Parenting Adult Children Today with Catherine Hickem

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Parenting adult children, relationship restoration, personal growth, emotional maturity, managing expectations, handling fear, neurological shifts, boundaries, self-awareness, healing journey, family dynamics, communication, independence, role transition, parental responsibility.

SPEAKERS

Catherine Hickem, Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney  00:01

I’m so pleased and excited to have this guest on the podcast today, and this is someone that really works with a topic that is very near and dear to my heart and that I talk a lot about on coaching and family relationships podcast. And her name is Catherine Hickam. She is the founder of parenting adult children today, and I want to just dive right in. I know we have a limited time together, and I don’t want to waste any of it, but I do want Catherine to talk about some about her credentials and why she’s doing this. So Catherine, would you give a quick introduction to the audience, and then we’re going to dive right into the podcast.

Catherine Hickem  00:42

Right the very first, probably the most important credential for me is the fact that I think I was born and created to be a safe harbor for people. And I learned early on that people would come and just talk to me and and at with hard things. And I realized early on that it kind of lined up with my interest in helping people. So I became a therapist, and so I kind of look at my job as people come and talk to me when the Seas of Love Life get really, really hard, and I help them, and I’ve helped them as a therapist. I’ve helped them as a family coach. I’ve been, you know, I’ve owned my own corporate development company, where people would come from an organizational perspective, but at the end of the day, we’re people, and so I’ve had the privilege of being able to walk alongside a lot of families, both adults and the parents, and through really, really hard things. And I just feel like we haven’t done enough culturally to come alongside to address the issues that I think are really hard because no one talked about them. You know, we could go to the library, to the bookstore, we could get online classes for a million reasons, for under 18, but, boy, when that 18 hit, there was nothing. It was a vacuum. And I want to change that. I want us to have a dialog about, how do we come alongside and address the issues that are really tearing families apart today, because we have a highest level of estrangement that I’ve ever seen, and I’m deeply concerned for us, both personally but also culturally, as to the implications as to what that means. So

Catherine Hickem  02:23

I could talk about this all week. It’s just really so near and dear to my heart, and I actually have a 41 year old son and a 40 year old daughter. So I’ve been, I’ve been at parenting adult children for quite a while. Oh yes, you have why what professionally and personally brought you to focus on, then the relationships that parents have with their adult children. Well, I will tell you my personal story with my own dad. Is that my dad was a great dad until I was about five, and then there was this one fateful event that happened when I was five. He was a minister, and I was in church on a Sunday night. My mother wasn’t there, and a little girl came with her family sat down next to me. She’d never been there before. She said, where’s the bathroom? I said, Here, I’ll show you being the good helper that I was. As I’m walking back in the to the church, my dad stops his sermon and says, Kathy Taylor, don’t you ever do that again. So there’s this public shaming of a little girl who was only seeking to help. But from that moment on, my dad changed his relationship with me. No longer was he the nurturing, warm, affectionate dad. He was very cold and distance and very disciplinarian, and I knew, you know, looking I figured out pretty early on that he was scared. You know, back in the 60s, a man’s ability to lead a congregation was very tied up into how his family, you know, were they? Did they reflect what he was teaching, or were they rebellious? And so I think he was just scared, but his way was very hard, and I became very invisible in the family. That was my goal, was to be invisible so I would not be publicly shamed again. So I tried at 15, made an appointment with him to have a conversation, Dad, I want a relationship with you. He throws me out of his office. And that conversation wouldn’t happen till I was 25 but when I was 25 I went back. At that point, I was married, I had finished graduate school, I had done many years of my own personal therapy to grow and to heal. And I just said to him, and said, Dad, I want a relationship with you, but it can’t be the way we’ve always had it. And he said to me, Catherine, I really blew it with you. I made a lot of mistakes, and he said, I can’t undo them, but the only thing I can do is to give you my word that, moving forward, I could be the dad that you needed, not the dad that you had. And for the next 33 years, I had the most amazing relationship with my dad. It was precious in every possible way. I could never have asked for more. And so it was such a Journey of Restoration, such a journey of healing. And I was with him when he died. He wait. I was out of the country. He waited till I got home

Catherine Hickem  04:53

to walk into the room, and four hours after I walked in, he was in a semi state coma. And.

