How to Stay Welcome and Relevant in Your Grown Children’s Lives
You will need to evolve from being a “Teacher” to being a “Friend”
Do you compulsively try to teach your grown children? Regardless of the life phase or topic? Regardless of whether you actually know anything about it?
Do you listen patiently (patting yourself on the back for not interrupting), then reach deep into your bag of life lessons to retrieve the perfect epiphany, fact, or nugget of wisdom your child needs.
It is understandable. You desperately want your grown children to avoid your mistakes and benefit from your decades in the school of hard knocks. Teaching your children is a long-ingrained habit. It is what you do. It is what you are supposed to do. It is what you have been doing since the days of the high-chair. But, it is OK, in fact it is essential, to stop, step back, and let the relationship evolve
When your children are young, you act as both teacher and friend. You are their favorite person, their protector, their everything.
As they grow, that changes. They get other friends. They begin to listen to other voices. They also begin to perceive your weaknesses and compare you objectively with other people. They learn things that you don’t know and become good at things you are not good at. They develop paradigms and beliefs that are not exactly the same as yours.
In anything other than a young-child/parent relationship, people don’t enjoy spending time with a person who is constantly trying to teach them. But, you may wonder, “if I’m not teaching my child, how else will we interact?”
The first step is to just stop trying to teach your child. Quitting that knee-jerk habit may require some basic habit-altering skills, but more fundamentally it involves “letting go”. Make that decision. Let go of your child as a project and embrace your child as a friend.
Once you have quit trying to teach your child, you should ask, “What do I do with the people I most enjoy being around?” After all, isn’t that what you want; your children to enjoy being around you?
You may find that it isn’t about having some big hobby that you and your child both enjoy and do together — although that would be great. You may find that most of your friends are people you just really enjoy talking with — without trying to teach each other.
Most of us have friends that we find to be funny, outlandish, intellectual, great gossipers, or whatever it is that draws us to them. Start to consider your child as a potential friend that you could just enjoy. Start to imagine listening to them, laughing with them, and enjoying them without trying to teach them.
A brief reflection on your current friends will reveal that many of them believe a few things you don’t believe, do a few things you don’t approve of and are different from you. Yet you enjoy them without constantly trying to teach them.
This is not philosophical, religious, or therapeutic advice. It is practical advice. If your children feel like you only want to give them advice, they will avoid you. If they feel that they can safely interact with you and open up to you about their lives without fear of being ambushed with unsolicited advice, they will ask for advice when they really need it. This requires a ton of patience. But it is worth it. And when your child is your friend, it requires less patience because you are not spending the whole time waiting for your big opportunity to teach and missing all of the opportunities to just enjoy and interact.
Ultimately, when it comes to our children, we are somewhat like God. We know a lot, but our children ask for advice way less often than we know they should. It is easier to understand why God doesn’t more forcefully inject Himself into our lives when we have grown children and see how little of the time they really want to hear the advice we have to give :)
This is not a recommendation to abdicate your responsibility to love, teach, and guide. Sometimes you must forcefully say the hard things that your grown children need to hear. But, you should first let go and let your grown children take their place in society and in your mind as independent adults. As you begin to embrace your children as potential friends, you are far more likely to recognize and respect their unique talents and abilities and admire and enjoy their personalities.
Then, someday, when you are 80, and they are 60, they will not still be coming to the childhood home only to experience the frustration of a relationship that has not evolved. You will have moved far beyond that to a bond of mature adults who love and respect and constantly learn from each other.
