Talking Effectively With Your Aging Parents

As an adult, keeping healthy communication and close relationships going with your parents can be a challenge. You or someone you know is probably struggling with setting boundaries, knowing when to be open/disclosing or when to keep things to yourself, and knowing when you can expect to give or receive comfort.

This is a pervasive issue for many adults from their late 20s through their 60s, and much of it has to do with the normal separation-individuation process and how the attachment “secure base” works. Following is the background, and some specific recommendations:

When you are a child, you depend on your (healthy) parent for comfort and security. When you are out exploring, you inevitably fall down, face obstacles, or get anxious/frightened. In these cases, the healthy child would normally retreat to the “secure base” of the parent. As a secure base, the parent would be (1) consistently available, (2) attuned and responsive, and (3) warm and willing to provide comfort. Once they clearly see your need (validating), comfort you, and then uplift/reassure you, the parent would engage you in a “goal-corrected partnership.” This is where they help you calibrate your goals, strategize new pathways to those goals, and identify what types of support you will need. If your parent did this consistently for you in childhood, by late adolescence you would be able to do it for yourself: validate, comfort, uplift, re-strategize, and get going again.

As you approach adulthood, you gradually pull away from your parents and transfer at least a part of the secure-base function to friends, romantic partners, and mentors. This can feel rejecting to the parents, but it is a normal part of adolescent development to reject your parents’ styles, values, and goals and set off to find your own identity. This can last several years before the young adult comes back toward the parent and reconnects as a healthy adult child.

As a healthy adult who went through this separation-individuation process you would primarily use your romantic partner or friends as a secure base. But if things get really intense it would still be normal to go to your parents for comfort, support and guidance.

But many people fail to move successfully through the separation-individuation process, and they end up either totally cut off or highly enmeshed with their parents well into adulthood. This might happen if the parents never provided an adequate childhood secure base in the first place (rejecting/neglecting parenting); if the parents were invasive and did not respect the child’s boundaries and need for privacy and their own feelings; or, more likely, because the parents were overly involved in their child’s goal pursuits (and successes) and the child never learned to self-soothe or to problem-solve independently.

Adults who continue to use their parents as their primary secure bases tend to:

1. Overshare details of their lives that might be better kept private.
2. Think out loud with their parents about their anxieties and misgivings.
3. Bounce their ideas for the future off the parent.
4. Express their confusion and lack of confidence in making important decisions.

Not having transitioned out of the model of parenting younger children, the well-intentioned parent might:

1. Make judgments about their adult child’s love and lifestyle choices.
2. View the adult child as overly emotional and needy (and say so).
3. Share their opinions about your goals and how you are pursuing them.
4. Treat you like you are incompetent and in need of their direction and sage wisdom.

Most adults do not enjoy or welcome these behaviors on the part of their parents, but they fail to see how they contribute to this pattern in the first place.

Here are some practical suggestions for navigating the secure-base issue and communicating more effectively with your parents as an adult:

1. Do not share details of your love life or lifestyle choices if you don’t want your parents’ opinions or you are going to feel judged by those opinions.

2. Find healthy sources of emotional support outside of your parents and use those supports for your secure base; lean on your parents for the secure-base function sparingly.

3. Don’t bounce your business ideas and plans off your parents unless you want their input.

4. Realize that if they share your confusion or anxiety over a decision, your parents are likely to take this as an invitation to take care of you and step in with their wisdom and knowledge.

5. If you want to share your life with your parents without the aforementioned pitfalls, provide some structure for the conversation:

• Tell them that you want to share your life journey but that this won’t be safe for you if they pass judgment. So, either don’t share or kindly ask them not to judge. Yes, overtly ask them.
• Tell them that you want to be supported and comforted, but that you don’t want them to fix the situation for you: No fixing!
• Tell them in advance when you want to hear their opinion vs. when you are just sharing and do not want their opinion.
• Know your parents’ attachment styles: If they are highly avoidant, realize that they might not have the capacity to “hold” your emotions and comfort you. If they are anxious, they might have strong emotional reactions themselves when seeing you go through your trials and tribulations. They might not be able to hold their own emotions in that case or just might not want to.

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Above all, give your parents the same respect you want for yourself. If they say they do not want to do any of the things that you ask, respect that and realize that you then need to make corresponding decisions and adjust how you relate to them.