Catherine Hickem  05:00

He heard my voice, and he calmed right down, and four hours later he left, and I was so thankful that I had that chance to be with him, but I knew he was waiting on me because we had developed such a tight bond over all those years. So I want for other people to know that restoration can happen. You may have had a very difficult childhood with a parent. But that doesn’t mean it’s too late for parents to grow and change and evolve and to own some of their stuff, right? And so if it could happen with me and my dad, who was incredibly hard on me, it

Catherine Hickem  05:35

can happen for anybody. And don’t get me wrong, I realize there are some circumstances in life that are very severe, and I’m not talking about the ones where there has been, you know, long term sexual abuse, or even short term sexual abuse where there’s no trust. I’m not referring to that part of the population, but I am referring to the biggest part of the population where parents, they did the best they could, but maybe it was a really crappy job, and maybe they weren’t great parents in those years, but do they want to be now? And can we figure out ways for those parents to be the healthiest version of themselves so they actually can bring that to the relationship, right? That’s my why. Yeah, thank you that. And that’s a beautiful story. Do you it sounds like your dad did a lot of growing up between the time you were 15 and the time you were 25

Tina Gosney  06:22

and that he probably came to a lot of self awareness. Do you know what he did during those that period of time? No, my dad was a very intuitive man, and I think when I left home for college, I think that was his wake up call, because I think he started to have regrets of all the time that he had missed with me. And I think, you know, my mother would say, you know, I know your dad hasn’t said a lot, but he really does miss you, or he always, you know, brags about you behind your back or something like that. So I knew at that point that

Catherine Hickem  06:56

some revelations had set in for him, but I wanted to be able to really sit down and have a conversation where we could actually work on the relationship when I was ready. And so it was just that the timing was perfect for that, and it was before I had children. So we were able to establish a really strong relationship before grandchildren came into the mix. And

Catherine Hickem  07:20

he was so surprised when I named my son his his name like my son’s name was Taylor, that was my maiden name, and he just couldn’t get over the fact that I would name him that. And I said, Dad, I’m proud to name him that. So it was,

Catherine Hickem  07:36

it was just a healing work that was done between us that I think is possible, you know. And having been a therapist for 40 years, I’ll tell you, you know, I’ve worked with a lot of hard, hard, hard situations. But what I do believe is that if we’re willing to do our work, we have to do our work. We just can’t ask other people to do their work. We really have to be the healthiest version of ourselves.

Catherine Hickem  07:59

We really increase the odds of our children being open and receptive to

Catherine Hickem  08:06

making a new connection with us again,

Catherine Hickem  08:10

but we have to do our work, because they lived with us for 18 years, right? They were hostages in our homes, so they saw the very worst of us and the very best of us, but they learned who we are, they also learned what areas that they didn’t think they might be safe to share with us during that season. And I think as parents, we don’t think anything of it. You know, we might have been ranting in about someone else’s kid doing something stupid and not thinking anything of it, but at the end of the day, it clicked in our kids head. I can’t tell my parent if I ever do that, because this is what they’ll think about me,

Catherine Hickem  08:47

right, right? And so we’ve already laid the groundwork for disconnection. And then if we throw expectations on it, and we throw, you know, our fears on it, we got a mess, is what we’ve got, right, right? And so I just want to be able to help parents understand, you know, we can fix a lot of the things that you’re struggling with, but you got to be willing to have the mirror close by first, right, right? This is about how you’re going to show up. Yeah, we show them for 18 years who we are, and they, I think they see us much better than we see ourselves. I completely agree with you, Tina, and they know this is okay. This is not okay. I have to hide this part of myself. I can’t bring this to my parent or even just knowing that they’re going to withdraw from us. If they know that they’re going to be part of them is going to be rejected Absolutely, and that’s actually a wise move on their part, to make that move to protect themselves if they don’t see us being a safe person for them. Now I’m wondering

Tina Gosney  09:53

you say we need to do our work. Now, I understand what that means, but I don’t know if everybody listening to the podcast.

