What Does It Mean When Your Adult Child Says You Don’t Respect Their Boundaries?

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Family conflict, boundary therapy, respect boundaries, parent-child relationships, emotional safety, mental health vocabulary, communication preferences, trust issues, individuation, relationship shifts, difficult conversations, emotional regulation, therapy language, self-help content, social media influence.
SPEAKERS
Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney 00:01
Welcome to coaching your family relationships. I’m your host Tina Gosney. I’m a family conflict coach, and this is the space where we get to slow down. We get to be really honest with each other. We get to learn how to show up differently, and these are in the relationships that matter the most to us.

Tina Gosney 00:19
So in this podcast, I am sharing with you things that the latest research shows creates healthy and connected families. I really love to dig into the research from those people that are out there, you know, running studies and collecting the data, and then sharing that information. I find this so valuable and so interesting because what helps families to be healthy and connected is something that I consider invaluable.

Tina Gosney 00:50
In today’s episode, this is one I’ve been thinking about for a while because this is a question that I hear behind the scenes all the time. It comes in different forms, but it usually sounds something like this. My daughter told me I don’t respect her boundaries, and I don’t even know what that means. I raised her and I loved her. How am I not being respectful? It can look like that. It might look like something like my son said I crossed a boundary when I asked about, and then fill in the blank. I was just asking a question: Is that really a boundary violation?

Tina Gosney 01:26
If you have ever felt confused or hurt or even a little defensive when your adult child uses the word boundary, then you are not alone, and you’re not a bad parent for having you know this reaction.

Tina Gosney 01:38
In the next few episodes, I’m going to start doing episodes about words that are being thrown around right now, and they’re usually think of these as like therapy talk, but these are really becoming common in our society because they’re becoming common in social media circles and you know posts and and videos and things like that, and so often we’re using these words without really knowing what they mean, and parents are really confused. Our children are using them not always correctly. Sometimes they are, but not always correctly. And I really want to dive into these words because I know parents are confused.

Tina Gosney 02:19
So this episode is about boundaries, which is a word that’s used very often. I want you to consider that what if the word boundary is not an attack? What if it’s actually just information? What if underneath, you know, the therapy speak and the language that feels so foreign to you, your child is trying to tell you something important about what they need from you. That’s what this episode is about. So we’re going to unpack this word boundary. We’re going to talk about where the language comes from, why it can get misused on both sides, and most importantly, we’re going to talk about what you can actually do with it.

Tina Gosney 03:00
Okay, so let’s get into this. Let me start by just want to be super honest with you about something. When someone tells us that we have crossed a line, our nervous system responds before our brain has a chance to catch up. We’re going to feel it physically. We’re going to get tight in the chest. Our face is going to feel hot. We’re going to feel something. It feels a lot like either shame or anger, or maybe both of those at once. And when that person is your child, that person that you sacrificed for, you stayed up so many nights worrying about them. You love that person more than you knew it was possible to love somebody, that can feel like a super big gut punch.

Tina Gosney 03:49
So first of all, I just want to give you permission to feel that, because your reaction is human, and that hurt is real. But I also want you to notice something. The word boundary is not the same thing as you are a terrible parent. Those two things have gotten fused together in a lot of people’s minds, and that fusion is part of what makes this so painful. The word boundary, you know, has been floating around in our culture for a while now, especially in the mental health and self-help spaces. It’s been on social media. It’s been in therapy offices, best-selling books. Somewhere along the way, for a lot of people, it started feeling like a weapon that they could use.

Tina Gosney 04:37
Here’s what boundaries actually are. Those are limits. Those are the lines that tell us where one person ends and the other one begins. They define what someone is comfortable with and what they’re not comfortable with, and how they need to be treated in order to stay in the relationship. And so, think of boundaries not as punishments-they are not ultimatums. At their core, they’re just information. And when your adult child says, “I don’t feel like you respect my boundaries, what they are often trying to say, even if they’re not saying it very well, which is fine, they’re trying to say there’s something in how we interact that is not working for me, and I need it to change if I’m going to stay close to you.

