Does respectful parenting work? How does it look as our kids get older and more independent? Does our approach to relationship building change and if so, how? Will our early efforts pay off? In response to a listener’s questions, Janet discusses the challenges, rewards, and surprises she’s experiencing as her three babies have become adults. She shares on topics like boundaries, maintaining closeness, and how she’s tried to support her kids through struggles.
Transcript of “My Life With Adult Kids”
Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.
Today I’m going to do something totally different. I’m responding to a question I get every once in a while. And I don’t think I’ve ever responded to this kind of question on my podcast or anywhere before, so this is a new one.
A parent wrote to me:
I’m so inspired by your teachings. Thank you.
I would love to hear more from you about your relationships with your adult children. You often allude to how satisfying it is to have meaningful relationships with your adult children, but I’m so curious as to what that looks and feels like and how it works. What boundaries do you and your children have now? How do you maintain closeness? How have you watched and supported and counseled them in their life struggles as adults?
I know this is a broad and personal question and out of the realm of the usual advice for littles you offer, but just want you to know that this is what I find myself wondering about, as a 42-year-old adult daughter and a mother of a three- and five-year-old. I appreciate your consideration of my inquiry.
I’m flattered. I guess I have alluded to how special I feel about the relationships I have with my children. I don’t talk about them in detail for one, for their privacy. And also because, to be honest, I’m so enamored with them, I’m so crazy about them that I probably will sound like I’m bragging and I don’t want to do that. But here goes.
First, “I would love to hear more from you about your relationships with your adult children.” What I’ve noticed is that gradually, as my children have grown, my relationship with them really looks more like a friendship. They don’t need me to parent them much anymore, I mean, they haven’t for a while. We didn’t plan for some kind of transition or anything, it just happened that way, that I feel like they’re my closest friends. And because I have three children, and because I’m also more on the introverted side, I like to be alone sometimes, I have a few other very close friends, but maybe not as many as other people have.
At this point, my children influence me a lot more than I influence them. Like if any of my children tell me that they like my hair a certain way or that I look good in a certain outfit, you better believe I’m going to be wearing my hair that way and wearing that outfit as much as I can. It’s so fun having grown-up children because they keep you young and fresh to all the new slang and trends and interests and views of the world that younger people have. I know all these things I would never have known.
And I’m looking forward to grandchildren someday—or a grandchild at least, I don’t want to get my hopes up too high!—to hopefully help me continue that feeling of having the benefits of being older. What happens when we’re older, for a lot of us, is that we get more comfortable with ourselves, we get more accepting of ourselves. That’s such a positive thing. And at the same time, when you have children, you get to experience the youthful side of yourself as well, or at least see it in this new light through the lens of your children. It’s really the best of both worlds.
When my oldest daughter was a few months old and I first learned about Magda Gerber’s approach and then met her and trained with her, I started to observe my child more and therefore see her better and trust her more as capable, as a person. So that she was able to show me who she was, instead of me feeling like I had the responsibility on me to try to dictate who she was going to be or try to make it happen, try to mold her a certain direction. And that had benefits from the very beginning, and so many surprises in what children do that’s different from what you would think they would do.
And oftentimes, as my kids have gotten older, they’re still surprising me. It’s mostly positive! They’re just blowing me away with the choices that they make. Things that, if I was trying to impose on them, trying to push them in a certain direction, I would’ve thought some of the things that they chose to do of their own volition would’ve been too much to ask of them. But they wanted to do these on their own.
Like when one of my daughters chose to go to a literature camp year after year for her summer camp. It was sort of the opposite of what I would’ve thought would be a fun summer camp, where you don’t have to think about any schoolish things and you’re just hanging around on the beach. But that’s what she chose. Or my son, he would choose to spend his summer mornings as a tween and teen in junior lifeguards, where they would be doing push-ups on the sand at 8:00 AM. And he decided to take an extra course in his senior year of college, giving him less time to play around and enjoy his senior year, because he wanted to graduate with distinction. And then my oldest revels in this unique position, consulting and hospitality and event planning, where she spends these very, very late nights into the morning managing people’s entertainment and socializing—sober.
These are challenges I never would’ve thought to push my child towards or to ask of them. And because I didn’t do those things, because they didn’t feel my hand in trying to get them to be a certain thing or do certain things, they actually made choices that were above and beyond what I would’ve chosen for them. And in just such interesting directions, too.
By the way, they all naturally pitch in at holiday gatherings or gatherings of any kind together. They’re very, very different from each other, not because they felt like they needed to be different from each other, but because they actually really are. And yet they all did a lot of the same things when they were younger, but then branched off in different directions in many other ways and later on.
