SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Family systems, Adult children, Partner distance, Family triangles, Marriage, Boundaries, In-law relationships, Family development, Emotional steadiness, Conflict coaching, Acceptance, Loyalty, Social patterns, Relationship strain, Family dynamics

SPEAKERS

Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney  00:01

Hey, before he got married, your son called you on his drive home from work almost every day. You talked about everything and nothing-you know, his job, the game, maybe even what he was making for dinner. Now those calls are pretty rare. Holidays have turned into something more like a negotiation, and last Christmas they went to see her family. This year they’re doing their own thing,

Tina Gosney  00:26

and when you do see them, it feels like every conversation, every word that you have is being weighed on some arbitrary scale that you don’t have access to. Maybe you even caught yourself thinking more than once, like this didn’t happen until she came along. Maybe you said it out loud to your spouse or to a friend. Maybe even very carefully, you said it to your son, and maybe that did not go the way that you hoped. Well, when the distance seems to come through your child’s partner, it can feel like you lost your child to someone else, and you had no say in any of that. Today, we’re going to look at what’s happening between the three of you, and why it’s almost never as simple as it feels.

Tina Gosney  01:15

Welcome to Coaching Your Family Relationships. I’m Tina Gosney, a family conflict coach and a parent educator, and on this podcast we talk about what to do when your relationship with your adult child feels strained, or difficult, confusing, or painful. We’re going to do this through a family systems lens, which means we look at more than just one event and one relationship. We’re going to look at the whole system, and that gives us a lot more information about what’s really happening underneath the surface of the relationship, and there is one hope that I want you to hold on to: that when one person in the family becomes more steady, the entire system can begin to shift.

Tina Gosney  01:56

This is part three of a five-part series on why giving your child space feels so hard. So if you haven’t heard the first two episodes, I would encourage you to go back to those and listen. You don’t have to do that before you listen to this one, but it will be helpful for you also to go back and listen to those. That is number 238 and 239. So in part one, which is 238, it was talking about when you know that you need to let go. We talked about why stepping back from helping and fixing and rescuing can feel like, as a parent, it can feel like failure, and how our culture came to define a good parent as one who is always doing more and super involved. In part two, which was episode 239, this is when your child starts drifting away and you don’t know why. So we talked about the quiet grief of a child who slowly pulls away. You know, there’s no fight, no explanation, and you know that not knowing can even hurt more than the distance itself. That that not knowing of why it’s happened, so today we’re going to talk about a different kind of distance, and this is the kind of distance that feels like someone else chose it for you.

Tina Gosney  03:11

When your adult child gets married or they partner with someone, it seems like that person is the reason that you have less of a relationship with your child. So let’s start with what this feels like, because many parents carry this one very quietly, and it can be really embarrassing to admit it, even to yourself. So maybe it’s a it’s a daughter-in-law who seems really cool towards you, no matter how hard you try. Maybe it’s a son-in-law who makes it clear that holidays are going to be spent with his family. Maybe it’s your daughter’s partner who seems to answer for her, or your son’s wife who seems to be the one deciding when and whether they’ll visit and how long they will stay. Maybe you’ve noticed your child’s tone changes when their partner’s in the room, or you notice that when plans get canceled, the reason always seems to trace back to their partner, that that other person. So underneath all of this, you know this is a feeling that’s pretty hard to name. You could feel replaced. You spent decades raising this person and giving them so much, you know them.

Tina Gosney  04:23

You feel like you know better than almost anyone. And now someone who has known them for much less time, maybe only a few years, or maybe even not even that long, seems to have more say in the relationship with your own child than you do. Well, there’s also a feeling of powerlessness. In part two, we talked about that pain of not knowing why your child is distancing, but this one has a different edge to it. You know, you think that you do know what’s happening, and it’s that other person, it’s their partner, and because the problem seems like someone. You have no influence over. It can feel like there’s nothing you can do except wait or fight it. So, if this is where you are, I want you to know that you’re very far from alone.