Tina Gosney 05:24
Now I know that is hard for you to hear, but it’s worth hearing because relationships shift and change over time. As a family grows into different stages, relationships have to shift, and it’s very difficult as the parent to see that shift happen. I want to get into something that is really important and often gets left out of these types of conversations: the mental health vocabulary, the language of boundaries and triggers and trauma and emotional regulation. So all of it, it’s pretty new to our mainstream culture, and it spread pretty darn fast, faster than the understanding of what these words actually mean.

Tina Gosney 06:08
Your adult child grew up with much more access to therapy language, to self-help content, to social media communities where those terms were used constantly, and many of them genuinely benefit from that ability to access these types of words. It gives them words for experiences that they couldn’t name before. But here’s what’s also true: not everyone who uses those words really understands what they mean, because sometimes a word gets picked up because it sounds right or because it was used in a meme somewhere, or because someone in a support group used it and it seemed to fit your situation too. And when a word is used without a complete understanding of its meaning, it’s real easy to misapply it.

Tina Gosney 06:55
I really want to be careful here because I’m not saying that your child is wrong, or that they’re lying, or that they’re trying to manipulate you. What I’m saying is, language is always imperfect and imprecise. And when we are in pain, and when we’re in a hard conversation, sometimes we’re going to reach for words that feel the most powerful, even if they’re not completely accurate. So here are some examples of how you know boundary language can get really muddled and fuzzy.

Tina Gosney 07:26
So here’s one example. Let’s just say your son, you know, usually call your son on Sunday evenings, and then you decide, hey, I’m going to call him on a Tuesday because I really miss him, and he says, Mom, that crossed my boundary. Well, what he actually might mean is, I have a routine, and unexpected calls throw me off. Well, that’s not really a boundary violation in the clinical sense. It’s a preference. It’s a scheduling preference, a communication style. He’s using boundary language because that’s the vocabulary that he has.

Tina Gosney 08:03
Here’s another example: Your daughter shares something personal with you, and later she finds out you mentioned it to her aunt, and she said you violated my trust, and that’s a boundary. Well, she’s not wrong that something happened, but what she’s naming is not a boundary; it’s a breach of confidentiality. It’s a trust issue. The emotional reality is real for her, even if the word is not quite right.

Tina Gosney 08:28
Here’s another example: Your son says, “Hey, I don’t want to discuss my mental health with you, and then you ask one follow-up question. He says, “You you crossed my boundary. Maybe he set a really clear limit, and you genuinely forgot, or maybe you just didn’t really take him seriously in the first in the first place, or maybe his limit was never really communicated clearly in a way that you understood, and now that expectation feels like a rule that you didn’t even know existed. Do you see how complex this can be.

Tina Gosney 09:02
In every one of these examples, something real is happening, and your child has a need that’s not being met, and a preference that isn’t being honored, and they’re looking for language to name it.

Tina Gosney 09:16
And in every one of these examples, the parent is being left to decode a word that can mean so many different things. This is why I say the word itself can be a signal, even when it’s not being used correctly or precisely. Your job is not to fact check their vocabulary. Your job is to listen for what is underneath it. And yes, I know, I totally know. This is a lot to ask, especially when you feel like you’re being accused.

Tina Gosney 09:44
We’re going to talk about how to actually do this in a minute, but I just want to pause for a moment and talk about why this matters beyond just one uncomfortable conversation, because research on family estrangement consists consists. Tells us that one of the top reasons that adult children cite for for pulling away or distancing or cutting off their parents is that their needs and limits are not respected. It’s not finances. It’s not physical distance. It’s not their busyness. It’s respect, and more precisely, the absence of it.

Tina Gosney 10:25
Now, most parents I work with will tell me I absolutely respect my child. I love them. I’m so proud of them. I would do anything for them. But here’s a gap. Respect isn’t just what’s in your heart. It’s what shows up in your behavior, and sometimes there is a significant distance between how much we love someone and how much our actions communicate that we see them, we hear them, we understand them, and we take seriously what they need. Now, I’m not saying this to make you feel guilty. I’m saying it because I want you to understand the needs and the stakes that are and what’s at stake here.

