions for the next few months, while I also saw Ben individually. My goal was to guide Mark and Stacy to make a shift in their perception of adulthood and to help Ben understand how becoming more independent was connected to alleviating his self-doubt and proving that he could count on himself. By expecting more of their son, Mark and Stacy were fostering Ben’s independence while also maintaining his connection with the family. All three were learning that independence doesn’t mean having less of a relationship—it means graduating to what might be described as interdependence.
Within four months of moving home, Ben found employment as an administrative assistant in a law firm. Later he moved out of his parent’s home and into an apartment with two roommates. Now he’s considering training to become a paralegal. At our last session, he remarked that he knows that his parents prefer that he go to law school, but he’s now more capable of identifying what he wants. He’s able to separate his path from his parents’ dreams for him, and has more confidence that he can achieve his goals.
#####
Cases like these typically involve high achieving parents without any obvious pathology who are nevertheless behaving in ways that impede their child’s maturation. Their parenting appears to have gone reasonably well up to the point they come in for help. But, because the world has changed, patterns that once seemed to work are no longer helpful to either the parent or child. Still it can be hard to catch yourself, even if you’re aware of the issue. In fact, as a therapist and a writer who’s held numerous focus groups with twentysomethings and their parents, I often have to remind myself of the lessons I try to teach parents in my practice.
While I was writing this article, my 22-year-old son called my cell phone to try and wiggle out of getting the car he drives inspected. He was home from college during winter break and I was out of town. He’d put off going to the Motor Vehicle Authority (MVA) for three weeks, waiting until the day before he was to go back to school. He sounded groggy and complained that he’d gone to sleep at 5:00 a.m. after an evening with his friends and was just too exhausted to “be behind the wheel.” When I told him that he had to go and wouldn’t give him an easy out, he used every trick up his sleeve to persuade me to let him off the hook, and ended by complaining about how unreasonable I was. Annoyed, I said that if he didn’t go, he couldn’t drive the car the next time he was home, and hung up.
Later that day, he called to say that he’d finally gone to the MVA. When I said, “You know, you had plenty of notice and lots of chances to go earlier in the vacation. I didn’t like that you believed that this obligation was unreasonable.” He replied, “Well, Mom, I’ve been coddled for 22 years, you can’t expect me to change without a fight.”
by Linda Gordon
These days, the journey to adulthood is often more circuitous than it was in previous generations. The markers of adulthood that were once self-evident-- getting married, having children, finding a job that might last a lifetime, becoming economically independent, and owning your own home--- are more elusive and harder for many young adults to achieve. The average age for first marriages is now closer to 30 than to 20, and many young adults delay having their own children until they're in their mid-thirties. Satisfying, career-track jobs are also more difficult to find, and changing jobs is more common. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person now holds 9.2 jobs between ages 18 and 34.
Job insecurity, unemployment, and other social factors account for the fact that 62 percent of adult children today expect to live at home for extended periods of time after college or between jobs. As a result, parents who think that their empty nest will allow them to turn that unused bedroom into a gym or home office often have to think again! In fact, many find that their nests are even fuller, often cluttered with girlfriends and boyfriends. They also have to learn a new balancing act between too permissive and expecting too much too soon that can be extremely challenging.
Today's twentysomethings, oscillating back and forth between child-like dependency and sincere efforts to negotiate the hurdles to more self-responsibility, often see themselves as victims caught in today's uncertain economy. Parents may be unsure of how to draw the line between being too soft when their child needs tough love and too withholding when their child needs time-limited parental support. With such families, therapists can play a crucial role in helping everyone understand what adulthood really means. The following case illustrates the struggle one family had with what I call "adultesence," an ambiguous developmental stage bridging adolescence and adulthood that's one of the great challenges of 21st-century parenting.
Ben is a 22-year old who came to see me because he was feeling depressed and embarrassed about moving home after college. He was worried that he didn't know how to get out from under his parents and move on. He'd never successfully held a job, had college loans to repay, needed his parents to bail him out of credit-card debt, and felt that he was a failure already at 22.
