Parenting Adult Children

Last week Anne and I had a really sad day.  On Monday we both left for work and came home to an empty house.  Not that we didn’t come home to an empty home many days but this was different.  The last of our six children had packed her car and left for college.  What was amazing was she left us some notes expressing love and appreciation that made us cry.  I read them first so I knew what was coming for Anne when she got home.  Then on Wednesday we drove to Liberty University and helped her move into her dorm.  There was definitely a solemnity on the drive home.  Things have changed—it's already different.

I had the privilege of raising six children.  I remember vividly towing six little ones behind us everywhere we went, including all the needed childhood paraphernalia like strollers and portacribs, and longing for the day they were older.  But nothing prepared me for the difficulty of the years to come.  I no longer had to carry them in my arms but the emotional burden I took on for each of them was enormously harder.

It’s been a decade since I began to parent adults and now they are all in that category.  I’m far from being an expert but I have learned a few things as my parenting has shifted in this new stage of life.  Maybe they will encourage you.

You can’t!  The first and maybe most important thing I learned was that I couldn’t parent adults.  There comes a time in the lives of our kids when they come from under our control and leadership and they spread their own wings.  If I continue to try to parent them from the position of authority and power that I’ve used until then, I will only drive them away and damage our relationship. 

I didn’t get it at the time, but when I went off to college my own father wrote me a note telling me just that.  He told me I was now my own man and I had to make my own decisions.  He’d be there, offer counsel and help me in any way he could, but I was now a man.  Many of us will never say that to our kids but it’s going to happen regardless.  They will become their own person and emancipate themselves from our parentage, whether we want them to or not.  It will help if I will accept that I am no longer ultimately responsible for them—they are now responsible for themselves before God.

You trust!  When you come to the place of surrendering your right to parent your adult kids, you must also, at the same time, trust God to lead them and help them.  I don’t care what the context, it’s always scary to trust God—to surrender control.  I don’t know about you but I made plenty of mistakes as a young man—still do—and consequently I want to spare my kids those same mistakes.  Let’s be honest, we too often want to make decisions for them.  But don’t you realize that God has used every one of your failures to make you who you are?  I don’t mean that we should want our kids to fail or make mistakes, but I am saying we have to trust God that He will work through it for their good—as He did with us.

And here’s what that means specifically: you and I must let them shoulder the responsibility for the decisions they make.  I’m not saying we never rescue our adult children, sometimes we should, but far too often we don’t allow them to experience the consequences of their choices and thereby stymie their growth.  Too many moms and dads are too often bailing their adult children out instead of trusting God.  I remember Anne once heard the Lord tell her that she was getting in the way of what He was trying to do in our kids lives.  It takes a tough love to let our kids grow through pain, but we must learn to trust God.

You pray!  Along with trusting God, we commit ourselves to remember them to God through prayer.  The Bible book of James says prayer can greatly change things.  As God is sovereignly superintending our world, He can rescue or direct our kids in response to our petitions.  If anything we need to prioritize prayer for our adult kids, but it’s equally true that our supplications do as much or more for us in the area of trusting God.  In other words, the more I pray for my kids the easier it is to trust God’s work in their lives.

You counsel!  This may sound contradictory to what I’ve already said, and I confess it takes some balance, but we never give up the role of counselor to our kids.   We must relinquish the desire to control them, to tell them what to do, but never the responsibility to speak into their lives.  The Bible actually calls us to speak into each others lives as brothers and sisters in Christ; how much more should we do that as parents to our grown children?  The difference is we speak, not from a position of power or parental authority, but rather from a loving, equal relationship.  Jackie, a friend of ours and a mother of three adult children in their late 30’s---early 40’s, says she always tells her kids what she thinks but what they do with it is up to them.

You love!  There is nothing more needed by our adult kids than for us to love them.  But what does that mean?  Loving them means you pour into them what they greatly need from you.  They need you to respect them, to believe in them, and to affirm them.  When they don’t call as much as you like, you call them.  When you wish they’d initiate more, you still take the lead without pouting or getting your feelings hurt.   You love them.  You tell them often and you show them continually.

Parenting toddlers had its challenges, but so does parenting grown-ups.  However there is also great reward in this new parental relationship and I’m looking forward to what lies ahead as I walk with my adult children.