The mindset switch I made to parent my children in their twenties

Plus tips on parenting adult kids from a developmental psychologist

Every stage of parenting brings new joy and new challenges and none more so than parenting adult children. I have found it so hard to know when to let go, when to step in and how to be more beside them than guiding them. And I miss the smaller versions of them so much still.

But in positive news, I have also found it surprisingly enlightening parenting my 22 and 23 year old daughters after I made a mindset switch. This came to me when I noticed I was jarring more with my eldest as she made her life choices, home choices and relationship choices.

She didn’t want any of my logic, experience or advice, she didn’t want me to voice concerns either: that was like saying I had no confidence in her, she was extremely resistant to any involvement in her life from me, even furiously returning things I bought her. I found it all a bit of a shock. She found my parenting instrusive and I think overwhelming: and that’s down to me.

I was feeling my way to a new status quo and it challenged me for a bit. But then I realised there was a way through this next period of our lives: and I decided the best thing to do was switch from being in the game to becoming a spectator.

When I took a deep breath and stepped back to curiously look on and only offer advice or be there when asked it got easier all round for us. I found a way of saying nothing, quite a detour from my normal path. I also learnt that if I was speaking for more than half the conversation then I was probably coming off the benches and back into the game, which was unhelpful so I said less and listened more.

I quite enjoy the new more silent me now and I am also discovering who my two oldest children are becoming as adults, their new identities aren’t what I expected and that’s ok. I am learning so much from them too and soaking up new ideas and thoughts arounds things. It’s such an unpredictable journey this parenting lark, and each day I have to stop and rethink my thoughts. In a way I am growing up too.

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We interviewed developmental clinical psychologist Dr Meg Jay, the author of The Twenty Something Treatment and Super Normal: why your twenties are your second chance at life on our podcast and I found her words extremely helpful and I have summarised the advice below.

We asked Dr Jay what is developmentally normal? How do you motivate and inspire someone who doesn’t want to change? Is discovering their identity through social media a bad thing? And what are the four words every teen and young adult wants to hear from their parents? Here’s a taster of her advice below.

Dr Meg Jay: Uncertainty is normal, but our brains don’t like it

The brain interprets uncertainty as danger and it imagines the worst. For young adults in their 20s they are emerging from the certainty and structure they’ve always had in their lives through the education system. They always knew where they stood and then they enter their twenties and begin to question how many years it will take to establish their career; will they have enough money to buy a house, will they ever have a partner? Can they pay their bills and afford to have a family? Everything is uncertain all at once. They need to figure out ‘How do I do this next part of my life’. There are a lot of skills they suddenly need to find in order to help them get through life. We need to reassure them that it’s perfectly normal to feel this way. We can perhaps share our own experiences of stepping into adult life, and let them know they will become more sure of themselves once they start to set themselves up with a career, establish new friendships, move out of home etc. Step by step they will see that they are starting to be able to handle life’s challenges and milestones better.

A mental health issue isn’t an identity

Having a diagnosis of a mental health issue can be used to understand what can be done to help you feel more grounded or secure, or even happier. Or it may become ‘my identity - this is what I will always be’, which is a fixed mindset around mental health, what I call the ‘Nocebo effect’ - the power of negative expectations. It’s what happens when we believe what we have is not treatable or something that we can’t find a way through. I’ve been talking to twenty somethings about mental health for 25 years and these days my clients are more likely to come in to see me with their own diagnosis from social media or online sources, so I have to do a lot of psycho-education about the fact that it’s really easy for a twenty something to meet diagnostic criteria for a whole host of mental disorders, as these disorders diagnosed online don’t take developmental stages into account. For example social anxiety disorder: about half of young adults meet the criteria for this, which means the criteria is not developmentally appropriate for 20-somethings.

What I ask is: What does it mean that you meet the criteria for this? What do you/we need to work on? Is it your identity or does it give ideas to work out what you need to do to get better? Twenty-five years ago, labels were not available to young people, they lived in medical school textbooks, so it was only medical students that might identify with the criteria. Now they do have that access and they are looking for certainty and structure - our generation did it through things like astrology and tarot cards.

The four words every teenager or young person wants to hear from their parents

I BELIEVE IN YOU! Telling your child that you believe in them, that you believe they can do this (whatever this may be) is the best way for them to know that their parents have confidence in them. Don’t say everything is going to be fine, say I believe in you, we’ll figure this out, do you want to talk about it? If you take care of things for them, you’re saying that you don’t have confidence in them. A lot of growth and change happens in the twenties, so if you’ve a child still living at home and you’re seeing a behaviour that you don’t like eg, they won’t help out around the house, don’t blame yourself or consider yourself a failure as a parent - use it as information to see that it’s an area of growth that still needs to happen. Look for the positives, what they are doing right and then project the situation to them being out in the world living with other people, how do you help them transition into adult living roles? You can say: ‘We’re all adults here, so we need to renegotiate how we live together - if you were living with a roommate, tasks would be divvied up more equally between you’. If you don’t do it, you’re not helping your kids to get the skills they need, and they will encounter problems later on in life. The most compelling thing for a young person to hear is that they are needed.

NB As usual this advice is not for those parenting teens/young adults with SEND or more complex needs