Tina Gosney  05:14

There’s a researcher. Her name is Terry Apter, who studied in-law relationships for many years, and she found in her in her research that about 60% of women describe the relationship between them and their mother-in-law, you know, mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, in very negative terms. Only about 15% of mother-in-law’s son-in-law relationships showed tension. So, if you are a mother who has a son that is married. That strain that you’re feeling is extremely common. It’s also not proof that you did something terrible, and it is not proof that your son married someone terrible either. I’m going to use a son and his wife as my main example today because that’s the situation that most people, most parents bring to me most often, but everything that we talk about would also apply to daughters and son-in-laws and partners, whether or not they’re married. So, if your child has a partner and you felt the distance grow since that person arrived in their life, this episode is for you.

Tina Gosney  06:22

And if your child has a same-sex partner, I want to speak directly to you for a moment, because there are often extra layers that make this harder for everyone. For some parents, a child’s coming out was a pretty hard adjustment. Maybe you needed time. Maybe you said things early on that you wish you would could take back that you wouldn’t have said. Maybe also you’ve come a really long way since then, or maybe you’re still working through a lot of questions. All of those things are very normal, and even for parents who have been very supportive from day one, there’s less of a roadmap here. There are fewer examples to follow for what a good relationship with your son’s husband or your daughter’s wife is supposed to look like. And meanwhile, while you have no roadmap to follow, your child and their partner are watching you very closely for signs.

Tina Gosney  07:17

And this is what they’re watching for. They want to know how accepted they really are, and really really small things can carry a lot of weight, such as how do you introduce your child’s partner to your friends? Is your child’s partner in family photos? Are they given a room together when they visit? You know, sometimes a relative might make a comment at a dinner, and that gets brushed aside or ignored instead of addressed. There’s a sociologist I talk a lot about on this podcast. Her name is Ren Reczek, and she interviewed gay and lesbian couples who had been together for many years, and she wanted to know about their relationships with their families, and most of them described at least one family member as having mixed feelings about them. In some ways, they were loving and warm, and in some ways, they were very disapproving. And the family members they most often describe this way were parents and parents-in-law. One woman said that her partner’s parents told her, “Hey, we tried not to love you, but we just can’t help it. So some of these couples handled these mixed messages by simply spending less time with the relatives that they felt judged by. That is important thing to understand. If your child’s partner has felt rejected before, by maybe by their own family or by yours, you know they might be the most protective one. What can look like a partner keeping your child away from you might actually be a partner that is trying to keep both of them from getting hurt again. There’s another piece of research here that’s worth knowing, and in a large national study, Dr.

Tina Gosney  09:07

Reczek and her colleagues they found that gay and lesbian adults were more likely than heterosexual adults to report a period of estrangement from their fathers, while they were not more likely to be estranged from their mothers. Now, if this is your situation, this does not mean that this is where your family is headed, but it does tell us that questions of acceptance quietly shape how much closeness feels safe to LGBTQIA couples. So, if your child has a same-sex partner, and you are feeling the distance. It may be worth asking yourself whether any of it connects to earlier hurt around acceptance. This is not so that you can blame yourself. This is just so you can get a more clear picture. And I just want to drop that here because many couples do not fit neatly into the heterosexual definition anymore, and there are other factors to consider when this is a part of your family’s makeup. So today, for the rest of this podcast, I’m going to use a heterosexual couple example. We’re going to use a son and his wife. We’re going to look at what family science says about why you feel like your child is being held behind a wall, being held away from you. And I’ll tell you now that research points to a picture that’s a lot more complicated than you’re seeing, and in some ways, it’s a lot more hopeful than what you’re seeing too, than just you know your child’s partner is keeping them from you. So let’s get into some of this research. We’re going to start with family development theory, and I’ve talked about that earlier in this series. And this is as families move through stages, each stage comes with its own tasks.

Tina Gosney  10:58

Family therapists Betty Carter and Monica McGoldrick, they described one of these stages as the joining of families through marriage or the forming of a new couple. They named two main tasks for this stage. The first is forming the couple system, which means two people building their own shared life with their own identity, their own routines, and their own loyalties, and the second task is realigning relationships with extended family to include the new spouse. So both sides of the family need to make room for the new person.

