Anxiety is inevitable, given the lack of guidance and certainty. However, parents can lessen that anxiety to a large degree when they realize that the vast majority of emerging adults will commit to a mate, have careers and start their own households. They will launch. The best thing parents can do to “hurry” the process is not to hurry it. If parents can learn to let go of expectations and let grown children be who they are (not who parents want them to be), they are likely to get to a place of adult readiness faster than if parents constantly badger them and send them messages of disapproval, moral judgment and resentment.
A poignant passage by Judith Viorst, author of Necessary Losses, provides insight:
…although the world is perilous and the lives of children are dangerous to their parents, they still must leave, we still must let them go. Hoping that we have equipped them for their journey. Hoping that they will wear their boots in the snow. Hoping that when they fall down, they can get up again. Hoping.4
Parents need to try to put themselves in their children’s positions. What would you do if you were an emerging adult in today’s economic and social climate? Would you have the answers all worked out?
Chapter 8
SECOND TIME AROUND
Why does it seem that so many emerging adults are returning to the nest after a period of solo flight? Think back to the time you first left home to make a life for yourself. What challenges did you face economically and socially? What roles and attitudes toward leaving home did your parents assume? What messages was society sending you?
Let’s look at the “second time around” phenomenon: those emerging adults who return to live in their parents’ homes after periods of independence. This may occur after emerging adult children have been away at college, after the breakup of a marriage or long-term relationship or as a result of the inability to make it financially on their own.
The leap from the parental nest has never been easy. This period has been described as “one of the most complex [and challenging] of the chronological life stages.”1 But it has grown substantially more difficult over the last couple of decades, to a degree many parents don’t appreciate. Major changes in the global economy have altered the dynamics of independent living. A worldwide economic downturn has upped the ante and intensified many issues. No longer can emerging adults expect to have the financial resources and mobility they anticipated during their adolescent years. Offshore outsourcing and a host of other factors have drastically lowered their value in many professions. Lack of scholarships and grants combined with staggering increases in the cost of higher education have left many saddled with enormous student loan debt. The cost of independent living has skyrocketed, especially in relation to the money most emerging adults earn. Even renting a modest apartment is not doable for many emerging adults on an entry-level salary.
Ambiguity and unpredictability are the rule rather than the exception. Traditional pathways to “success” no longer work. It is important to note that this does not mean that parents are required to accept emerging adults back into their homes anytime they ask, but it does mean that parents should probably view their sons’ and daughters’ requests to do so with a slightly refocused lens. Holding them to the same rules the parents faced may be unrealistic and shortsighted. The world has changed. It is harder to live independently than it was a few decades ago. The “returning adult child” is now an established cultural phenomenon. Parents can deny it or they can think about how they are going to deal with it if the situation arises. For many, it already has.
What to Expect?
If you have made the decision to allow your emerging adult to move home for a second (or third or fourth) time, you have probably asked yourself many questions related to your role. For example, you may be unclear about what the parameters of financial and emotional support should be for your emerging adult. How do you maintain your own sense of adult freedom when you have been cast in the role of full-time, on-site parent again? Your emerging adult is likely to be unclear about these same parameters. Expectations of each other are probably murky. The revolving door phenomenon brings with it interesting challenges and opportunities. We will focus on techniques, strategies and tools to help you navigate this unexpected new chapter of your parental life. Many of the topics apply equally well to emerging adults who have never left home; however, some of the issues presented are particular to the “returning home” scenario.
Staying Home versus Returning Home
In some ways, the return of the emerging adult to the parent’s home can be more challenging than if he or she had never left in the first place. Here are some of the challenges:
•You have gotten used to your independence from your emerging adult. You probably don’t relish the idea of resuming old parental roles and struggles.
•Your emerging adult has gotten used to his or her independence from you. He or she has matured and changed and may have acquired behaviors that you will find surprising. Your emerging adult may be resistant to your limit setting.
•You may need to readjust privacy patterns, life habits and personal space arrangements.
•You may have to deal with difficult new issues, such as how to address your emerging adult’s sexual relationships.
•You may need to consider the influence your returning emerging adult child will have on the younger siblings in your home. Is this going to be a healthy mix?
•Your parent/emerging adult relationship will need new rules. You will need to change the caretaker/child and host/guest dynamic. You will need to make a decision as to how much limit setting is appropriate.
•Your family will need to reinvent itself. Will the returning emerging adult be a part of family activities? To what extent? What financial expectations will you have in this regard?
The return scenario also can provide some benefits:
•The “return” conversations offer a built-in opportunity to renegotiate the rules in a concrete way.
•Your son or daughter may have newfound respect for your rules and privacy, because he or she has been away and is reentering your “turf.”