Catherine Hickem  10:00

Just understands what that entails. Can you go through what that might look like for somebody? Yeah, well, why don’t we start with something simple? Okay? Because let me say simple, but not easy. Okay, not always the same thing. They’re not always the same thing. So for instance, if I throw out the word expectations, right, parents, oh, I don’t have any expectations, it’s like, well, let’s talk about the holidays, right? You have expectations around, are you going to see them? When are they going to come home? What traditions do you insist that we do? Because, you know, this is what we’ve always done, right? And that’s something that’s very simple, or like holidays. But we also have expectations of what we think they who the kind of people they should date, or the kind of people they should marry, or the kind of career they should go in, or the kind of money they should make, or the whatever you just think of something. And we started those expectations before they were born. When we found out we were going to have a baby, those expectations began and I adopted my son, and a month before he was born, I got a letter from his mother, and it was a three page letter, precious letter, but it was filled with expectations. She didn’t, she’d never, she would never hold him, she would never see him, she would never know him, but she had expectations of his life. Yeah, and it’s powerful, because we have a collective so by the time we launch them, right? We’re launching them, but they’re carrying the weight of all the expectations that we have either spoken or unspoken of them into their life that are ours and not theirs, right? Right? So then they’re put in a really tough spot. Do I fulfill my parents expectations, which will make them happy, which means they’ll still love me, accept me,

Catherine Hickem  11:50

and, you know, care for me, or do I take the risk of making them unhappy because I’m going to follow what I want for my life and risk them being mad, upset, rejecting me, abandoning me, and today, that is bigger than ever, because we have become a culture that cannot communicate even in our own homes. We’re so frightened of upsetting people and telling the truth in a kind way, we don’t know how to tell the truth in a kind way anymore, because people are so scared to say anything, they just don’t say anything. They just pull away. You know, I call it the drift, you know, it’s the it’s the unseen drift that takes part, that takes place in a family. And you wake up one day and you realize, oh, my goodness, we’ve got distance between us. I wonder how that happened. Well, it happened because we kept avoiding the conversations that we needed to be having, it’ll be fine to another, it’ll go away, right? And we just keep letting it, but it keeps building building and building, until now we have a wall, right? And that’s the that’s the tragedy of not being able to handle hard things.

Tina Gosney  12:54

And so part of the work that parents need to do then is to realize what their expectations are.

Catherine Hickem  13:03

Yeah, I encourage parents to do is sit down and make a list of what you think your expectations have been over the course of the years, right? And you know, put, you can put them in buckets, right? Expectations around holidays, expectations around you know, who, who they date, the careers, how they spend money, all those things. And then I encourage them to go back and then look which of those expectations really trigger you emotionally, you know, where you’re likely to react instead of respond, you know. And whatever those

Catherine Hickem  13:38

expectations are, you know, put a big circle around that, because that means you’ve got some healing work to do in your life. It symbolizes something that needs healing. It could be a wound. It could be a fear that’s not been addressed. It could be, you know,

Catherine Hickem  13:56

one of the big challenges is that most parents feel that their children are reflection of the job that they did as a parent,

Catherine Hickem  14:06

all ownership of their mistakes, right? In fact, the stats are from the Pew Research that 81% of parents take responsibility for the successes or failures of their children. Well, in my world, either you take all or you take nothing. You can’t just take all responsibility for their mistakes and no responsibility for their successes. So if you’re going to take let them have the joy of experiencing their success, then you need to let them have the discomfort of their mistakes. And that’s not a reflection of us. They’re adults. They’re separate individuals. They have to own their lives, and one of the problems we have is that we don’t have enough people owning their lives. So you know, it’s easy to blame, it’s easy to shift something, but you know what? We need to let them this is how they grow. This is how they develop confidence. And every time we rescue them, we are out.