Tina Gosney  11:35

Well, let’s take a look at that first task. A new couple has to draw a boundary around themselves. This has to be. They have to become an us, and to do that, both people have to shift some of their loyalty away from the families that they grew up in, and they need to shift it towards each other. That shift is supposed to happen. In fact, many family therapists would say, a marriage where that does not happen is usually in trouble. But from the outside, that healthy shift can look a lot like rejection. When your when your son starts saying we instead of I, when he checks with his wife before answering your invitation, when they start their own holiday traditions, it can feel like you’re getting pushed out. But very often, what you’re seeing is a couple doing the work of becoming a couple. There’s a very practical reality here that often gets overlooked. So let’s look at that. You know, a married couple has two families pulling on the same amount of limited time. Every holiday, every weekend, every vacation day has to be divided between them. Some sociologists say they have described marriage as a greedy institution because it tends to pull time and energy away from other relationships, including relationships with parents, the research on this is mixed. It looks different across countries, and families and cultures. But the basic math is real. When your child gains a second family, your share of their time is likely to shrink, even if nobody is trying on purpose to shrink it, there’s also a pattern in the research that’s worth knowing. If you’re the parent of a son, studies consistently find that daughters tend to tend to stay more in frequent contact with their mothers than sons do, and in a long-term study of married couples, researchers noted that women typically turn to their own families more than their in-laws. So when a couple’s social life seems to orbit around your wife’s family, that is a common pattern.

Tina Gosney  13:53

It may have very little to do with how she feels about you, but sometimes the distance really does seem to be coming from the other partner. Your son seems willing, but his wife is not, and so let’s look at what might be going on for that partner. Family researchers have studied this for decades, and there are four reasons that come up again and again. So, reason number one, they’re protecting their marriage. Here’s what that can look like. After every visit, your son and his wife end up arguing. Maybe it’s something about how you said that they’re raising their kids. Maybe it’s about how long the visit lasts or how much your son changes when he’s around you. After enough of these arguments, his wife starts suggesting, “Hey, why don’t we not stay as long? Or why do? How about if we don’t go as often? But from your side, it looks like she’s pulling him away from you. From her side, she might simply be trying to stop the fighting at home.

Tina Gosney  14:53

Researchers who have followed married couples over many years they found that tension with parents. And in-laws tends to spill over into the marriage itself, so when the relationship with the extended family is stressful, the couple tends to feel more stress with each other too, and when a partner limits their time with in-laws, it’s less about them not liking you and more about protecting the peace in their own home. Okay, that was reason number one. So reason number two, you know, they’re finding their place in a family where somebody already has a place in the family. So let me tell you what that means.

Tina Gosney  15:30

Think about maybe Thanksgiving meal. For 30 years, you made the turkey, you set the table, you hosted everyone, and then you have a daughter-in-law that comes into the family and she says, “Hey, how about if I host this year? And maybe she’s trying to help you out by taking off some of that burden. That’s a lot of that’s a lot of work to host Thanksgiving. So maybe she’s trying to help you out, and with even think out without thinking, you say, “Oh, but we always do it here. Or maybe you know the grandkids come along, and your daughter-in-law. It’s it’s still at your house, but the daughter-in-law comes in. She’s bringing a sleeping toddler. She sets them down on the couch. She makes a little bed, a little comfy place for them on the couch. And you mentioned, oh, my son always napped better in a dark room. Well, to to you, you’re talking about a tradition, or maybe you’re trying to give some helpful advice to her, it could feel like she’s being told that her way of doing things doesn’t count, or that she’s not doing the mom thing right.

Tina Gosney  16:32

Psychologist Terry Apter studied in law relationships for years, and she found that the mother-in-law daughter-in-law relationship was far more likely to be tense than the mother-in-law son-in-law relationship, and she said it’s not usually because the women dislike each other; it’s because one is used to being the center of her own family, and each one, each woman keeps wondering what she’s going to have to give up to make room for the other. Like whose traditions are we going to keep? Whose are we going to live each year? Whose way of raising children is right? Whose opinion matters most to the man that they both love? Those questions hardly ever get acknowledged. They hardly ever get said out loud, but they shape a lot of what’s happening in the relationships and at the holiday table. Let’s go to reason number three, which is you know they don’t feel like they belong yet. Imagine marrying into a family with 30 years of inside jokes, family stories, traditions, and ways of doing things. So every time you get together, let’s just go with a holiday example again. People tell stories that you were not there for. They talk about people that you’ve never met, and nobody ever stops the conversation to say, “Hey, do you know who that person is? or “Hey, this is what was happening around that same time, just to give you some context.

