What's a Parent's Role?

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As I read the first few pages of the book The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, my heart sank quite a few times as my discomfort escalated and I recognized myself. I was flooded with memories of the multiple times when I hadn’t really listened, when I didn't read the room properly, and when I overstepped in exchanges with my children while they were on the precipice of adult life.

The Marriage Plot is set in the early 1980s on the East Coast of the United States. It opens with Madeleine (Maddy), aged 22 years, dreading the prospect of her parents arriving in the next few hours for her graduation from an Ivy League college. It's the usual story. She’s not sure where she’s going in life. She’s not in a good place emotionally; she feels lost. She has no interest in the significance of this day. Her boyfriend broke up with her three weeks ago, and she hasn't told her parents yet. She has a hangover from drinking too much the previous night, and she probably had casual sex with someone, but she cannot remember clearly what happened.

Enter her parents. So annoying and intrusive. They wake her up with the persistent ringing of the doorbell at her apartment at 7.30 a.m., and they are ready, as planned, to go for breakfast.

The usual accusations and demands start: “What’s the matter? Didn’t you hear the bell?" Madeleine’s lie, “I was in the shower,” was met by her father’s doubting reaction, “Likely story.” The parental insistence, “Will you let us in, please?” and “We want to see the apartment now.”

Madeleine’s roommates are asleep, so she meets her parents downstairs. No time to change her clothes from the night before.

During breakfast at a restaurant, the interrogation continues. Is she planning to move in with her boyfriend? Her mother makes a judgy comment about her clothes: “Are you wearing that dress to the ceremony?” (my italics)

As her mother looks around the restaurant, she spots Maddy’s friend Mitchell, with whom, unbeknownst to her mother, Maddy is fighting. Maddy’s mother insists that he join them for breakfast.

Maddy’s father chimes in with “Big party last night?” This contains a subtext that Maddy looks like she had had a big night.

This is a prickly exchange that most of us as parents could identify with in some way.

We witness how expertly Maddy’s parents go straight to her sensitive areas.

Eugenides cleverly navigates the exchange. He doesn't leave it here. While he cuts Maddy’s parents some slack—they did, after all, drive for hours to get to her graduation—he makes a few scarcely concealed jibes at us as parents.

He remarks that her graduation wasn't only Maddy’s achievement, “but their own as parents.” This minimizes the girl’s own efforts and reminds us how we exaggerate our own part in our children’s successes. Do we ever stop to consider what this means for our children?

Eugenides persists, with the irreverent statement that there is “nothing wrong or unexpected about it,” which leads us as parents to question our sense of self -righteousness and whether we make it about ourselves too often.

What's a Parent's Role?

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This authentic depiction of daily life challenges us as parents to think about the language we use, our expectations, and our tendency to quickly slip back into our familiar parent/child dynamics when we interact with our adult children. This raises questions around our struggles to “meet” our adult children in a respectful and dignified way.

It’s our job to model being the adult in the room

We need to recognize the sensitivity of this interim stage for our adult children and to be aware of the danger of our complicity in slipping back to customary parent/young child dynamics.

As our children move toward adulthood, how do we do our part to make this transition as smooth as possible without smoothing it out for them? There is a big distinction here. We need to let go and know that our adult children need to make mistakes, fall over, and pick themselves up again and again. Just as we continue to do.

We need to be aware of our tendency to react quickly without first shaping a thinking space, a chance to check in with ourselves and our preconceived assumptions before we make a measured response.

We need to be gracious and curious, not patronizing or clouded by our prejudice and judgment.

We need to model mutual respect.

This means being mindful of the language we use. We need to go beyond listening to an active hearing. How often do we impose our voice, interrupt, make demands, and ignore the criticisms that we send to our adult children? The times we don’t use our words wisely and ignore obvious cues. We can ask ourselves:

Are we aware that our words and actions hold many historical subtexts and that our adult children are aware on some level of transparent contradictions, including those between our verbal and non-verbal communication?

Are we open, generous, and fluid in our exchanges so we can embrace inclusiveness, the and, or are we trapped in binary thinking, the or?

Are we brave enough to honestly look at ourselves, our patterns, our own values and prejudices, and to recognize our mistakes and work on them?

Do we use humor as a positive energy or a condescending and destructive force?

How often do we make it all about ourselves?

We can take this opportunity to reshape our relationships with our adult children

It’s on us as the parents to move away from our comfort space and reframe our adult children’s difference as a sign of their growth. We can acknowledge our contradictory feelings and use difficult conversations as a way to reset ourselves and our relationships and to demonstrate how to cross this difference respectfully.

We need to be the adult in the room and avoid any temptation to become the child. We need to let go, to release any control over our adult children and to rejoice in their life decisions and achievements, which are separate from us. We need to hold our tongues except for the rare wisdom we may utter.

Parenting never finishes. It morphs and changes and has the power to transform us.

© Psychology Today