•You will be able to establish new economic expectations (e.g., rent, utilities, food).
•You will be more likely to recognize, respect and honor the maturation your emerging adult has undergone than if your emerging adult never left home.
•You will have broken the enabling patterns of the past. It will be obvious to you if you start to slip back into troublesome patterns.
•You can make a fresh start. The return home offers a real opportunity to create an adult relationship with your son or daughter.
•The financial, emotional and household contributions that your emerging adult provides can offset the inconveniences.
Movies and television sitcoms often paint the returning child syndrome as a uniformly troublesome scenario. Some news magazines report the phenomenon as a social problem. Friends and relatives often judge the situation negatively and moralistically. Add to that the feelings of failure the return home is likely to trigger in both you and your emerging adult—him because he couldn’t “make it” on his own; you because you didn’t do a “good enough job” as a parent to launch him. It all stacks up to a predisposition to see the return home as a problem.
As you consider how to deal with this new chapter in your life, I encourage you to give more attention to the benefits list than the challenges list. Try to focus on the positive aspects and vow to make this “second time around” a growth experience for everyone involved. It is very important to adopt a positive attitude, because the negative aspects are “in your face” in very glaring ways.
I urge you to be more forgiving and accepting. This can easily be a wonderful step toward a great relationship with your emerging adult. It depends on your attitude. Making it work starts by recognizing that you are not alone in this situation, that it is occurring in virtually every neighborhood of every city and town in the United States. According to a study conduct
ed in 2011 by the Pew Research Center, 29 percent of the parents surveyed reported that their emerging adult children returned home to live with them due to the current economic downturn.2 It is a new reality and not necessarily a failure on anyone’s part.
Look at the return as an opportunity rather than a problem.
Coddling versus Support
Here we will be looking at how real families have adjusted to the “second time around” phenomenon and the expert advice of Dr. Michael Bradley, a respected professional who is the author of books such as Yes, Your Teen is Crazy. I approached him for advice on the “second time around” phenomenon and I thank him for his valuable feedback and wisdom, which is woven through much of this chapter.3
Linda Gordon presented Ben’s story and her work with Ben and his parents in “Adultescence: Helping Twentysomethings Leave the Nest” in Pyschotherapy Networker.4 Dr. David Waters, an expert in the field of family therapy, offered his insights on Gordon’s case study.
Ben has graduated from college with significant tuition and credit card debt. He is mildly depressed given his current situation: unemployed and having to return to his parents’ home.
His parents have decided to help him with his debt. At present they are allowing him to live in their home with few rules and expectations. There is no formal “exit strategy” for Ben, no timeline or set of conditions to be met in order for him and his parents to agree that it is time for him to move on. So he is living at home in a sort of limbo, which isn’t making anyone happy. The situation is causing friction in the family, some of it expressed openly, some of it suppressed. Ben and his family are seeking family therapy to help them with this important transition.
What are your thoughts about Ben and his parents? Are they coddling Ben? Should they support him financially and, if so, what considerations should guide their parenting decisions? Dr. Waters believes a certain amount of discomfort is integral to a successful “second time around” experience, otherwise a coddling pattern is likely to take shape:
I believe that when kids return home…they need to hit a bit of a wall: the situation is different, the rules have changed, and we have to negotiate something substantially different than what we had. It needs to be palpably uncomfortable and strange for a while, lest everyone slip back into the old way of doing things. I often find myself engineering collisions within families in this situation to get to the underlying question of what the new rules need to be, and magnifying, not easing, the discomfort.5
The “second time around” experience is likely to bring a certain amount of discomfort. Otherwise, a coddling pattern is likely to take shape. Coddling reinforces irresponsibility and dependence. When one is coddled, everything is soft, amorphous and relatively painless. Emerging adults have no hard edges from which to push off. Part of the challenge for “second time around” parents is to create enough hard edges—limits, rules, expectations—to give emerging adults the sense that this new arrangement is not free and not without conditions.
At the same time, parents don’t want to create so many rules that they stifle emerging adults’ autonomy and put their children back into a parent/adolescent relationship. Dr. Bradley thinks it is critically important to consider these issues and others before your son or daughter comes back into the home:
Emerging adult children return to the homes of their parents varying in levels of dependency, ranging from asking for financial help to moving back to their old bedrooms and handing over all of their life crises to their parents. There are critical questions that parents should explore with their returning emerging adult child, regardless of the specific issues. The exploration process is key to designing an assistance plan to remedy not just the immediate crisis. This is best done before a baggage-laden emerging adult shows up on the doorstep.6
I would not always characterize the return home as a “crisis,” but I do think Dr. Bradley is correct about parents devising a plan before the move home occurs. Dr. Bradley believes that the success of the emerging adult’s second tenure in the family will depend greatly upon how well thought-out the plan is. The danger of not making a plan in advance is that if your emerging adult moves back home first, both he and you are very vulnerable to slipping back into old patterns. In the absence of a firm new set of guidelines, people tend to revert to a “fallback” position that feels familiar. In the case of your emerging adult returning home, this is often a pattern that is more appropriate to adolescence than adulthood.