In short, more about our relationship is that I’m obviously getting a huge kick out of them and I can’t believe my luck, really. They make this approach look really good. I’m sure I would not have had the nerve to begin writing and sharing about this approach online if I didn’t already have, at that point, a 17-year-old. She was a good way through her teenage years and my youngest was eight. And if I didn’t have that long view already on how this worked—even though I sensed aspects of it working very early on with my children and with the many children and families that I’ve been able to work with over the years, I’m just not the kind of person that, without that long view, could have started putting myself out there and saying, This is the thing to do! I really needed to see that it does work, that there aren’t any drawbacks to it that I can see. There are definitely drawbacks in the way that I practice it, because I’m imperfect, but the approach, to me, has only been positive. That’s why I’m so compelled to share about it.
Okay, second question. She asked: “What boundaries do you and your children have now?” And this was a hard one for me, I’m thinking about it still. And again, I don’t want this to sound like we’re some perfect family or something. That’s absolutely not true. Still, I really can’t think of any boundaries that I have with my children now. And I was thinking, in terms of what I said earlier, that they’re my best friends, do we have boundaries with our very close friends? Or do we choose friends because these are people that we don’t need to have boundaries with? Because these people sense them in us already, they have empathy and care for our needs in the relationship.
Of course, I didn’t choose my children, but that’s how I feel about them. I think this is because I had personal boundaries and I looked out for them with other children and I made a big effort, a very imperfect effort, to try to model the character traits that I hoped to instill in them. I mean, they got me saying please and thank you more than I ever dreamed of doing in my life.
And I did this really hard thing for me, which is trying to make amends, trying to apologize when I did something wrong. We hear a lot of people talking about this now: Oh, just repair, just apologize. I don’t really love the word “repair” because it implies something’s broken, but this idea of apologizing, I don’t think we’re talking enough about how hard that is to do. Well for me, at least, but also for a lot of us. We really have to be vulnerable and put ourselves out there. And it’s scary, right? Because maybe somebody’s going to pounce on us and double down, or if that’s ever happened to us once, then we’re going to fear that happening again. It really takes a big effort and it’s a laudable effort to be vulnerable in that way and call attention to what we did that we felt was wrong. And we need to keep this in mind in regard to our children’s apologies as well, that it’s a delicate thing. I also tried to make sure that they knew that I was on their team, helping them to behave the best that they could do in any given moment.
That idea of other people’s personal boundaries and societal boundaries got instilled in them very young. And that makes it easier later on, of course, because we don’t really have to think about them anymore. Very occasionally, though, one of my kids might do something that hurts my feelings, that’s happened a few times. And I have to admit, I do find it hard to bring that up and not just swallow it—and that’s my issue—because I do feel still that I’m their parent and I want to be that bigger person for them. But because I know that, if this really is going to be the kind of friendship that it needs to be as we’re all older, I have gotten better about bringing it up. Because the most important thing of all to me is that I never, ever form resentments with my kids or that they do with me. The air between us needs to be clear, because I know that those resentments just eat away at relationships and I’m not willing to let that happen.
“How do you maintain closeness?” Well, I haven’t really thought about this consciously, maintaining closeness, because I guess, again, this doesn’t seem like an effort because of all the time I put in in the very beginning with my children. It has a way of maintaining itself because you all have a desire to maintain it, it’s not something that you have to think about trying to make happen. But one of my secrets has been all along, Don’t judge, don’t judge. Even if their friend is being horrible to them and they’re complaining about the friend to me or their partner or they’re telling me about something they’re going through that they know I don’t really approve of. Whatever it is, it’s not my place to judge them at this point. They already have that judgment inside them. That’s the work that happened early on when, through the social learning that they’ve done, beginning with the relationship they have with their parents to extended family to friends, they’ve had to learn how to navigate judgment. And I have to trust that.
My oldest daughter taught me this early on. She was, I think, a very young teenager, and she had had a disappointing experience with a friend and was complaining about it to me and sharing about it. She was very upset, this friend had hurt her. And when I thought I was siding with her against the friend, her reaction was a big no. She said, “Don’t judge my friends.” I was so glad that she was upfront with me, because that lesson has stuck. And it makes sense to me. It’s like when your good friend is in a relationship and you don’t approve of the relationship, but you’ve got to wait for your friend to figure that out. Because what happens when you get in there and tell them what to do or let them know that you are judging the situation? Then they don’t want to share with you anymore when they go back to the partner or when, in the case of my children, they want to stick with the friend.
So navigating our children confiding in us, it is kind of a delicate matter. And we’re not going to be perfect, but just being aware that it’s more about supporting our child’s feelings without adding our own two cents, unless asked. Exploring with them how they feel, but allowing them to come to these conclusions, because those are the lessons that they learn best. And they learn it in keeping with our relationship, instead of in the discomfort of our relationship. I’m supporting you to make your decisions. If you want to ask me, I’ll tell you. But mostly I trust you, because you know you best.