Catherine Hickem  15:00

Actually undermining their ability to build confidence in their skills on problem solving and figuring things out. So I just think we need to, like, step back, breathe. And you know, the focus of my organization, which is parenting adult children today, is getting parents to understand that,

Catherine Hickem  15:21

that our success isn’t based upon how our children turn out. It’s based upon how we show up,

Catherine Hickem  15:30

and we have the power to do something about that. I can’t control how my kids turn out, right? I can sure control who I am in the context of that relationship. And so when I say we have work to do, I mean we need to be looking at, am I reactive instead of I Am I responsive? Do I attempt to be a manager versus an ally? You know, am I trying to protect and rescue versus empower and support? You know, these are the questions that I think we have to be asking, because they pull away when they sense we’re going to be controlling, or when they sense

Catherine Hickem  16:10

their love. Our love for them can be conditional. And I know most parents think, well, of course, they know I love them. I can tell you, from my practice, over 50% of the people that I talk to absolutely would never have shared their lives with their parents for fear, right? They would tell them something that their parents would never forget or get over, right, right? Well, and as you say this, adjusting your expectations, and I know you talk about grieving the child that you thought you had so that you can embrace the one that you do like this requires really shifting out of the world view, the way that you think the world works, and the way that you determine success, and the way that you have measured yourself and everybody else in the world, and including especially including your children. And so if you can actually expand that and open that up and let

Tina Gosney  17:05

your child have a different view of what success looks like for themselves, rather than what you think it looks like. That’s a really difficult thing to do, but that is necessary. It sounds like that’s saying what you think is necessary for us to grieve these expectations and let them live their own life without us trying to control and dictate it and measure our success by it, and that allows us to open up and have more conversations that are difficult, absolutely, and you know, we don’t even know sometimes that we have expectations until our world gets rocked, right? So a month before my Son and November for Thanksgiving, 2010

Catherine Hickem  17:48

my son comes home for Thanksgiving, and he is 25 he is working in with a foreign oil company. He’s a chemical engineer, and he comes home and he says, Hey, Mom, I just want to let you know that I’m I’m going to move to Singapore.

Catherine Hickem  18:05

And I said, Well, do you have a job? And he said, No, I don’t. He said, but I want to live there. And he said, My where I live, my environment is extremely important to me, and I don’t think I can find what I need here in the States. And he said, so I’m going to go and I’ll get a job somewhere until I can find my permanent position, he said, but I just, I know this is what I need.

Catherine Hickem  18:31

Well, you know, it’s at the holidays. He leaves for Singapore December 21 so I don’t even get a last Christmas with him. And I knew though he was right, but it didn’t change the fact that I now had a son that was going to live 12,000 miles around the world that I probably would not see nearly as often, because in the States, I could get to him in a few hours. I can’t get to him in under 26 hours.

Catherine Hickem  19:03

And so he’s still there. He 15 years later, he’s still in Singapore. Loves his life, and I’m so thankful for the life he’s created. But if you had told me that he would be there 15 years, I would I might go years without seeing him just due to circumstances like covid and certain things. I would have said, no, absolutely, you know what I mean. It would have frightened me. But I chose to take it week at a time, day to time, and I chose to be very intentional with I’m going to stay connected to him, and thank God we have zoom right. Think goodness that we have technology, that I can have conversations like with him every so many weeks, and we I can stay in his world and and really connect with him. I can’t hug his neck, right? I can’t there’s certain things I can’t do, but I still can have this amazing relationship with my son. So.

Catherine Hickem  20:00

But I had to release him of what I thought something was going to be like in order for him to live the life that was his life, to live that was right for him. And so there’s a PART part of us that as parents, we have to be a recognized we may grieve, we may grieve their choices because they don’t line up with the dreams that we had, they don’t line up with the the anticipation of the big holiday gatherings and

Catherine Hickem  20:28

or just so many things. And so I think we’ve not talked about that, that grief is a really important part of parenting adult children, and we need to, because if we can’t grieve, we don’t let go to receive what we can receive. And there lies when one of the problems with our adult children relationships is we can’t let go of what we want. Then that that’s the beginning stages of building a wall. It’s their lives that we need to honor and respect and jump into.

Tina Gosney  21:05

And grief is hard. My guess is that that was a really, that was a process for you that you were able to work through over time, but you didn’t ask him to take that grief away by changing his choice.

