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‘Why Are My Parents So Stubborn?’
Adult children and parents often clash over mismatched goals
More than a decade ago, everything fell apart for my parents — and thus my family. My father fell, hit his head, got emergency surgery, and ended up spending the rest of his life in a nursing home, leaving my 70-something mother frazzled and alone in their spacious Florida condo. So, I flew from my Northern California home frequently to help her.
As a child, I was close with with my mom and lived with her for a few years in the 1980s while I finished my college degree (my parents lived apart together for about a decade so it was just the two of us) and so I knew her pretty well. But something had changed — she was acting, for lack of a better word, really stubborn.
When I filled up the coffee machine with water to brew a pot, she berated me for doing it the “wrong” way. When I suggested that as long as water got in the reservoir, what difference did it make how it got in there? That did not do anything to ease the situation — she wanted it done her way and her way only, and so I did it her way for the rest of my visit.
What had come over her? Was it the stress of dealing with her new situation? Maybe. That said, there might have been more going on than just that. According to some studies, middle-aged adult…