Talking about closeness, though—some of my friends and extended family members, they have kids that call them once a day or more. And my kids and I are not like that. Sometimes a week or two goes by before we talk. Sometimes I wonder, Oh gosh, I’ll think, Is something wrong here?, if I’m just comparing myself. Which, of course, is never a good thing. Comparing is never a helpful thing, I’ve noticed. But looking at that from the outside, I can think, Ooh, maybe we’re not very close. Yet I know in my heart that’s not true. It’s really more about us having busy lives and knowing so deeply and clearly that we are there for each other and having a lot to catch up on when we do connect. I believe that when something is there and unconditional, it doesn’t have to be constant. Because it already is constant, without us having to keep checking in on each other. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that either. Sometimes I envy those relationships.
I am thinking about my kids all the time, they’re coming up in my thoughts many times a day, I’m wondering what they’re doing. But I don’t always need to express that to them. I can just enjoy it and be happy for the times that we do connect. My daughter that lives an hour away, she’s here for at least one night every weekend or every other weekend. She makes a point to make the drive out here, and I’m so honored by that and just touched that she still wants to do that. It’s just such a gift. Right now, I’m writing a book in which I share a lot of personal experiences as I’m sharing about this approach. So they’re very, very alive for me in my thoughts these days. And the overriding feeling is gratitude that I’ve been able to find a path that helped me be so clear—in my mind, not always in the way I’m practicing it—but help me see clearly what my job is with them.
“How have you watched and supported and consoled them in their life struggles as adults?” All three of my children have gone through difficulties that lasted more than a year, for each of them. Big challenges in their life that I really had zero control over, unfortunately. And boy, as a parent, as you can all imagine or maybe you know, you go through it with them. You don’t want them to necessarily know how much you’re going through it with them, but you are. It’s hurting you more than it hurts them, it’s scaring you more than it scares them. That’s what we signed up for. And all I wanted my kids to know through that—well, I wanted them to be okay, but again, I had really no control. What I wanted them to know was that I was there for them, I was on their team all the way through. If they wanted my advice, and sometimes they did, I waited for them to ask, and then I gave it to them. Just a little bit, not overdoing it, because I really didn’t know what to say anyway a lot of the time.
It has to come from a place of believing in them and believing in their right to feel something other than happy and content. That’s something we have to deal with from the time children are very little: Can we allow our child to feel all the things? Not just allow it and Here I am, I’m here making it better, but really allow it, welcome it and support it? It’s always going to be a challenge with these people in my life that I love so deeply. Somehow we survive it, we survive the hard times. And they come through it with all of these life lessons that they learned without me. Because most of the life lessons they learn, really, I’m just there to support.
And it felt like, when they did want my help, I knew that I was being offered a huge privilege in that moment, and I didn’t want to mess it up. I wanted it to be the ticket to this happening again another time. So I wanted to treat it with care and respect, respect for my child. And what I realize now—I’ve sensed all along, but now I can tell you 100% for sure—is that all these elements of parenting that I learned from Magda Gerber, that I talk about, that I’ve also explored and learned more about with my own work with children, they’re not just something you do for a two-year-old or a three-year-old. It’s the same dynamic that you strive to have with children throughout their life, or any other close relationship that you have. Allowing that person to be themselves, wanting that person to be themselves, accepting them as they are. Interested in them as they are, in what they want to do and who they are, in how they feel. Not trying to do anything to affect those feelings, only to be there as support.
It kind of sounds easy when I’m saying it now, but it’s not. It’s worth it, though. And my children, I’m grateful, they’re all in very good places right now in themselves and in relationships. It’s amazing. So much has come to fruition for them already, and I feel like they have a lot more living to do, obviously. And throughout it, they know, and I know they know, I’m a total goner for them and I always will be. That’s it, it’s uncomplicated. I enjoy them, and any time I do get to spend with them, it feels like a gift.
I know this all sounds incredibly corny, and how could she really feel like this? I do and you can. And if you’d like to hear more about some of the specifics of respectful parenting and how it affects children and hear it from the horses’ mouths, please listen to a previous podcast that I did—or actually I didn’t do, my kids did it, I wasn’t even in the room: My Daughters Weigh In on Respectful Parenting. And if you’re craving more support, please check out my No Bad Kids Master Course. You can learn all about setting boundaries in a relationship-building manner. And for a quick and easy read, my book No Bad Kids has been helping people for years now, so check that out as well.
I really hope some of this helps in some way. Thank you so much for your interest. Thank you to this parent for asking me these questions. Again, it’s an honor. Believe in yourself, believe in your kids. We can do this.