Tina Gosney 11:06
When your adult child uses the word boundary, they are not usually being dramatic. They’re not being oversensitive. They are trying to communicate something that feels urgent to them, and whether or not the word is technically perfect. The feeling behind it deserves your attention. What’s the alternative? Dismissing it, arguing about the word, getting defensive and shutting down. That path will widen the distance between you two. I promise. Widening the distance, I think, is probably the last thing that you want, if you’re listening to this podcast, so let’s get practical.

Tina Gosney 11:45
When your adult child says you don’t respect my boundaries, they are likely communicating one or more of these things. They want to be asked before you act. If you show up unannounced, if you share their information with others, if you offer advice that they didn’t request, these are all things that cross into someone’s space without their permission. This is not you understanding where you end and they begin. So the underlying ask is check with me first. Also, they want to be heard when they say no. If they decline something, whether it’s a visit, a conversation, a topic, a request, and you come back around to it again and again, they experience it that as they don’t believe me.

Tina Gosney 12:33
So what they’re asking is, when I say no, please trust that I mean no. Also, they want their choices to be honored without you editorializing about it. They might make choices that you don’t agree with in their parenting, in their relationships, in their lifestyle, in their politics. When you comment or you question or you subtly communicate disapproval, and you do it repeatedly. They experience that as they experience that as you not accepting who they really are. So the underlying ask here is love me even when I do life differently than you. They want emotional safety, and I’m going to do another episode on emotional safety because I think that is something that can be very confusing about how to do that. Sometimes when a child says you cross their boundaries, what they’re really describing is that conversation with you, leaving them feeling really unsettled, judged, or defensive.

Tina Gosney 13:38
They can’t quite name it, so boundary becomes the word that they reach for, but they’re asking for. I need our interactions to feel more safe. They will also want their life to be theirs. One of the core developmental tasks of adulthood is called individuation. This is becoming a separate self when a parent continues to treat their adult child the way that they did when they were 15, that really causes friction. The underlying ask here is see me as an adult, not as a child.

Tina Gosney 14:15
None of these asks are unreasonable, and none of them are permanent. They’re not saying I’m done with you. What they are saying is I need something from you to shift in the relationship if this is going to work. So this is actually a good thing. This means they’re asking for something that is developmentally appropriate for the stage of life that they are in. Their relationship is shifting, and they’re asking you to shift with them. So I want you to see that as a hopeful thing because there’s something that you can do. Okay, so they’ve told you that they don’t feel like you are respecting their boundaries. Now what? I’m going to walk you through this step by step.

Tina Gosney 14:59
First. First, resist the urge to defend yourself. I know that’s really hard, but here’s the thing about defensiveness: even when it’s completely understandable, even when you have a really legitimate point to make, and you when you lead with that, you’re going to shut down the conversation. Your child came to to you with something really vulnerable. If your first response is to argue with them, they learn that bringing things to you is not safe, and they’re going to stop doing it.

Tina Gosney 15:31
So literally, stop and take a breath. It’s one of the most important things that I teach with my clients. Slow down before you respond, take a beat. Don’t try to force yourself to be ready before you are actually truly ready. Second, get curious before you get clarifying. There’s a difference between asking questions to understand and asking questions to prove a point. What do you mean by that? Asked with genuine openness is very different than what do you mean by that? Asked with a tight jaw and crossed arms. Try something like, I really want to understand what you’re experiencing. Can you tell me more about what that looked like from your side?

Tina Gosney 16:20
And then listen. Really, really listen. Don’t listen to respond, but listen to understand.

Tina Gosney 16:28
Third, acknowledge before you explain anything, even if you don’t fully understand, even if you don’t agree with a word that they used or any words that came out of their mouth. You can still acknowledge the emotion that they are feeling. This sounds something like it sounds like that for you. There have been times where you felt like I wasn’t hearing you, or I wasn’t honoring something that matters to you. I don’t really want that for us. That’s not what I want. When you say something like this, you’re not saying I’m guilty.