Tina Gosney  17:54

And they also don’t ever stop the conversation to even notice that you’re not participating in it, and they try to bring you in, and when you’re together for a holiday, and somebody says, “Well, we don’t do that this way in our family, and no one pauses to ask you, “So how did you celebrate this in your family, or what special traditions does your family have? and someone makes a comment about how you cook, or about how you dress, or the amount of money that you’ve spent, or how you’re parenting, no single one moment is a big deal, but together they send a message that says, “You’re not quite one of us. Researchers who study these in-law relationships have found that when a son-in-law or a daughter-in-law feels supported and accepted, they’re much more likely to feel like a part of the family, and when they feel criticized, compared, or corrected, they tend to pull back. All of this is a very human response. Most of us don’t keep showing up where we feel judged. It’s normal to pull back.

Tina Gosney  19:00

Another study found that many daughter-in-laws want their mother-in-laws to be warm and involved, but not to interfere. Well, that’s a really, really hard line to walk, and it’s easy to miss that line without even meaning to. So sometimes it looks like a partner keeping your child away is a partner who never quite felt welcome. Let’s go to reason number four, is that you, your child, and their partner see your family very differently. Here’s an example for you: you and your son have talked on the phone every Sunday for years. To him, it’s a nice habit, and he likes catching up with you. To his wife, it’s the hour every weekend where he disappears into another room, and she starts to resent it. Or your son thinks that it’s perfectly fine for you to drop in. Those drop-in visits are no big deal at all, and his wife feels like she has to constantly clean the house because you might come by. Well, a long-term study that followed more than 350 couples for 16 years, they found that couples will very often disagree about their relationships with each other’s families. More than half of the couples disagreed about which family they would turn to for advice, or about the amount of time that was split between both sides, and those disagreements really mattered for the health for the health of their marriage.

Tina Gosney  20:28

This is what that means for you: is that when your son changes how often he calls or how often he visits, it might be the result of a compromise that he’s worked out with his wife, and you never saw any of what happened behind the scenes. It isn’t necessarily a decision against you. It might be a decision for their relationship, for their marriage. There’s a very related finding from the same research that surprises a lot of parents, and that is that wives who felt really close to their husbands’ parents actually had somewhat of a higher risk of divorce. The explanation is this: that being so close can make it harder to set boundaries, and over time, that involvement can start to feel like interference. The point is not that you should keep your distance; it’s what feels like warmth and love from your side can sometimes feel like pressure from theirs.

Tina Gosney  21:27

One note on all this research: much of it was done with married heterosexual couples, and much of it focuses on you know mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws. So it’s not going to describe every family perfectly, and it’s not going to describe every culture perfectly either, but these four patterns show up in my work that I do with parents over and over. So I thought those are the ones that I would highlight. So now let’s step step back into looking at the shape of what’s happening because family systems thinking this explains why this situation can feel like you are so stuck. When two people in a family are tense and there’s tension between them, and they don’t know really how to work that tension out between the two of them, there is a natural pull to bring in a third person. Family therapists will call this a triangle, and I’ve called I have talked about triangles before on this podcast too.

Tina Gosney  22:26

So the third person absorbs some of the tension that was happening between the two people, so that those original two people they don’t have to deal with it as directly when there’s a third person there. This happens in every family. Nobody plans it, and most of the time, it’s just the way that we do things. Nobody even notices it. When there’s tension between an parent and an adult child, and the child’s partner, you know, a triangle is almost guaranteed, and one of the most stable shapes that a triangle can take is one where the partner becomes the problem person. Here’s why that holds so well: if the partner is the problem, the parent doesn’t have to look so closely at their own relationship with their child. The child doesn’t have to tell their parents directly, “I need things to change, and sometimes their child lets the partner carry that message by saying things like, “You’re like your son might tell you, ‘My wife doesn’t think we can make it this year. That’s a lot easier for your son to say than ‘I don’t want to come this year. Everybody gets a little relief, but the relationship between the parent and the adult child never gets talked about. I want to share a study with you that shows how strong this pattern is.

