October 15, 2024-
HOW TO HELP YOUR DEPENDENT ADULT CHILD
One of the most difficult things for an adult parent to do is to separate themselves from requests from adult children that are harmful to both. Good parents never quit loving their children, regardless of their age. Problems occur when parents, regardless of the reason, find themselves helping out their adult children in a never-ending stream of needs ranging from financial to overwhelming emotional. To help out a child in a difficult financial or emotional relationship situation is what good parents do. When the help leads to dependency on the part of the children on their parents, then something needs to change or it will be a never-ending dependent relationship where the child will not be launched into life with its necessary responsibilities, but rather will be living off of their parents as if they are still young dependent children. This is even more essential if the relationship has never evolved from a dependent child into an adult adult relationship. If you find yourself in such a situation, the following are things to do to return your relationship to hopefully one of two loving independent family adults sharing a loving lifelong family relationship: 1. Determine if you honestly enjoy the dependency and find it hard to say no because it makes you feel better about yourself. 2. Determine what would be reasonable boundaries to help yourself be more responsible as a loving family member, and at the same time helping your child be a responsible adult. 3. Make sure you do not allow your dependent child to use emotional blackmail in the sense that if you do not help them, you will be letting them down as if you were still responsible as a parent for them and they may even indicate you may not be able to see the grandchildren or them if you do not help them get what they want. It is critical not to allow this to happen to you. 4. If your children are financially dependent on you, you need to set up a timeline when you are going to have them be responsible for themselves. A crisis will eventually occur when you stop the funding unless they begin to take responsibility for their own financial needs. 5. If your child is emotionally dependent on you and wearing you out emotionally ,you need to give advice when it is asked, but not become emotionally distraught yourself as you inappropriately take on the emotional burdens of your children. 6. Accept you must stick to the boundaries you have set and recognize that you must stop the process in order to have any lasting change. 7. If you are not able to implement the boundaries that you need to have in order to set your child free to become an independent person, then you can consider bringing in family, friends or an experienced therapist in such matters to help you in the process…This is going to be a very difficult situation for you to change. Oftentimes, this codependency has been in place for many years and may have always been in place since your children became adults. Whatever the situation, the time to change the relationship into a healthy one is now. You both need it.