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When one of my daughters turned 18, our relationship hit a crisis so painful it lasted longer than I knew how to bear. I was a psychotherapist, trained in child and adult development, yet I was utterly flummoxed. Decades have passed since then, but when I recently spoke to her about that time, a flood of distress washed through me as if it were yesterday.
This is how my daughter, now a mother herself, put it when I asked her to describe that era:
“I was furious and desperate and lonely. I fought with you and Dad in a way no one in the family had ever fought with you before. I remember screaming at you while out on a walk, as you desperately implored me to be quiet because people could hear. I wanted them to hear. I wanted to smash this image of us as a happy family to pieces – and I was incredibly successful in doing that.”
I remembered I had looked at other families and wondered what they had got right that I had got so wrong. I didn’t know how to navigate the relationship now that she was technically an adult but to me still so young and vulnerable. I was frightened for her, angry with her (an emotion I didn’t want to feel) and furious with myself. Beneath it all lay the shame: I had failed her and our family.
Questions upended me. Why didn’t I see this coming? What did I do wrong? How could I fix it? I searched for guidance and found almost nothing. There was virtually no information that helped me make sense of this new terrain. I wish I’d known what recent neuroscience research from Cambridge University suggests: that the brain’s adolescent phase extends until the grand old age of 32. These findings, published in Nature Communications, challenge traditional assumptions that maturation ends at 18 or 25, and highlight why this extended period of not-quite-adulthood represents both vulnerability and opportunity for our children.
Parenting does not stop when our children turn 18; it simply changes shape. Yet parenting adult children remains one of the least discussed and least understood aspects of family life.
With time and therapy, my daughter and I survived those fights and rebuilt a close relationship. I am profoundly grateful for that. In hindsight, the breakdown became a breakthrough: a necessary reconfiguration of our family system. It reset boundaries, opened more honest communication and taught us to fight productively. That sounds like a happy ending, but the process was chaotic and raw. Here are some of the guiding principles for building good relationships with your adult children.
In previous generations, adulthood meant cutting ties at 18: you left home, got a job, married young, and rarely looked back. Today, it’s different. Many parents look at their adult children and wonder what has gone wrong. Compared with what they did at that age, their children’s slower path to independence can be seen as arrested development.
Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett coined the term “emerging adulthood” for the years between 18 and 25, a phase of exploration and uncertainty when young people are “in between” adolescence and adulthood. It is a time to test, experience and discover who they are. This is not evidence of moral decline but a developmental shift that reflects a radically different world. Technology, the women’s movement and social change have transformed what it means to grow up.
The statistics tell the story starkly: about a third of young adults aged 18 to 34 now live with their parents. Nearly 60% of parents financially support an adult child. As difficult as that might be, it is a required adaptation to a profoundly altered economic and social reality. Parents rarely talk about how drained they feel, or how to navigate it coherently.
I think of Sarah, a client in her mid‑50s, who came to therapy feeling utterly depleted. Three years earlier, her son Tom, 26, had moved back home after university. What began as a temporary arrangement “just until he finds his feet” had calcified into something neither could name. Tom worked part-time in a coffee shop, spent evenings gaming, contributed nothing to household costs and bristled at any suggestion he might do otherwise.
Sarah felt trapped between love and resentment. She cooked his meals, did his washing, tiptoed around his moods. She suffered in her marriage; her husband came home late to avoid the tension. Sarah couldn’t understand why Tom seemed so stuck when she’d given him everything. “I’ve failed him,” she said, weepily. “He can’t cope with adult life.”
But as we worked together, a different picture emerged. Sarah’s own mother had been cold and critical. Sarah had vowed to be different: warmer, more available. Yet she had overcompensated, protected Tom from struggle. She solved his problems and rescued him from consequences. Now, at 26, Tom had no confidence in his own capabilities because he’d never had to develop them. And Sarah, exhausted from years of hypervigilance, felt angry at the very person she had tried so hard to protect.
The breakthrough came when Sarah began to see that her anxiety, not Tom’s actual need, drove her behaviour. We worked on what she was truly frightened of: that if she didn’t manage his life, something terrible would happen. Beneath that lay an older fear: that she wasn’t good enough, that love would disappear.
Sarah started small. She stopped doing Tom’s laundry. She told him, calmly, that he needed to contribute monthly to household costs. She resisted the urge to rescue when he complained or sulked. It was agony. Tom was furious. He accused her of not caring, of suddenly changing the rules.
But, gradually, they adapted. He picked up more shifts. He began, tentatively, to talk about moving out. The atmosphere at home lightened. Sarah’s husband started coming home earlier. And, in one session, Sarah told me, “Last week, Tom thanked me for dinner. It was the first time in three years he’d noticed I’d cooked. I realised I’d been so busy giving, I’d never let him give back.”
Research confirms what Sarah discovered: when adult children return home, parents’ quality of life and wellbeing often decline significantly, regardless of why the child returned. Yet we don’t openly admit this, for it feels like a betrayal. The silence keeps everyone trapped.
What changed for Sarah and Tom wasn’t that she loved him less – it was that she loved him differently. She started to trust him to navigate his life. That shift, from anxious manager to respectful witness, is a hard task of parenting adult children.
The same dynamic plays out around money, career choices and relationships. Parents see their children struggle and rush in to fix, advise or rescue. It comes from love, but it often backfires. Studies show that excessive parental involvement, what researchers call “helicopter parenting”, is associated with disrupted mental health in young adults, lower self-confidence and difficulties with identity development. The very thing we do to help can hinder.
