Please Stop Acting Like Your Adult Child’s Behavior Is Out of Your Hands

My parents live deep in chitlins of my ass, even at 33 years old. Mom calls regularly at 8:07PM to remind me, with her signature flair of judgment, that I haven’t called my aunt to wish her a Happy Birthday. She knows this because she accidentally-on-purpose just happened to stumble into conversation with my aunt about whether or not Kayla has talked to you yet, have you heard from her today since it’s your BIRTHDAY?!Dad spends a full work-day on YouTube trying to predict when I should refinance my house using what formula, or researching an engineer’s perspective on what caused our stove to malfunction. Mom and Dad defied the culture’s “hands-off” approach to us maturing and instead opted for the “You’re still some lite form of an idiot who needs my counsel” ethos.Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.When my brother and I were kids, Mom defamed us with her quirks.I don’t blame her for these unintentional displays of her insanity, as I assume they were born of her abusive childhood. But her other declarations of crazy seemed like clear pleas for status, or brands of posturing amongst the younger parents of other children. If you’re a regular reader, you already know Mom and Dad had us when they were 41. They were nearly old enough to be the parents of some of these younger Moms and Pops.There were barefaced differences in how my parents saw their role as Mom and Dad compared to their younger cohort. And Mom sported a brand of looney the more-youthful-but-dumber parents had no choice but to respect (or, at worst, ignore as merely “A Boomer thing”).She’s the type that, if the house was ablaze, she’d grow hysterical if the firemen didn’t allow her to straighten up before saving her life. Everyone in the neighborhood will know, after sifting through the ashen debris, that I only vacuumed twice this week.Mom’s fetish for public image would continue to reveal itself as we aged. In preparation for sleepovers, for instance, she’d pack each set of mine and my brother’s clothes with tissue paper layered in between folds to avoid the clothes wrinkling. Sure, kidnapping was a concern at the time, but can you imagine being the missing kid on the milk carton with a wrinkled polo? Now that’s a tragedy.Dad had different priorities. He was less concerned with the aesthetics of being a civilized, clean person or with the social branding of Mom’s behavior. Dad’s priority was raising two children that weren’t complete idiots.I’ve told this story endlessly, but I also have some new readers, so here’s a one-liner to showcase Dad’s disciplinary style: When I stole a limp balloon from a gas station when I was 8, he punished me with manual labor. He made me blacktop the driveway. It took nearly 6 hours for me to finish, to which I received little more acknowledgement than, “You’re done…. Mmk then.” Pats on the head and “words of affirmation” for a job well done? Not Dad’s flavor of kudos. Punishments and the residual effects on our little psyches were not to be treated with the same brine as inspirational, teachable moments. Dad’s expectation was that the sweltering sun would cook my guilt over the course of the day, marinating my 8-year-old conscience, and I’d learn the lesson on my own.I did. I waited about eight full years before morphing into a colossal bitch in high school.Mom and Dad didn’t see it as particularly useful to reward my brother and I for doing things we were simply supposed to do. Paying us for chores? Mom and Dad put a roof over our heads as payment. We learned that merely existing as humans didn’t allow us access to bottomless privileges. You want something? Earn it.It’s this truth I’ve wrestled with most often in my career of choice, working with professionals and parents seemingly hellbent on lowering the standards if the whiniest child who doesn’t consent to boundaries.I’m eternally grateful Mom and Dad opted out of the Participation-Trophy era of parenting. Although this phrase wasn’t operative at the time, they saw such mediocrity as “the bigotry of low expectations”---- and they would not be seen raising sissies. Or, worse, Democrats. (Ha!!!)What I’d ache for parents to understand is their power in norm-setting even through our adulthood. Modern culture places excessive focus on the initial reactions to any form of boundary or aversive consequence set. Dogs do not like being shocked when they’re trained much like children prefer not to be grounded when they’re caught smoking much like adult employees cuss the name of the boss who suspended them from work. Punishment reigns supreme in changing behavior; feel free to change my mind.I can see where these efforts to shape good-hearted people aren’t obvious to the parent. And I’m sure I haven’t told my parents enough how thankful I am for the lessons they’ve instilled. I’m not even certain I have the words or the success to prove it. With Mom being as shifty as she is, I imagine there will be seeds of her folly that will lie dormant in me until years down the line, when I’m suddenly compelled to scrub the kitchen backsplash, mop the floor, and choose a new hairstyle moments before I’m meant to leave my house for an important work meeting I’m already running fashionably, adorably late for.When your kids are my age, they’ll reflect on their childhood in a hazy sort of nostalgia and will occupy a better self, a more balanced individual better equipped for the challenges of the world because of what you forced them to do, all those decisions that you agonized over and argued over and worried about doing more harm than good. Say it with me, Mom: you will not traumatize your child if you punish them for being a moron. You can even call them a moron and they’ll be none the wiser.When your adult kid screws up, Mom and Dad, you can do better than to throw your hands in the air and say “Yeah, well, she went off to school and now she’s all into this trans stuff and feminist crap and thinks Brazil is a new iPhone app,”replete with your rueful chuckle and a sigh. This sigh is the raising of the proverbial white flag, an emblem