Adult Children

There is a particular heartbreak that parents experience as their children grow older. It’s a difficult, hard-to-define, push-pull kind of feeling that’s a mixture of happiness, sadness, pride, and nagging nostalgia. You raised them, worried about them, listened, taught, guided, cried, laughed, and spent decades helping them to become capable adults…

In our 60s, attending to our needs and improving our relationships is more important than ever before. Time is of the essence, but making the most of our time takes practice. One way to enrich our lives is by applying boundaries to accommodate…

If setting a boundary with your adult child feels harder now than it did decades ago, you’re not imagining it. Boundaries at this stage of life come with a particular weight that they didn’t carry when your children were young. Logic might suggest boundaries get easier as you get older – more confidence, more life experience, less need for others’ approval. In practice, many women find the opposite…

By the time we reach our 60s, most of us have quietly rewritten a lot of our life’s plans – careers that took different turns, health that doesn’t cooperate the way it used to, friendships that faded. Family is often the last picture we’re still holding onto exactly as we first imagined it.

It’s his life, not yours… Thattechnically true sentence is kind of useless emotionally. Parents of unhappy adults live with a silent grief and unlike in other distressing situations, there are no rituals or support for the heartbreak of watching an adult child struggle. Even though it remains difficult as well, we’re not talking here about an adult who’s going through a rough patch, a breakup, a job loss, a burnout…

If you’re over 60 and finding yourself grieving a relationship with your adult child that technically hasn’t ended – no fight, no falling out, just… distance – you are far from alone, and there’s a reason this particular grief is so disorienting. Most griefs we’re taught to recognize have a clear beginning: a death, a diagnosis, a divorce papers signed. This one doesn’t…

Parents know (or hope) the day will come when they look at their children and realize they’ve become self-sufficient adults. Not just legally adults, but functioning adults. The kind who pay their own bills, solve their own problems, make their own appointments, and call home because they want to – not because they need something or someone to rescue them…

We have no shortage of advice telling us to let go. Let go of the past. Let go of what we can’t control. Let go of our adult children’s choices, our ex-husbands’ opinions, the roles we’ve outgrown, the expectations we’ve been carrying since before…

If there is one thing we all noticed a little more of during the Covid lockdown, it was the amount of clutter we had accumulated and the impact it can have on how we feel in our own homes. Perhaps for the first time, you clearly felt the impact…

Life is surely full of relationships. We are born the child in relationship to our parents, and we may simultaneously become someone’s brother or sister….