Catherine Hickem  21:21

No, no, no, I’ve had to learn what grief looks like. And you know, my dad being a minister, I had been exposed to hundreds of weddings, so when he got when we went to a wedding of his friends, and there was the mother Sun Dance, I started to cry, because I knew that was probably never going to be me, and I didn’t know why at the time that it wasn’t going to be me, but I knew that Taylor and I would never have that moment. Yeah, fast forward, he’s living in Singapore. He calls and says, Hey, Mom, I’m getting married in 60 days. Will you come? And so, of course, I’m going to be there. There was nothing tradition. None of my wedding traditions existed at all. And his wedding, but it was wonderful, and I didn’t need him to have any American traditions in his wedding. This was his wedding, and so I got a chance to learn so many new things and to experience it with just such a sweet spirit with him. I didn’t compare. I didn’t look back, I didn’t say at golly wish I was full in for his life and his bride and their family and his future. And it was so sweet that I could do that. But I could do it because I had already grieved the fact that it was not going to ever be like I thought, right, right. So there’s a lot of ways that we need to do some grief work, and we don’t die from grieving. I think most of the time we don’t want to grieve. We just want to hold on and make what we want to make happen, but that means we’re holding on tight, and we don’t have open hands to receive the good things that can come from releasing. You know, it’s hard. We need support. That’s why we’re talking about it. Absolutely.

Tina Gosney  23:10

What about the parents who are like, Well, my son isn’t moving to Singapore, but he’s marrying someone that I think is super toxic, that’s going to ruin his life, or he’s like, going down this political rabbit hole, and I see him, you know, making you these terrible choices, or he’s leaving our our religious faith, and I’m so afraid for what this is going to mean for him in his life. What do you what do you say to those parents who are so intent and so afraid of what they see could happen in the future because of their child’s choices, that they feel that it’s their duty and their job to intervene.

Catherine Hickem  23:48

So Tina, here’s a here’s a couple things for people to remember. First of all, fears behind every bad decision we’ve ever made, every single one, if I dare anyone in your crowd to make an inventory of every bad decision, and if you really sit with it, you’re going to get to the root cause of why you did what you did. It was based upon fear, fear of not being enough, fear of being rejected, fear of looking like you’re a failure. I mean, 1000 different things, but there’s a fear that drives that. And so if we don’t want our children to run away from us because we think they’re making bad choices. We have to step back and we have to get curious. We can’t just come in and say, Well, you’re not making a good decision. The minute we start to tell them what to do, we’ve lost them, and now the focus of our adult children is on managing us, not listening to us right, right? So our talking is like, you know, the mom of Charlie Brown, Wah wah wah wah, just come out on full bore and go. Well, you know, this is a really dumb decision. What are you thinking? What we have to do is to get really curious.

Catherine Hickem  25:00

Is about what’s important to them, about the issue, or this person, or we have to really get to know them. And this is another mistake that most parents make. They think they know their adult children, and the truth is, they only know parts of them, because the minute they left, there are parts of them they don’t know now, right, right? So and not knowing them, our job now is to get really curious. So we get really curious and to seek to understand, not to change, but to seek to understand. And then we can ask really good questions that will help facilitate that understanding. And sometimes in those questions, seeds fall out of those questions that may plant thoughts that our adult children can actually maybe start to contemplate themselves. But how we do it is key, right? Be very respectful, to be very kind, very non judgmental, and this is why I go back to saying, if we haven’t done the work. We’re going to bring emotion into it. We’re going to bring judgment into it. We’re going to bring criticism, because the fear is going to come out in those forms, and our kids just will not hear us, you know, right, right, huge issue for us.

Tina Gosney  26:16

So let’s give an example of because I can think of a couple examples right now of a question based in fear versus a question after you’ve done your work and you’ve handled yourself emotionally, it is based in pure curiosity, okay? And that is helpful, versus one that is not helpful. Okay? Is there a particular topic you want me to grab.

