The Minefield of Parents’ Relations with Adult Children
This parenting role can come with great pain. The impulse to protect our children is deeply wired in most women, and the challenge is overwhelming.
The Charge to Protect
Does the charge to protect end when our children are adults?
Why does our relationship with adult children so often feel like minefields with unexpected explosive devices across the field? Or like a battleground instead of a loving relationship?
Does a parents charge to protect end with adult children?
What about when your adult children are in abusive relationships? Or when they are in wrongful or immoral situations that you know will destroy or affect them badly? What about when you have to deal with seeing adult children making wrong choices? How do you protect when you do not possess the legal right to do so? When does protecting become interfering? What does God expect and demand of us when negotiating relationships with adult children? Now let’s think of ourselves also as children to our parents? How do we as adults respond when our parents or elders come with advice, suggestions, recommendations that get on our nerves that threaten how we are raising our own children or the rules and relationships in our homes? How do we distinguish between their urge to protect and their tendency to control, command and demand? How do we deal with the fact that we sometimes find it easier to accept advice and truth from friends and outsiders and not from our parents? Or that we expect them to be there for us and also to be willing to take things that others will not accept from us. Are we harsh in our language because we have become their financial providers? Have we come to dishonor them? Or are they the ones dishonoring us?
There is no simple answer, to these numerous questions. This is a conversation in which we have to look in two directions – seeing ourselves as parents and also as children who have parents. The challenge of both letting go and keeping near is the challenge in many of our lives which complicates our relationships. But there are times when parents or a parent has so failed abysmally to protect us when we needed them to be there, or have inflicted harm on their children – emotionally, financially, in words and actions: then do/should they have the right to demand respect and provision from their adult children? For instance, many fathers have been guilty of neglect in different ways and yet society and our traditions demands a child should give them a place of power and undeserved recognition in the life of the adult child e.g. at wedding ceremonies etc.
Is this forgiveness and reconciliation or is it entitlement?
What does God say?
How do we negotiate our relationships with adult children and our relationships with our parents as adult children?
Philippians 4: 6-7 “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus”.
Check our resources for this rich and inspiring conversation on video on this topic THIS PARENTING JOURNEY: Protecting or Interfering? The Minefield of Parents’ Relations with Adult Children.
and yet society and our traditions demands a child should give them a place of power
and undeserved recognition in the life of the adult child e.g. at wedding ceremonies etc.
Is this forgiveness and reconciliation or is it entitlement?
What does God say?
How do we negotiate our relationships with adult children and our relationships with our
parents as adult children?
Philippians 4: 6-7 “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer
and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God,
which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ
Jesus”.
Check our resources for this rich and inspiring conversation on video on this topic THIS
PARENTING JOURNEY: Protecting or Interfering? The Minefield of Parents’ Relations with
Adult Children.
