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Relationships
5 Stages in Your Relationship With Your Parents
You're always viewing your parent through changing lenses.
Posted February 8, 2024 Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Key points
- Our relationship with our parents moves through stages as we all change over time.
- The rebelliousness of the teen and early adult years often gives way to greater tolerance and role change.
- The key is realizing that these stages are normal. By anticipating them, you can adapt better.
Like it or not, you’re always connected to your parents somehow. Even if you’re estranged from one or both of them, they still shape your life by creating emotions that trigger over-reactions or determined vows to “never do, never become,” making you hypersensitive to what you feel you need to avoid in your other adult relationships. For most of us, our parents are more permanent fixtures to navigate throughout our lives. As we change, our view of them, what we need from them, and what annoys us about them also changes over time. Here is a simple trip through five stages of this primary relationship:
#1: Childhood.
Even childhood is a mixed bag, with bursts of connection and mini-rebellion. If your childhood was filled with neglect or abuse, the results are less mixed and include more traumatic wounds—fear, walking on eggshells, strategies to stay out of trouble, or attempts to push back—that will shape who you are afraid of or attracted to in your adult life.
#2: Teen years: tumult, breaking away.
The classic 13-year-old wakes up one day and hates her mother, is embarrassed being dropped off at school, or by what they wore to the school play—anger flares up at this age. Teens who were adopted become curious about their biological parents and may try to seek them out.
While this uproar and pulling away is our image of teen life, some don’t rebel and remain the good kids. For some, the breaking out comes later, sometimes with an unexpected vengeance.
#3: Late 20s and early 30s.
Most of us spend our late teens and early 20s creating an adult life—education, career-building, finding a mate. But once you round that corner and your life is more settled, many look back on their childhoods with new eyes. The un-rebelled teens break out; they look back and remember that angry outburst at the dinner table when they were eight or the time they weren’t allowed to wear that dress to school. It's small stuff but the tip of the larger iceberg of unfairness, a reflection on your childhood through this new, more individuated, adult lens. This is where adult children cut their parents off and send angry emails telling them to never talk to them again. The parents are shell-shocked and confused, worrying their child is on drugs or mentally unstable because they don’t remember what their child is talking about.
Even for those who don’t pull away, these are the years when they often struggle to tolerate their parents, get embarrassed about how they act around their friends or dating partners, or get quickly annoyed by their advice, their micromanaging. They get within ten feet of their parents and find it all too easy to suddenly feel like a 10-year-old.
#4: Midlife.
The ones who left their parents behind because of abuse or neglect as soon as they were able to break away may circle back, especially if they are now parents and have a more generous perspective on just how difficult parenting and, simply, living can be. The ones who did the cutoffs in their late 20s and early 30s may show up at grandma’s funeral and start talking, closing the rift. For others, there may still be the annoyance about too much unsolicited advice, but it’s now taken with a grain of salt, or they can gently set boundaries.
This may be a transition time, where the adult child has a crisis—a breakup, divorce, work or health issue—and leans into the parent for support. Or, the child begins to slowly shift toward becoming the caretaker: Dad has a stroke or retired and is depressed, or the parents divorced, and there’s checking in and mopping up despite their own busy adult life.
The overall relationship has shifted from parent-child to more adult-adult, but who’s more the adult on any given day may vary depending on the situation.
#5: Old age.
The transition is over, the roles have shifted, and the adult child is caretaking and more in charge: helping to manage finances or talk through the latest technology, conferring with doctors, exploring whether independent living is still possible, or realizing it isn't, having to help make those difficult decisions about what’s next. It's a stressful time because you’re the sandwich generation, struggling to help an aging parent while likely still trying to launch or support your own children.
The moral of the story.
Life and relationships move through stages, and each stage has its own challenges and opportunities. What’s the best you can do? Expect the change; realize that not only will you and your parents individually change as people, but your view of them and your relationship with them change as you do. By knowing what you expect, you can hopefully anticipate and adapt. Because they don’t see what you need unless you tell them, rather than focusing on what you want them to stop doing, give them new jobs in concrete ways and let them know how to be in your life now.
If you can, assume they are doing the best they can and are still trying to care for you.