Tina Gosney 16:59
This is all my fault, which is what we’re usually worried about saying or conveying. What we’re doing is acknowledging to our child that they are a person with real feelings and that their feelings matter to us. Fourth, ask what do you need from me going forward. So once some of that emotional pressure is released, you can move towards this really practical step, like what would it look like for me to do better with this? Is there something specific that you would like for me to do differently? This moves that conversation from concentrating on their wound and their hurt to a future, like a possibility. Now, not every adult child is is going to know how to answer that question right away. In fact, they probably won’t. They maybe have never even thought about that, and that’s okay.

Tina Gosney 17:47
The question itself communicates that you are willing, and willingness counts for a lot. It’s okay to come back to that conversation later after they’ve had a chance to think about what they want. And then fifth, follow through. This is the step that most parents skip, and it’s not because you know we’re trying to avoid something, but actually sometimes we forget, or you know we we think the old habits are hard to break, which they are. But if your child tells you that something matters to them, and then nothing changes, the message they receive is, you heard me and it didn’t matter enough for you to make a change. So here’s what I want you to take from those steps: is that small changes, when you do them consistently, are a lot more powerful than grand gestures you do one time.

Tina Gosney 18:37
If your child asks you to not comment on their parenting or their finances or their life choices, catch yourself the next five times you want to ask and you don’t. That’s where trust gets rebuilt. I want to come back to something that I touched on earlier, but I think it deserves you know a little bit more explanation.

Tina Gosney 19:00
There are situations where adult children will use boundary language, being enforced as a rule. So the child decides they don’t like something, and now they declare it as a boundary. But you’ve never-they’ve never actually communicated that clearly, and now they’re expecting you to know a rule that you were never told. Sometimes boundary language is used to avoid a difficult situation or a difficult conversation. You know, when they say something like “That’s a boundary for me, that can be a way of ending a discussion rather than having an uncomfortable discussion. It’s a way of avoiding things that could be discussed, and in some cases, you know, the parent is left with no way to understand what happened, and we have no idea how to repair it.

Tina Gosney 19:47
Sometimes the word boundary is just used in reaction to something that’s genuinely hard, but it’s also just part of being in a relationship with another human being. Relationships with other humans are different. Especially in a family, not every discomfort is a boundary violation. Sometimes asking a hard question is just a hard question, and sometimes, if I’m being fully honest, boundary language can become a tool to control other people when one person uses that threat of disconnection to manage the behavior of another person.

Tina Gosney 20:24
I am not saying that your child is doing any of these things because most of them are not, but I also want you to know that you are allowed to feel confused, and you are allowed to ask for clarity. You can say, “I want to understand this better. Can you help me know specifically what I did that felt like a boundary violation to you. That’s not a defensive question. That’s a reasonable one when you ask it from a place of true curiosity. What you’re not allowed to do, or what you shouldn’t to do, if you want to stay connected to them, is dismiss their concern entirely because you know their vocabulary doesn’t fit the situation precisely enough. The emotion behind the word is real, even if the word is being used in a fuzzy way.

Tina Gosney 21:11
So both things can be true at once. You want to take that feeling seriously, and if the framing doesn’t make complete sense, ask questions. Feel with with warmth, not with an agenda. Everything that I’ve walked through in this podcast with you today-you know, the slowing down, the getting curious, the acknowledging before explaining-these are all things that you can start practicing today, just right now.

Tina Gosney 21:37
You don’t actually need anything else to start, but I I do want to be honest with you about something else is that in my coaching work I use two simple frameworks with my clients to help this become second nature, rather than you know something you have to really think your way through every time because that is really difficult.

Tina Gosney 21:57
So the first one is called Heal H E A L, and it consists of four foundations that you plant yourself on. It’s about who you are becoming in this relationship and in all your relationships. The other one I call stay because it’s what helps us stay in the moment when things get hard because we all need help in the moment when we feel those that flood of emotions, and so we need a framework to help us with that. I’m not going to walk through what these things are because they are really frameworks that we use in a coaching environment. We are walking through a specific situation together, rather than you know a list of things that you’re going to just hear on a podcast that you won’t truly understand how to use them.

