Motherhood Has No Off Switch: When Your Adult Child Is Unhappy

It’s his life, not yours… That technically 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. We’re talking about a deep-seated unhappiness, a persistent state of mind that lasts five years, ten years, sometimes longer.

The “Always-On” Reality

The child is grown – the worry is not. When children are small, worry comes with things we can do: doctor, special privileges, cuddling. When they are grown, worry just sits in the chest. The feeling of having failed somewhere is often there: not having equipped the child to face life’s difficulties, past mistakes a parent may have made… Some of us take responsibility for the misfortune.

Parents of adult children are asked to perform an emotional contradiction: remain strongly linked, but act appropriately detached. Maintaining a healthy balance requires being a good listener without neglecting your own needs. The pain of watching an adult child hurt means, above all, seeing him/her miss out on his/her life. It’s a sorrow that settles in over time, a suffering that manifests itself with every phone call, every visit, every conversation…

Crucial Skills for Living in Society

You did your best, and adult children unhappiness is not a sign of failure. It’s about the unresolved pain and emotional struggles from which they can’t seem to free themselves. Parents of unhappy adult children must deal with recurring coping mechanisms that they often adopt: anger, victimization, withdrawal, and severing of ties.

Lashing out or holding the parent accountable for past or present struggles is frequent. No one is easier to manipulate than a parent longing for her child’s love. Unhappy adults also often play the victim, nothing is ever their fault, a well-known tactic to distract from accountability and shift the focus back to you or anybody else.

Grown children can establish limits around access to their lives to prevent emotional harm creating geographic or psychological space. Struggling, reactive adult children often have not learned to manage big emotions without either shutting down or blowing up, but the ability to calm down and solve life’s problems is a crucial skill to develop in order to function in the adult world.

Grieving the Life You Hoped for Your Child

One of the greatest heartbreaks for a parent is watching a child waste his or her life or potential. The parent has to come to terms with the loss of the life she hoped for her adult child. It is a kind of grief that is hard to name because the child is alive, grown, functioning maybe, and should be responsible for his own life. But the parent is still grieving many losses: his/her happiness, relationship, inner peace, the atmosphere within the family, and the emotional well-being of the grandchildren. It is also hard to talk about all this with friends or relatives whose adult children appear to flourish, sometimes leading to envy, shame, and withdrawal.

Living in a constant state of background anxiety, always fearing the next phone call or crisis is also very disturbing. Nobody wants his child to become an emotionally absent, disengaged, or stuck in chronic dissatisfaction adult.

You cannot make the world kinder for him/her, nor can you fix the problems he/she faces. What you can do is recognize your own grief without allowing it to take over the whole space. Accepting that this pain is real is the first step toward preventing the pain to completely overwhelm you.

The Family Ripple Effect  

When an adult child is unhappy for years, the pain does not stay contained inside him. The mother is not living her child’s life, but she is living in the shadow of that life. So is the spouse. So are the children. They are all different witnesses to the same unhappiness. The wife lives with it every day. The children absorb it. No one is standing in the exact same place, but everyone is touched by it. One unhappy adult can change the emotional weather of an entire household. And talking about weather means talking about climate. Over time, all this unhappiness becomes the family climate.

When an adult child closes in on himself, his pain may begin as something private, but he slowly pulls the people around him into that same confined space. It affects the tone of conversations, the tenderness in the couple, the emotional safety of the children and so on. For the mother, the pain is tied to helplessness, she doesn’t have the authority, the tools, or the right to intervene.

For the spouse, the pain is lived from the inside. He/she shares a home with it, shares the silences, the moods, the fatigue, the distance…

For the children, the pain of growing up with a parent who is physically present but emotionally absent, distant, uninvolved may influence very important aspects of their adult life. The family has to learn how to live around someone else’s unresolved pain. Everyone steps on eggs.

Finding a Way Forward

How can I be there for my child without it taking up such a big part of my own aging? That is THE question. While you cannot fix the problems of your adult child, you can transform how you live with it.

• Stay grounded by knowing your value. His/her words and tone do not define you.
• Overwhelmed and unsure of how best to help your grown children? Try to balance emotional support, encouragement for seeking professional help, and practical assistance.
• Your calm presence can help both you and your child, and you can be an important presence for the spouse and grandchildren too.
• If you know his/her visit typically leads to anxiety, plan a short reunion and if at home, leave the room to decompress when needed (walk the dog, feed the cat, make a phone call…).
• Seek professional help to feel less vulnerable to what’s happening: talk about your relationship with your son or daughter but talk about yourself too, as a mother and as a woman, to help you regain some serenity and inner peace.

We all want the best for our children, but sometimes, despite all the love, understanding, effort, and support, they choose a different path.

Questions for Discussion:

If you have a difficult or unhappy adult child, have you found ways to carry this weight more lightly? Have you been fortunate enough to experience a positive outcome, where your grown child has finally found stability and fulfillment?