He was stuck between feeling guilty for asking his parents for assistance and relieved that he had such a willing safety net. Filled with self-doubt, Ben was uncertain whether he could find a job and what he had to offer any potential employer. Therapy began with his venting and discussing his inability to get his life started, but the focus soon shifted to how he contributed to keeping himself stuck. It became clear how, like so many young people I see in similar situations, he kept relying on his competent, high- achieving parents to serve him. He habitually called his mother from downtown to ask her to go on the computer and read him the movie schedule, and often phoned his parents for driving directions rather that checking a map.
Baby boomer parents are usually more indulgent than parents of the 1950's. They were raised in the era of rigid feedings, no pacifiers and sayings such as “children should be seen and not heard”. Partly in reaction to the culture of the 50's, their generation was determined to do it differently. Their children were fed on demand, not by a strict schedule; they encouraged them to express their feelings, worried about their self-esteem, and they divorced in record numbers. As a result of these and other societal changes, baby boomer parents coddled their children more than previous generations. So, even though many twentysomethings benefit from a deep connection to their parents, they also struggle with the downside of over involved, indulgent parenting.
When I counsel twentysomethings, I like to meet parents to help me assess how they are helping and/ or hindering their child's maturation. So I decided to invite Ben's parents, Mark and Stacy, to see me. My goal was to get a clear picture of how they viewed Ben's moving back home--as an opportunity to provide welcome support or as an indication of their son's and their own failure.
Ben's parents expressed a lot of resentment about the continued conflicts in their home and their loss of privacy. Stacy said that after her other kids left home, she and Mark regained some intimacy and reignited a spark that she'd longed for. Now she felt like her needs were once again on the back burner. She'd slipped right back into her role as mother, making sure that there was food in the house, organizing dinners, and expecting Ben to be home to eat them. Mark said that it drove him crazy that his son sat around the house and did nothing.
Mark and Stacy had clearly neglected to establish appropriate boundaries for their adult son when he moved home. In my experience, most parents in this situation find this difficult because they simply aren't clear on what these boundaries should be. As a result, they usually slide right back into old patterns, confusing their 22-year-old with a 17-year- old, unsure how to parent the child they had always anticipated would be more independent at this age.
With such clients, it can be very helpful to offer a coherent template laying out the behavioral characteristics associated with adulthood, emphasizing the last parental lessons they can offer to move their child in that direction. With confused parents like Mark and Stacy, I may even write down a list like the following to clarify fuzzy concepts like “maturity” and “personal responsibility”:
Empathy
Independence
Financial responsibility
Appropriate boundaries
Respectful interdependence
We then go on to a concrete discussion of each of the characteristics and how they apply in the life of a young person still struggling to leave the nest. So when the inevitable question comes up of whether the parents should charge rent, I refer to the list and highlight the types of actions that characterize these different qualities. If a twentysomething is missing job interviews, sleeping late, lying around like a couch potato, charging rent is a useful means to promoting responsibility, both personal and financial. However, if an adult child is spending a year in an unpaid internship that’s providing needed life experience and will help build his resume, why charge rent if you don’t need the extra income?
Using this template, I pointed out that while Ben expected to have the same freedoms he had while living on his own at college, it was appropriate to require him to participate in household tasks. Stacy and Mark agreed and said they wanted Ben to start sharing responsibility for food shopping, keeping his room relatively clean, doing his own laundry, exercising their chocolate lab at the park, and taking the trash to the sidewalk.
Parents of adultescents must work hard to avoid the trap of reverting to expectations from an earlier stage of parenting. Stacy struggled to stop fixing things for Ben. Each time she made a phone call to cancel a doctor’s appointment for him or make an airplane reservation, she continued to keep him stuck in a dependent mode. While Mark and Stacy talked a good game in my office, they continued to take the trash out after Ben forgot and kept believing the excuses he made for not having the time to exercise the dog or pick up food form the grocery store. I kept my focus on Mark and Stacy’s lack of follow-through and their attachment to old parenting patterns that were no longer appropriate.
I became a coach for both Ben and his parents in helping all three negotiate the hurdles of “adultesence.” That role was highlighted when I received an angry e-mail from Ben and a frantic phone call from Stacy the day after they’d had a major fight. Two days later, Ben came in for his individual session still furious, raging that his mother was totally out of control. I scheduled a session for all three of them, to get to the bottom of the anger.