Tina Gosney  23:48

In 2021, researchers Sara Shope Sullivan and Joshua Coleman they surveyed more than 1000 mothers who were estranged from adult child. The most common reason that mothers gave was, you know, this was reported by 79% of them, was that someone had turned their child against them, and the person that they named most often was the child’s other parent, or the child’s spouse or partner. Here’s the other side of that research. Only about 18% of the mothers said that they were at fault, and the researchers pointed out that the research with adult children tends to find different reasons, like things like emotional hurt, clashing expectation about family roles, personality conflicts. In her words, you know, there’s a real disconnect between what mothers are saying and what their adult children are saying, and I want to be super careful about this because this study was about estrangement, which is typically more serious than what many of you are facing, and it only included the. Perspective, so I’m not saying, so I am not sharing this to say that parents are wrong, or that partners are never the problem.

Tina Gosney  25:10

I’m sharing it because it shows how naturally our minds might reach for a third person to explain a painful distance, because that’s what triangles do, and once the explanation becomes it’s them, it’s the partner, they’re the problem, it becomes really hard to see anything else. And to be clear, there are situations where a partner is truly controlling, and they truly work to isolate your child from people that love them. That does happen, and it’s very serious. But in most families that I work with, what’s happening is far more ordinary than that. It’s a new couple trying to find its footing. It’s two families with different expectations, and a lot of hurt feelings that keep building up, and nobody knows how to talk about them out loud. There is another family pattern here that is worth knowing about, and that is sometimes when a young adult never quite found room in their own family that they grew up in. They never quite found the room to be their authentic self or to become their own person and to individuate. Sometimes they will handle that by pulling far away from their family and looking and becoming deeply woven into another one, like their partner’s family. So from the outside, it might look like their partner took them, but it’s often you know that child is finally finding some breathing room, and it might be the only way that they know how to do that. That usually says a lot more about how much closeness and pressure there was in the original family than it does about the partner. And another thing that’s worth looking at here too is your own history. How did things go with your in-laws when you were first married? Did your spouse’s mother treat you like family, or like an outsider? Did you have to fight for a place in the family?

Tina Gosney  27:06

Did you try to pull your spouse away from his family, or did you feel pulled away from yours? Patterns like these tend to get passed down from one generation to the next, and the way that your family handled the arrival of a new spouse a generation ago, may be shaping what you expect and what you fear right now. So, what does it look like to handle this situation with a lot more steadiness? Well, one of the most important ways out of a triangle is to build a direct one-to-one relationship with each person. This is not a relationship that runs through someone else. This is not a relationship as the couple, as a unit that you’re trying to win over, but a relationship with your son as a person and a separate person with his wife. You know, a separate relationship with his wife as a person. That second relationship is the one that many parents skip. They’re trying to stay close to their child by simply tolerating their child’s partner, but your child’s partner is not an obstacle between you and them.

Tina Gosney  28:16

They’re a whole person with their own whole family history, their own hopes for the marriage, and probably their own worries about whether they are accepted by you. So when you get curious about who they are apart from their role in your family, you often find someone that’s much easier to connect with than you expected. It also helps to respect the boundary that the new couple is drawing around themselves, even when you don’t love where that boundary is drawn, that boundary is part of what makes their marriage strong. And research suggests that a strong marriage with less strain coming from each extended family is good for everybody in the family system, including you. Supporting the couple rather than competing with one of them tends to open more doors than it closes over time, so you can hold two things at once here. You can feel the real loss of how things used to be with your child, and you can recognize that your child building a life with someone else is something that you probably hoped for them when they were growing up. Both of those things can be true.