This extended closeness can be loving and necessary, but also fraught. Parents may feel resentful; children may feel infantilised. The key is clarity, not control. Have explicit conversations about money, chores, privacy and expectations. Boundaries matter. It is the unspoken assumptions – those old, inherited patterns – that most often lead to conflict.
Young adults themselves identify aspects that support their return home: clear expectations discussed openly; meaningful contributions to the household; being treated as adults rather than teenagers; and an exit plan with timelines. Examples of this include them managing their own relationships. They have privacy around their phone, their finances and their social life.
The tension isn’t about whether your 28-year-old lives at home. It’s about whether the relationship has evolved to match their developmental stage, or whether everyone repeats the patterns from when they were a teenager.
This change is a tough gig. For years, our role was to protect and guide; to keep our children alive and help them grow. Then the task changes: to step back and let them make their own choices and mistakes. That transition can feel bewildering; for, at some level, they remain the tiny baby inside us. It takes deep psychological work to love the child we have, not the one we imagined or would choose; to listen fully, respect their autonomy and offer wisdom only when asked. As Anna Freud said, “A mother’s job is to be there to be left.”
Good-enough parenting of adult children requires a delicate balance: not to abandon, or to over-parent; not always in the parent role, but sharing more; to stay connected without becoming dependent. The real work is to let go of control without letting go of connection.
There is a parenting model called Circle of Security that is designed to enhance caregiver-child relationships by helping adults understand and meet children’s emotional needs in early childhood. It applies here, too. You want to be the arms your adult children can come into, but also the support that helps them move out into independence. Some parents struggle more with letting go, others with being needed; both require clear, loving boundaries.
What about the change as your child finds loving relationships? As parents watch their adult children date and have fun, it can stir up envy for their youth – the freshness of their bodies, the life that still stretches ahead – even as they feel pride and love. Acknowledging these emotions, rather than burying the shame, keeps us authentic and generous. The more we accept the reality of our own age and limits, the freer our children are to live fully.
Other difficulties can also arise in the shifting roles of parent and child. Unprocessed trauma from one generation can be passed to the next. When pain is buried rather than faced, it transmits through behaviour, emotional response and even epigenetically into our very beings. Unprocessed trauma makes us more reactive: parents may become unpredictable or unreliable, leaving children anxious or hypervigilant. These patterns echo across decades until someone is prepared to feel the pain and begin to heal it. Where trauma or neglect has shaped a family, estrangement between generations becomes more likely – not because love is absent, but because it has felt too painful to express safely. It is helpful for parents to recognise the trauma they carry from their past, and aim to process it not only for themselves but for the whole family system.
Sometimes it is the parent, not the child, who has not matured. Adult children with immature or narcissistic parents often end up as caretakers, who try, and usually fail, to manage or placate the very people meant to protect them. The task here – in this case for the children rather than the parents – is different but equally vital: to set limits without guilt, to see the parents’ limitations clearly, and to stop trying to earn love that was conditional or inconsistent. Love may still be possible, but only from a safe emotional distance. Boundaries become the form that love must take.
Another challenge arises when worldviews diverge – politics, religion, gender or lifestyle choices. The pandemic and the culture wars that followed have widened these divides. Parents often ask me in therapy, “How did we raise someone who sees the world so differently from us?” This situation calls for humility. Love does not mean agreement. It means allowing differences. The moment you try to win the argument, you risk the relationship. Curiosity is the antidote: ask rather than tell. Remember that every generation reacts against the one before it.
Your influence endures, but not in your opinions. It lives in how you embody love, respect, integrity and kindness. You helped write the relational map that lives inside your children: trust that and trust them.
The greatest tensions arise at points of transition: when a child leaves home or returns, when a new partner joins the family, a grandparent dies, or someone loses a job. These moments expose a family’s fault lines but also create opportunities for growth and repair.
Even the closest families hit storms. Conflict with adult children can cut deep because it touches identity, not just as a parent, but as someone who tried their best. The temptation is to try to fix it or to withdraw. Better to pause, acknowledge your part, apologise where needed, and listen with empathy. Repair after conflict not only heals but strengthens emotional security and resilience on both sides.
For all its complexity, this stage can bring profound rewards. Conversations grow richer; humour deepens. You can enjoy your grown-up children as people in their own right: their quirks, passions and wisdom.
As one mother told me recently, “It’s like watching your heart walk around outside your body, but now it walks confidently.” That captures the bittersweet beauty of it. If you can speak honestly, disagree respectfully and laugh together, you have done something remarkable. You have turned a bond of dependency into a relationship of mutual respect – one that evolves as you both do.
Parenting does not end; it matures. And, like all mature love, it asks for courage: to learn continually, to forgive repeatedly and to show up consistently, not as the all-knowing parent, but as a fellow human being, who still grows, too.
For my daughter, feeling listened to helped enormously. “Over time my rage decreased as I felt heard enough,” she says now. “Part of the developmental task of separating was proving wrong what I’d always feared – that if I showed my true, messy, struggling self, I wouldn’t be lovable. That love was conditional. Eventually, very messily, I learned I was loved as I am.”
Families are not static: they are living systems that constantly adapt. The best we can do, as parents, as children, as human beings, is to stay open: to listen, to grow and to love, even when it is hard.