Tina Gosney 22:39
But this deeper work, applying the heal framework and the stay framework to your actual relationship, your actual patterns, this is what we do in Bridge to Connection. This is my coaching program. So if today’s episode is resonating with you, that’s the place where we take this further.

Tina Gosney 22:58
This is the place where you come to get help with it is bridge to connection, and you will find a link to that in the show notes. But for right now, here on this episode, I want you to focus on the basics. Slow down, get curious, and acknowledge what they’re telling you. That alone is going to shape, you know, the it’s going to determine the shape of these conversations. I want to wrap up today with a few of the most common mistakes I see parents make when you know this boundary conversation comes up. Because I think if I talk through these things, they might help you avoid them. Mistake number one: making it about your intention instead of their experience.

Tina Gosney 23:38
Saying something like “I didn’t mean it that way is one of the most relationship-limiting sentences in the English language because your intention, no matter how good it was, is not what your child experienced, and their experience is what you’re asking, being asked to respond to. Mistake number two: waiting for an apology to come with a perfect explanation. Sometimes your child won’t be able to articulate what they need very clearly, and sometimes the conversation is going to feel really messy, and it’s going to feel incomplete, and all of that is okay.

Tina Gosney 24:14
When you stay in it, even when it’s unclear, is more important than waiting for the communication to be easy and clear and perfect, we get better at having difficult conversations by having difficult conversations, and that means there’s some mess in the meantime. And you know what? Your child does too, so you’re going to be awkward and you’re going to be clunky at first, and you should give both of yourself some grace and compassion for showing up and staying, staying with the conversation.

Tina Gosney 24:45
Mistake number three: agreeing in the moment and then changing nothing. If you’ve had a conversation before, and nothing has shifted, they are going to stop having that conversation with you, because do you know what they learned? Having a conversation with you doesn’t change anything. The conversation only matters if it leads to something different. So take your behavior seriously. Mistake four: taking things so personally that you can’t be present for them. Your pain about being told that you’ve hurt them-that is real. But when your pain takes up so much room that they end up managing your feelings instead of being heard, the whole thing can go sideways.

Tina Gosney 25:28
You are allowed to have your feelings, just not in that moment as the dominant presence in the conversation. Getting it right looks like this: you feel defensive and you slow down. You don’t understand the word. You ask a genuine question. Your child says something that hurts, and you acknowledge their experience before you say anything about yours. You have the conversation, and then you actually change some small thing, and you do it again and again. That is how real connection is built, and not-it’s not one dramatic moment of breakthrough. It’s small, consistent acts of taking them seriously.

Tina Gosney 26:08
And I do want to leave you with another thing: that is, energy should always be flowing down from parent to child. It should not have to flow up from child to parent, and it doesn’t really matter the age of both parent or child. So the only time that energy flows upwards is if in later life, when the parent gets, you know, where they are not able to take care of themselves anymore, that’s when energy begins to flow the other way. But until then, energy should be flowing downwards, no matter the age of the parent and the child. Here’s what I want to take you to take away from today. This word boundary is not your enemy. It’s just a signal. It’s your child reaching across distance, saying, “I want this relationship to work, but here’s what I need for that to be possible. You don’t have to agree with every word that they use.

Tina Gosney 27:04
You don’t have to accept the framing that feels unfair, but you do want to take the emotion seriously. You have to be willing to look honestly at your own patterns, and you need to be willing to change. The fact that you’re listening to this podcast tells me something about who you are. You care. You’re trying. You haven’t given up. Don’t let an unfamiliar word from that thing that.

Tina Gosney 27:31
Don’t let an unfamiliar word, like boundary, be the thing that keeps you from hearing your child. So take a breath, turn towards them, and get curious. The relationship you want is still possible. It just may need you to show up a little bit differently than you have before. I’m going to be back next week with another episode about another therapy self-help word. And until then, take good care of yourself and take good care of those relationships.