Toder / Ph.D. Your Kids are Grown: Parenting 2.0

with strategies for moving on
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-9882059-5-6
Verlag: Aziri Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Reihe: Your Kids are Grown: Parenting 2.0

Your Kids are Grown: Parenting 2.0 brings together effective tools for forging new parent and adult-child relationships. The book offers an extensive set of support materials and exercises for the reader to become more skilled in parenting adult-children. Psychologist/author, Francine Toder, Ph.D., describes and offers solutions for the many situations that are sources of major or minor conflict between parents and their adult-children, including personality and style differences, disappointed expectations, conflicting values, competition between adult siblings, and differing views of adult responsibilities. A bonus section focuses on a review and revamping of personal and couple life goals.

Francine Toder, Ph.D. is a faculty emerita of California State University, Sacramento and is a clinical psychologist retired from private practice. She is also the author of four books and is currently working on her fifth. Her extensive writing on diverse topics has appeared in magazines, professional journals, newspapers, blog sites such as Huffington Post, Next Avenue, Psychology Today, and chapters in edited books. She resides with her husband in the San Francisco Bay Area where she practices the cello daily.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Toder, Francine

Ph.D.,

Leseproben

Chapter 1

What Do Adult-Children Want?

Their Perspective

When I set out to write this book, I had my own biases based on a lifetime of being a daughter and a mother. I found it intriguing that what I most wanted from my own parents—respect, support, and interest, were the very things I was sometimes guilty of not showing to my own adult-children. To make certain that my personal mistakes and shortcomings didn’t interfere with my writing I did what all psychologists do: I did my research and talked with colleagues.

The array of responses was incredible. There is no easy way to summarize a person’s relationships with his or her parents. Even so, after speaking with as many people as could tolerate my questioning, I still felt that I had a biased sample. Certainly, the experiences of mental health professionals could not fully represent others!

I wondered whether certain communication patterns led to satisfactory relationships. I was curious about the existence of some universal standards for parenting adult-children that must be met. I questioned whether men or women had different wishes or expectations. I thought about the effect of culture, religion, education, or occupation on how people viewed contact with their parents. It was time to find out.

It is easy to do research at a university because students, faculty, and staff are used to being asked to participate in surveys. This was my starting point, but a university population is not very representative. I found myself distributing questionnaires to friends of friends and cousins of neighbors one thousand miles away. Finally, I had collected about one hundred responses from all kinds of people and felt ready to make sense out of a mountain of information.

The participants in my initial study ranged in age from eighteen to sixty-six, and the average age was about twenty-nine. There was a big group of young adults in their early twenties and another substantial group of almost midlife-adults in their early to mid-forties. The sixty-six-year-old woman in the sample indicated that she is still negotiating a relationship with her mother! It confirmed my belief that at any age there is value in working on and reworking relationships with parents. Incidentally, this same woman reports that her mother is both interested in and capable of changing how she relates to her daughter.

Of those who returned a questionnaire, 58 percent were women. It is not surprising that more women than men responded. Our culture has taught women to be more sensitive to relationships and to be more willing to communicate their feelings in surveys such as this one. No offense meant to the men reading this book!

In terms of educational background, the average respondent had some college experience. The range, however, was broad and included high school graduates as well as people with professional degrees. The occupations included students, business and trades people, professionals, homemakers, and government workers. The group also turned out to be diverse in religious affiliation. While it was not a diversity mirror of the United States, there was definitely input from most major cultural or racial groups.

I thought that race, religion, and educational level would play a bigger role in determining what adult-kids of any age wanted and needed from their parents. To my surprise, these factors did not separate the people who filled out the questionnaire. Instead, I found a consistency of memories from childhood; most people reported that their growing-up years had been relatively happy and normal. This report pleased me because my goal was to understand what “the typical healthy person” felt.

This book is being written for the typical midlife and later-life parent and not necessarily for the parent who is abusive, addicted, or otherwise emotionally unavailable. It is for people like you and me, with the best of intentions, who may have fallen short of the mark and wish to learn what we can now do to get closer to the mark.