Tina Gosney  29:22

You don’t have to choose between grieving something that you feel is lost and accepting something that’s here today. This is where differentiation of self becomes so important, and I talk a lot about differentiation. You know, this is staying steady when you feel hurt, not taking every declined invitation as a verdict on you, not needing your child to choose you to feel okay. That kind of steadiness does not happen overnight, but it does change the whole triangle because the triangle depends on everyone reacting in the same automatic ways. So working your way out of a triangle is. Pretty much hard to do alone, mostly because you’re standing in just one corner of it, and it’s hard to see the whole shape of the triangle from where you’re standing. This is a lot of the work that I do with parents. You know, I help them to become more steady. That means learning to notice what’s happening, what is happening inside of you when maybe an invitation gets declined or you don’t get a call when you were hoping to, and you learn how to calm that reaction inside of you before you turn it into a text that you’re going to regret later. It also means you know understanding the patterns in your family well enough to stop getting pulled into them, and it also means learning to see your child and your child’s partner as two separate people, with you have two separate relationships with them. So here’s what I see when parents learn how to do this: their child cancels a visit and it stings, but it doesn’t ruin their whole week. They stop rehearsing arguments. You know, when you wake up at 2o’clock in the morning, that kind of argument, you stop rehearsing that over and over again in your head. You can text your daughter-in-law or your son-in-law directly to ask, “Hey, how’s your new job going?

Tina Gosney  31:09

Without overthinking every word, the holidays stop feeling like a scorecard, and they start feeling like a chance to enjoy whoever can make it, whoever is at the table, and you start putting energy back into your own life, your own friendships, your marriage, the things that you love doing, because often you know when the pressure in the family drops, the child, your child, and your child’s partner they start showing up more because it feels like it’s easier to be around the family. That’s what steadiness gives you. It’s not control over what somebody else does, but it’s a life that isn’t on hold, waiting for someone else to change. So, if you want help, you know, getting there, you can find out how to work with me in the show notes. I want to name a few mistakes that I see often in this situation, because in the moment they all make complete sense, but they also tend to make the distance bigger.

Tina Gosney  32:08

So the first mistake, mistake number one, is criticizing the partner to your child. So you’re criticizing their partner, even a really gentle comment like, “I don’t think that she likes us very much, or he just seems to control everything, doesn’t he? You know that puts your child in an impossible position. You are asking them to choose between you and the person that they’re trying to build a life with, and in a healthy marriage, they’re going to choose their partner. That is not a betrayal of you. It’s what a committed relationship requires, and every criticism of their partner makes it harder for your child and their partner to be around you.

Tina Gosney  32:54

Mistake number two is going around the partner, right? So this looks like calling your child only when you know that their partner is not home, or making plans with just your part, just your child, and leaving the partner out, or asking your child to keep something just between the two of you, like don’t tell them about this. You know, it can feel like you’re protecting the relationship with your child, but it strengthens the triangle, and it makes the partner more of an outsider, which usually tends to lead to more distance, not less. If your child’s partner feels, you know, if they later find out that this has happened, it confirms their worst fears about you and your family.

Tina Gosney  33:37

Mistake number three is turning visits into loyalty tests, so counting how many holidays they spend with her family as compared to how many holidays they spend with your family, comparing how often they see her parents to how often they see you, you know, saying things like, you know, I guess we’re in second place now. I guess we’re not as important. You know, these comments come from your hurt your feeling, but they turn time together into a scorecard, and nobody wants to visit a place where they feel like they’re being graded. So instead, generous, low-pressure invitations, with room to say no and have that be okay, those tend to bring couples back more than guilt ever will. Here’s what I want you to take with you today: when the distance seems to come through your child’s partner, it’s very natural to see that person as the problem. But family science shows us a much bigger picture. A new couple has to draw a boundary around itself, and two families share the same amount of limited time. Partners might they might be projecting their marriage. They might be looking for a place in a family that already has a history that doesn’t include them, or they might be seeing very things very differently than your child does. And triangles make it easy for all of us to just. Put that problem on one person, and to name that person as the spouse or the partner.

Tina Gosney  35:05

None of this means that your hurt is not real. It means there may be more room to move than it feels like right now. When you build a relationship with your child’s partner as a separate individual person, when you respect the couple that they’re becoming, and you stay steady inside yourself instead of competing with the other family, the whole triangle can begin to shift. Okay, so next time in this this is a five part series.

Tina Gosney  35:34

So next time in part four, we’re going to talk about one of the most painful kind of space that there is, and this is when your child asks for that space directly. This is coaching your family relationships, and I’m Tina Gosney. This is where parents of adult children get the help that they need to repair, rebuild, and strengthen the relationship. If this episode has helped you today, send it to to another parent who might need some help and a little bit more hope. I’ll see you next time.