Stacy began by describing how, the previous week; she’d gone to bed early because of an important meeting at work the following morning. At 2:00 a.m., she was awakened by the telephone. Ben was outside calling from his cell phone; he’d forgotten his key, was locked out, and had brought a few friends home with him to watch a movie. Stacy was furious that Ben had forgotten his key again, and felt insulted by his inability to understand the impact of his forgetfulness on her. Ben was surprised by the intensity of his mother’s reaction.
In our next individual session, I helped Ben to fully understand how his behavior impacted his parents. My work with Ben’s parents focused on empowering them to be able to hold back in order to permit Ben to flourish in their vacuum. It was important to differentiate between what they feared was “tough love” and sending Ben the intended message that they had faith in him. While Ben’s actions were often selfish, he was also struggling with moving through the threshold of adulthood. Less self-absorption in his overall behavior would lead him to become a more empathetic and compassionate adult.
My clear understanding of this new developmental stage, the effects of the changes in how we now raise our children, and my knowledge of realistic characteristics of adulthood, provided me with a foundation to draw from in guiding this family. I normalized what I believed they shared in common with most other families, assisted in assessing how much of the safety net Mark and Stacy should remove and helped them recognize which features of their parenting inhibited their son from growing into a mature man.
While most therapists know the value of stressing the importance of boundary setting, the characteristics of adulthood also highlight the importance of other behaviors that should be emphasized as well. In the previous example, Ben was insensitive to how his 2:00 AM phone call impacted his mom. He demonstrated a real lack of empathy for the impact of his behavior as well as tuning her out when she expressed her annoyance.
As we continued with family sessions, Ben, Mark and Stacy identified and explored many grievances. Ben asked his parents to stop prying into his private life with their leading questions about everything he did. His parents told him that they could no longer tolerate open Doritos bags and half-finished bottles of flat Pepsi on his nightstand. Ben asked his parents to stop calling him to make sure he was awake on the mornings when he had a job interview. His parents asked him to let them know whether to expect him for dinner.
We continued bimonthly family sessions for the next few months, while I also saw Ben individually. My goal was to guide Mark and Stacy to make a shift in their perception of adulthood and to help Ben understand how becoming more independent was connected to alleviating his self-doubt and proving that he could count on himself. By expecting more of their son, Mark and Stacy were fostering Ben’s independence while also maintaining his connection with the family. All three were learning that independence doesn’t mean having less of a relationship—it means graduating to what might be described as interdependence.
Within four months of moving home, Ben found employment as an administrative assistant in a law firm. Later he moved out of his parent’s home and into an apartment with two roommates. Now he’s considering training to become a paralegal. At our last session, he remarked that he knows that his parents prefer that he go to law school, but he’s now more capable of identifying what he wants. He’s able to separate his path from his parents’ dreams for him, and has more confidence that he can achieve his goals.
#####
Cases like these typically involve high achieving parents without any obvious pathology who are nevertheless behaving in ways that impede their child’s maturation. Their parenting appears to have gone reasonably well up to the point they come in for help. But, because the world has changed, patterns that once seemed to work are no longer helpful to either the parent or child. Still it can be hard to catch yourself, even if you’re aware of the issue. In fact, as a therapist and a writer who’s held numerous focus groups with twentysomethings and their parents, I often have to remind myself of the lessons I try to teach parents in my practice.
While I was writing this article, my 22-year-old son called my cell phone to try and wiggle out of getting the car he drives inspected. He was home from college during winter break and I was out of town. He’d put off going to the Motor Vehicle Authority (MVA) for three weeks, waiting until the day before he was to go back to school. He sounded groggy and complained that he’d gone to sleep at 5:00 a.m. after an evening with his friends and was just too exhausted to “be behind the wheel.” When I told him that he had to go and wouldn’t give him an easy out, he used every trick up his sleeve to persuade me to let him off the hook, and ended by complaining about how unreasonable I was. Annoyed, I said that if he didn’t go, he couldn’t drive the car the next time he was home, and hung up.
Later that day, he called to say that he’d finally gone to the MVA. When I said, “You know, you had plenty of notice and lots of chances to go earlier in the vacation. I didn’t like that you believed that this obligation was unreasonable.” He replied, “Well, Mom, I’ve been coddled for 22 years, you can’t expect me to change without a fight.”