The beginning of the survey tapped childhood memories and the ways in which parents showed support and love, as well as disappointment and disapproval. The survey provided choices including verbal, nonverbal, and physical ways of giving feedback to children. Here are the categories:

Mother/father showed their love and support by:

touching, hugging and/or kissing

telling me with words

giving me material things or money

facial expressions and other body language

Mother/father showed their disappointment or disapproval by:

tone of voice

telling me with words

physical means (hitting, spanking, etc.)

depriving me of material things or activities

withdrawal of their attention or help

The point of including childhood memories was to try to determine whether good, healthy parent-child relationships would lend themselves to satisfying parent/adult-child relationships. The outcome does not support this idea. Apparently, even parents who seemed to master childhood parenting skills, according to the recall of their offspring, may not be knowledgeable or effective parents to their adult-children. This book has been developed on that premise.

Before moving on, let me share a few interesting observations from the original survey, conducted in the early 1990’s:

“I wish that mother/father could have given me . . .” was an open-ended question that produced a number of very similar responses. Almost all of the comments focused on intangibles that could have been given to them in childhood.

The pervasive wish included more touching, hugging, affection, support, time, nurturance, and respect. One thirty-five-year-old attorney said, “Greater respect for my decisions and autonomy (such that I had).” A twenty-three-year-old grocery cashier wished for “more attention when I was feeling disappointment.” A mid-thirties engineer wished “we could have spent more time doing fun things as a family.” A post-fifty pharmacist felt he could have used “time to talk out situations …. I would have preferred any explanation rather than silence.”

A small group gave responses that could have make their parents beam with joy: “They have given me everything I’ve needed,” said a twenty-year-old male student. This was echoed by another student: “Nothing more than they have.” A college junior was the only one to wish for “more responsibility and work around the house when I was younger.” Clearly, his view represents a minority opinion!

A philosophical forty-nine-year-old woman stated her wish this way: “More positive affirmations than my mother gave, although I realize that one cannot give what one does not have to give.” Accepting her mother’s limitations helped her soothe her disappointment. All in all, the men and women who participated did not seem very critical of their childhood memories.

Looking at their current relationships, as adults with their parents, this same group expressed more dissatisfaction. It’s difficult to summarize their feelings without losing their richness. For that reason, I’ve included the following representative anecdotes in response to the statement: “In my day-to-day relationship with my mother and/or father I wish they would be more sensitive to. . .”

A fortyish college professor from the Midwest captured a general sentiment in describing her father’s failure to be sensitive: “I wish he would actually listen to what I say, rather than simply responding that ‘Everything will be alright.’” A variation on this idea was offered by a twenty-five-year-old bookstore associate whose parents were not sensitive to “what I want to do, rather than what they think I should do.” Neither of these people felt that they were taken seriously by their parents, and both felt that their worries or views were disregarded. At twenty-seven, a college coed echoed this feeling. She wished that her father could be more sensitive to “my age and my ability to live my own life by accepting my decisions whether he agrees with my choices or not.”

A saleswoman in her early thirties was concerned about “the fact that I control my own life now and they shouldn’t treat me like a child.” The theme of adult status came up again and again. Somehow, parents who were sensitive to the needs of their children and adolescents had failed to make the transition to their offspring’s adulthood.

Some additional comments on “wished-for” qualities are presented in the respondents’ own words:

• “See me as an adult; supportive of my judgment.”
• “Acknowledge what I’m doing, and what I’ve achieved.”
• “Appreciate my life as an adult, trying to make it in the world—financially, academically, and socially.”
• “Notice the ways in which I am a competent and happy adult rather than showing attention only when there are problems.”
• “Understand my responsibilities as a single parent.”
• “Accept my maturity, individuality, and separateness.”
• “Comprehend that I need more space than what they are used to allowing/giving me.”
• “Support my search for the meaning of life. Sometimes they feel that I lack a purpose.”
• “Be aware of my fear of failure and realize the amount of pressure on today’s adults.”

The common thread seemed to be the desire to be seen and...