Catherine Hickem  26:42

Let’s do the topic of maybe your your child brought home a partner that you feel is very wrong for them, right? So one of the things I would do privately, I would say, you know, I just met, let’s just say Sally. We’ll just call her. Sally, see so tell me. I said, you know, I had a chance to meet Sally. I’m really interested in telling, tell me, how did you meet her, you know, and what is it, the things that you are most drawn to about her.

Catherine Hickem  27:09

And I would really just step back and start to listen, and he may say something like, well, she just has such a great personality, and, and, and, you know, he’d talk a few minutes, and I would pick up on what you I noticed, like, what does he smile? Like, is he smiling when he says it? Or where do I notice that he gets really, like, his face changes, like, you can see, like, the thing that draws him. And I would say, well, then I can, I would say, I can tell, like, this is really she’s really important to you. And when you know what is it about her that let you know that there’s such a strong that you could have such a strong connection with her, and then I would begin to see what is drawing him to that person that’s going to then tell me what need she’s meeting in his life. It’s going to tell me, you know, what part of him that I do know about may have felt like that he wasn’t enough in, or that she could compliment something that he’s not as good at. He might be more of an introvert, and she might be more of an extrovert, and he might perceive it. She doesn’t meet a stranger. She’s She is so good with people, and so that you would know, okay, well, that’s a complimentary connection that he could breathe, not having to worry about, having to always be the quote, leader of relationships, that he could step back and breathe a little bit. So it’s like a puzzle, is what it is you’re starting to get pieces of a puzzle to understand. You’re not going to get the whole puzzle together in one conversation, but if you start to lay the pieces and you start to create the connection, then you can begin to one, understand why he’s in the relationship. And then you can begin to, you know, put together other questions that would allow you to explore things at a little bit deeper level. But you got to start somewhere, and you got to start that says you’re not trying to separate them. You’re trying to understand and I think that’s really important, because if the minute they think we’re trying to separate them, there’s two bad things that happen. One, they don’t trust us, and two, they’ll go back and tell the girlfriend they’re dating, who will never forget, ever that we were trying to separate them, and we will suffer the consequences for the rest of our relationship, because they will always think we didn’t approve of them, right?

Speaker 1  29:42

Not good, right?

Tina Gosney  29:44

And so this conversation that you’re describing takes an immense amount of emotional maturity.

Speaker 1  29:49

It takes absolutely and that’s one of the reasons why I say we have to do the work,

Tina Gosney  29:54

right? You have to know, how do we manage our emotions, especially when we’re so afraid?

Catherine Hickem  30:00

Afraid? Yeah, and we’re wanting to protect them, and we’re wanting to warn them and just pull them out of this situation and shake some sense into them. But that’s the work that we have to do. We do. How do we manage ourself around that? Yes, well, and this is why, like, we have to keep coming back to, how do I handle fear in my own life, right? And how do I practice hand handling this fear for me? You know, my faith is a grounding point for me, so this is what I have. And I’m not saying everybody else has to do it the way I do it, but I’m just saying we all need to be grounded to something bigger than ourselves, because there are a lot of moments when you’re parenting children that get really scary, that you have no control over that. You have to be able to figure out, how am I going to reconcile this so I don’t bring my fears to my adult children, right, right? And because my my fears are not, should not be their problem. That’s my stuff to deal with. I shouldn’t be having to put that on them to help them take care of me,

Speaker 1  31:06

right?

Tina Gosney  31:07

Well, and please correct me if I’m wrong. But this is how we’ve been have learned to manage ourselves, is by managing other people so that we feel okay and we’re just we’ve seen many examples of this from our parents and our friends and our siblings and our entire lives, and so we’ve just learned how to manage ourselves, is by trying to control and manage other people so that I’m okay.

