Helping adult children
Q: I’m going to describe the situation outlined in one reader’s letter. Parents are concerned about their one and only daughter who married over 15 years ago and soon had one child. While she was pregnant with her second child, her husband ran around with their best friend’s wife. The daughter divorced her husband. Her parents helped her out financially through the divorce and subsequent adjustment. The husband came back, moved in, got her pregnant and then ran around again with another married woman. She eventually kicked him out a second time.
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Her parents again helped her get a different house and provided some money for living and for legal bills. She went through that money faster than her parents approved of. She took some job training, but lost much of her self-confidence and wasn’t able to get a well paying job. Her self-respect, her appearance and her housekeeping skills deteriorated. She began to feel upset when her parents criticized her, her housework or her job choices, although she still had to rely on them financially. Communication between her and her parents has now almost ceased.
A: When you help an adult child, you need to be clear about the conditions of your help. Is it unconditional? If this is so, adult children are not accountable to you about how they use your help, financial and otherwise.
Is it conditional help? Are there emotional or financial conditions attached to it? Are you expecting them to agree with or share all of your ideas and feelings? If someone gets something from someone else, especially within a family, the gift often has a bunch of messages attached to it. If so, problems are bound to arise. You are likely sending out subtle messages, perhaps not even being aware of them. The message might be, “You need to use what I am giving you the way I want you to use it,” or “I expect you will use what I give you to achieve a certain standard of neatness or cleanliness,” or “I expect your love or obedience back in return for what I am giving you.” These parents likely didn’t intend to have those messages attached to their help, but I strongly suspect their daughter felt these messages and, quite normally, resented them.
If their daughter’s home is messy or even filthy, that’s not their problem. When you visit her, you accept her as she is. If she or her children visit you and are wearing filthy clothes, you have the right to say, “We love you and we like you visiting but we feel uncomfortable when you are not clean or neat.” How the daughter responds is her problem since she is on her parents’ turf. But they have no right to criticize when they are on her turf.
Their daughter may have some personal problems and unresolved pain. As parents, they are the least able to help her with these. They are too close to her to be objective. They can express their concern for her and give her information about where support and help is available, but that is all they can or even should do.
If they wish, they could get their daughter a copy of Bruce Fisher’s book, Re-Building, a book which every divorced person should read, despite how long ago they were divorced. They could tell her this is a book which I have recommended, but they should not tell her to read it or grill her about what she gained from it. If she reads it, she will share what she wants with her parents when and if she wants to.