of resignation that your job is done and you’ve failed to launch your children to a mindset more apt for success, too bad, so very sad. Don’t schedule that golf trip just yet, Dad. There’s work to be done. Or I can take the more colorful approach my Dad took with us: “Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?”We’re selfish in young adulthood. We’re selfish even as we age, by most psychological and sociological measures we now have available. Many believe (including myself) that this directly results from “participation-trophy” style parenting. It’s your honorable duty, then, Mom and Pop, to assault your adult children with evidence, as frequently as possible and across varied contexts, that they are not as important as they think. Any check-in, guilt-trip or attempt to mold them into less of a moron will function as a guardrail against the swift slip into narcissism so common of people my age. Cue Frank Sinatra’s, “That’s Life”. No, you are not finding yourself, and if you are, it will not be on my dime. And no, you cannot come to the family Christmas party if you insist on turning our living room into a personal lecture hall for your political beliefs. And mother of God and all that is holy, no, you will not live under my roof as an adult just to admire all of the problems you’ve created.I’m not a parent, so perhaps my advice is null, void, and out of turn. But I’ll say it anyway, because my parents fostered courage in a daughter unflappable in the face of potential blowback. You are the parent for the rest of their life, not just until they’re legally an adult. You have more power than you think in influencing their decisions and ensuring they’re on the right track to, at the very least, graduating college without becoming a gender-confused communist (Ha!).It's my Mom who fostered my thoughtfulness and attention to detail. My brother and I used to call her the Stick Nazi, one year, because she was psychotic about there being twigs on our lawn. Yes, a twig, a two-inch long little tree dropping completely invisible to most living things other than ants, grew into the stick she’d lodge up her haunches, as if the Perry family legacy couldn’t survive if not for complete erasure of such despicable objects as tree spurs. We’d later appoint her to Grass Nazi, as she could be seen on a regular Tuesday morning at 6AM snipping all those unruly, misplaced blades of grass with Fiskars.My Dad would roll his eyes and mutter how fucking crazy she was all while reminding us that we must respect our mother and all of her idiosyncrasies. It’s Dad who forged grit and a thirst for spirited discourse. That, plus my asking “Why?” upwards of a thousand times a day when I’m told anything at all.Nothing gets past Dad. His neuroticism paired with his intelligence made it impossible to get away with anything, from minor white lies to well-reasoned untruths and escape plans. My parents once put bells on our doorknob when my brother and I began sneaking out as teenagers. After we carefully performed a lobotomy on the bells with tweezers, extracting the ball from the inside, my Dad didn’t even bother fixing the bells. Instead, he sat in a lawn chair in the driveway with a newspaper and a flashlight, waiting for us to walk right into him like the morons he always reminded us we were.Dad’s doctrine elevated our personal bars for behavior to impossible heights. He still makes nothing of telling me how much better I can perform despite my every shred of effort being put into something. He wastes no time in lecturing me as to precisely what I need to do differently when all I wanted was a compliment. My standards for myself and other people, now, are ever-rising. Sometimes this is a curse. Most of the time it’s what separates me from other women my age, particularly in professional settings. Thanks, Dad!Parents, here’s the deal. I could understand why you’d feel like your adult kid’s behavior has slipped from your grasp. Short of surveilling their every move and prying the Pabst Blue Ribbon from their hands on a Tuesday night, it makes sense you’d feel you’re out of options when it comes to managing their stupidity. But you must remember: the baseline you’ve shaped for them, the metric they’ll use for making their own decisions amidst the culture’s shifting tides, is how they’ll develop a sense of meaning, or purpose. And this isn’t pretty or linear.They will make a thousand decisions a day that you’d disapprove of. When forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, they’ll claw for the plainly worse choice. They’ll continue to present themselves as people you’ll be embarrassed to have raised. They’ll speak out of turn in ways that make them sound stupid and uneducated and holy shit, am I actually responsible for the obvious malfunction that occurred in this kid’s synaptic firing. This is part of what it means to be a young adult, though, and is not necessarily proof that this entire human you created was a missed opportunity for greatness. Stay the path.Kids always come back. We come crawling back to Mom and Pop for life advice, back to Mommy for reassurance, back to Daddy for insight, back to our family values in raising our own children or guiding our own students. Big life decisions and how best to mitigate the inevitable damage we’ve done are best peppered with the advice Mom and Dad are probably now exasperated to give us. Remember when you told us 50,000 times to bring a jacket because we’d get chilly, and we hemmed and hawed and fought you on that seemingly trivial and very-surely wrong logic until we’re shivering outside, cursing your name, wondering how you could’ve possibly known that we’d actually get cold in the winter if we go outside wearing shorts and a hoodie.Don’t allow our recurrent idiocy change the fact that your lessons are crucial to our understanding of ourselves, and will forever alter the trajectory of our decision-making when you’re long gone.Is parental over-involvement really worse than complete resignation?I think I’m living proof that it isn’t.Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit honestlyunorthodox.substack.com