Catherine Hickem  31:31

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s you’ve hit it on the head, Tina, because we do what we’ve been taught, right? We do what’s familiar, but that’s not always comfortable, and it’s not always accurate, and it’s absolutely not always emotionally healthy, you know, because today people are scared to have the hard conversations. And, you know, I, I just remember when I was, you know, pre I was doing a lot of work and conferences around the country on parenting under 18, many, many years ago, and I would ask the question to parents, how come you have to be angry to discipline your child? Why do you get mad when they make a mistake? I mean, the job of childhood is to figure things out and to you’re going to make mistakes and you’re going to learn, but if we get mad at them because they disobeyed, instead of us letting them learn the lessons of the disobedient, we get all worked up and bothered about it. The Children’s focus becomes on managing our emotions, not on learning the lesson of the mistake that they made, right? And therefore is that the goal of what you’re trying to do is just to get them to learn how to manage you, but they go through their life trying to manage everybody else too. That’s the point right there. And they’ve become very codependent, and,

Tina Gosney  32:52

yeah, a whole host of issues right now. I know that we, before I hit record, we were talking about some things that were really interesting to me, and I want to bring those back into our conversation. We talked about brain development. Can you tell us something about about what the latest research is saying?

Catherine Hickem  33:11

Yeah, there’s a study that came out from Cambridge University in December of 25 that said that they’ve uncovered that the brain doesn’t finish forming until the age of 32 Now, prior to this time, all the neurological research on brain formation had said that it was formed by 25 which is the reason why insurance rates dropped down after the age of 26 oh no, our insurance rates going to go back up. I tell more older. With this for study. I don’t know I that that’s I thought about that. But what’s fascinating to me is, if we have an understanding that their brain is still in the formation process and they’re still trying to figure things out up until their early 30s, we also need to appreciate and respect that they don’t have things figured out either. But that’s the that’s the the importance of 18 to 30-32. Is that they’re trying to figure out who they are and where they belong and what they believe. And we’re over here, you know, trying to be sure that they’ve embraced everything, you know, shoving our stuff down, believing what we do, how we do it, etc, etc, and when we do that, that’s just going to force them to run in the other direction, because they’re in that exploratory phase that we need to honor and respect. That doesn’t mean we can’t have boundaries, because I think that’s another place where parents, we’ve not done a great job of is knowing how to have boundaries in a manner that’s healthy and respectful and kind. I think most the time, when people hear the word boundary, they think of it as a bad word, as rejection, as punishment or another, and it’s like, no, they’re they’re guardrails for a relationship that you value, that you want to protect. That’s what boundaries are to be.

Catherine Hickem  35:00

And it can, they can be handled in the most loving kind way. We don’t have to be rude, mean and disrespectful to have them and need and our adult children need to have them with us as well. And we don’t need to take it personally, and we don’t need to, you know, react. We just say, Okay, that’s great. So if my children like, if, if, with my my daughter and her husband, like they alternate what years they spend with me for Thanksgiving and what years they spend with me for for Christmas, and that’s, that’s their lives. That’s a choice that they’ve made. Well, it’s a boundary, right?

Catherine Hickem  35:37

And so I, I’m thrilled that one, I’m on their radar screen, and I get to be included in holidays. But it’s that was a boundary, like we’re going to commit to both families, that we’re going to spend time around the holidays with both families, and we’re going to alternate so healthy. Appropriate is it? Does that mean that there are some Christmases I’m alone? Yeah, that does mean that. But you know what? That’s my problem. That’s not your problem. I’m an adult. I’m responsible for my happiness. I’m responsible for my community, my support system, and if I don’t want to be alone on Christmas, then that’s my place to fix it. It’s not my adult Children’s Place To fix that, right? But see, you know, our adult children feel responsible. What’s going to happen to happen to mom? You know, all that kind of stuff, not not their problem. I need to be really clean and really clear as to what belongs to them, what belongs to me, and not infringe what I need on them. I’m an adult. Well, how do we get mixed up what belongs to us and what belongs to them? As far as boundaries go, I think partly because we see them as an extension of ourselves, instead of a completely separate individual, person who walked to the tune of their own drummers. And, you know, I have one child who walked to the tune of a drummer that