The pre-return phase, therefore, is delicate and critical. This is where the opportunity presents itself to reinvent the relationship. If that opportunity is not seized, habit is likely to take over and both you and your emerging adult may soon find yourselves mired in old patterns that don’t serve either of you. It is much easier to create new behavioral guidelines before the move happens than to try to correct problem patterns that have already set in.
If you don’t seize the opportunity to negotiate new terms with your emerging adult, not only will you fail to encourage your child’s growth, but also you may inadvertently trigger a setback. Your son or daughter will experience the return home as another “failure” experience. You are likely to do the same. The result will be widespread negativity within the family.
In order to create a plan that works, Dr. Bradley suggests asking a set of probing questions when the emerging adult is still considering the move back into the parental home.
Returning Home: Questions to Consider
The following questions are designed to stimulate parents’ productive thought and discussion. The answers will help to dictate exactly what the return plan should entail.
Before we get to the questions themselves, let’s consider two pieces of advice from Dr. Bradley. First, he suggests that parents ask the questions of their emerging adults in a neutral way, without providing any feedback, direction or answers of their own. Parents should ask the questions and then give emerging adults a period of time, at least a few days, to think over their responses. Presenting the questions in written form may work best, particularly if you are prone to steering your emerging adult in a certain direction. However, if you are able to have a mature verbal discussion about these questions without doing too much editorializing, then that can work well too.
The goal is for your emerging adult to think critically about the questions and generate meaningful answers on his or her own. That way, your emerging adult will share in the authorship and ownership of the plan from the beginning. There will be authentic “buy-in” rather than the sense that you are imposing your will on the situation.
When asking these questions, parents can offer their own thoughts and suggestions, but only as a last resort. The goal is not to manage children’s lives but to give them support and structure in managing their own lives. These questions, framed in the right way, can offer such support, provided parents let emerging adults answer for themselves.
Second, Dr. Bradley points out “these questions must be presented without anger, sarcasm, control, or demand.”7 You need to subtract your emotions about your child’s return home from the equation. Anger, resentment, criticism and disappointment will not serve the process, no matter how “justified” you may feel in holding these emotions. Your emerging adult is suffering in this process too and very much wants the arrangement to be a success. Again, he probably feels like a failure. Your reinforcement of that perception will do no one any good, so you must carefully avoid the easy temptation to “pile on” to your child’s negative and guilty self-perception. Rather, assume that you both desire success. Do everything in your power to create an atmosphere of empowerment, a sense that this plan is going to work and is going to benefit everyone involved.
Ask these questions in a respectful, adult manner that says, “I genuinely value your input.”
•What is the return “mission”?
You are probably familiar with the concept of a mission statement in business. Mission statements are sometimes drafted in order to
ensure that everyone on the team is behaving purposefully and with the same ultimate goal in mind. Similarly, you should frame a “mission statement” for your son or daughter’s return home. What does your emerging adult see as the purpose of moving back home? What does she hope to accomplish, specifically? Three meals a day and a warm bed are not sufficient reasons. “The return must be intended as a temporary strengthening process, a resilience/asset building program, not a comfortable escape from the stress of an autonomous life,” says Dr. Bradley.8 It should be framed with a clear goal in mind.
Part of the parents’ mission should be to withdraw from their caretaking roles as soon as possible. Part of the emerging adult’s mission should be to make a contribution to the household, to use the stay as a means of building personal resources and, eventually, to move on. Write a formal mission statement for the return home and have everyone sign it. This gives the reentry experience more weight and gives everyone a vision to fall back on when things start to get confused and/or conflicted.
•What got in the way the first time out?
Very helpful questions to discuss are, “What went wrong during your first attempt at independence? What can we do to fix it?” In business, teams often do a “post mortem” review after a project has been completed. This gives everyone a chance to look at what went wrong and what went right during the process. The prospect of a return home gives your family a similar opportunity. You and your emerging adult can review his or her previous attempt to live independently. You can objectively analyze what worked and what didn’t. Looking at Ben’s case as an example, we might ask, what led to his failure to find a job and to his incurring credit card debt?
Parenting Your Emerging Adult Page 13