Catherine Hickem  36:54

is completely different in some ways. I have another child who could, you know, who’s very similar to me, but I love the fact that I have two different drum beats beating because it causes me to grow in different ways. And so part of this is, is that I just think we have to step back and get really clear on what do I need, and how do I need to be the healthiest version of me, so that way I can engage with the healthiest version of them, and I can treat them healthily, because that’s what they need for me to do. They need for me to be respectful. They need for me like, let’s say we’re going to have holidays together. I don’t just make all the decisions for the holidays. I respectfully say, hey, look, here’s some thoughts that I had around how we’re going to celebrate what are your thoughts? And then we work it out together as adults, because we’re separate individuals with separate needs and separate expectations. So I just don’t assume I treat it with curiosity. And how do we create the best? Win, win. That’s always my goal, right, right? I love that. Okay, I want to touch on one more thing before we end and that was you were talking about how it’s a neurological process for us to shift the way that we’re thinking, and it takes us a little longer than it takes our children. So would you go into that which we were talking about before? Yeah, absolutely. So what the neuroscience has shown has been when a child leaves home and they start their new lives with their new freedom and their new independence, their brain adjusts very easily. Okay, they because it’s almost like next stage formation for parents who’ve been in the caretaking role for a minimum of 18 years, and our child walks out the door, our brain doesn’t adjust and adapt to the fact that we are no longer in the caretaker, teacher, responsible mode. Our brain is still wandering around thinking, Where did the person go that I was taking care of? Because we’ve it’s a habit that we have lived, breathe and done for 18 years, 24/7, so our brain doesn’t have the off switch. It has a very gradual spectrum switch, and that’s one of the reasons it gets complicated for us, because our kids have already gone and they’re living their lives, and here we are still trying to hold on, you know, and bring it the way we’ve always done it. So I think we need to give some grace to ourselves that we have some neurological shifts taking place that just don’t move as quickly as we do. But I also think we need to be very intentional and recognizing that the roles that we had in those first 18 years no longer apply to the new roles. And I mean R, O, L, E, S, not rules, new roles that we now have with our adult children. So we go from being an authority right to being a resource.

Catherine Hickem  39:53

We go from being instead of being a protector to being a supporter and. We go from being an instructor to being a guide if invited, right? So our roles do a 180 shift. The only thing that stays consistent is the fact that we love them, so that doesn’t change. And then you know that we need to be the best version of ourselves when they were living at home or when they’re gone, that doesn’t change either, but everything else changes, and I think that’s that’s what we got to keep talking about, so we can people can breathe, calm down and and give themselves a break, because it’s a new season, but we have a lot to learn in this new season, right? And I think that is such an important thing to remember, is to give yourself time and be compassionate with yourself while you’re giving yourself that time. Absolutely, a lot of mistakes and and if you’ve you can establish some repair in the relationship when you do and it’s all going to be good, it’s actually going to be better to show your child that you can repair, rather than just trying to hold on to the old ways that you were doing things. Oh, it gives life into the relationship. It’s like putting oxygen in someone’s air hose. Yeah, huge. Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you think are important for parents to know, or maybe something to remember?

Catherine Hickem  41:13

You know, I think we, I think we covered it most of the what I consider the hot buttons, but I would definitely say, you know, be kind to yourself, right in terms of forgive yourself for the mistakes that you’ve made, if you need to seek forgiveness from your child, if for something that is still standing in the way, be secure enough to be able to say, I’m sorry.

Catherine Hickem  41:36

Our inability to say our sorry says we’re really insecure, and we need to be able to model humility and model vulnerability, because if we want them to tell us about their struggles, they have to be able to see that we’re willing to own ours. And so I just think it’s important that we’re real and authentic. They’ll trust that they won’t trust if they see we’re manipulative and controlling and trying to live vicariously through them that will push them further away.

Tina Gosney  42:03

Such good advice. Thank you so much, Catherine. If people want to find you after they listen to this podcast, where would they do that? You can find me on Tiktok Instagram. Our organization is called parenting adult children today, and so you can seek us out there on the website, and I have a newsletter and a free video reel for people who want to know more about the dirty word and expectations and but probably I would say Tiktok is a great place, because I try to stay pretty current on what’s happening in the world with adult children. So okay, well, thank you so much. I appreciate all the time that you’ve given us today. Yeah, well, thank you. Bye.