Always a Parent: Managing our Longest Relationship

By Gouri Dange

Always a Parent is quite literally an MRI scan of the parent-child relationship after the children are grown people, and possibly themselves parents. The author examines the inner workings and the push and pull of the Indian family. Parents continue to be deeply invested in their children, well after they become adults. And children continue to draw strength from parents, even when their own world expands, way beyond the parental home. The book takes a close look at how the bond can evolve into a completely new, and extremely enabling and life-affirming one, or can spiral into dysfunction and strife. With the use of real-life situations, Always a Parent delves into what can go wrong, as well as provides tools for preventive maintenance of this precious and demanding relationship that endures from the womb to the grave, and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fingerprint Publishing
• Release date: Jun 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9788175994355

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Terrible Twos, Anxious Adolescence, Troublesome Teens—there is no dearth of parenting advice for these or the many stages of child-bearing and child-rearing. It is in the next decade of parenting, when children enter young adulthood, and grow into their twenties and thirties, that a completely new equation emerges. There are very few books on this demanding and complex stage of parenting. At best, there are agony aunt columns addressing these issues.

Always a Parent aims to provide a well-rounded and contemporary look at this important aspect of parenting.

Parenting is by no means done when children turn eighteen, or even twenty-one. Not in Asian families, and certainly not in most close-knit families in the western world. Sure, children don’t need the parents’ physical presence as much as they used to, nor do they need them in their day-to-day academic work. However, this is a stage when their world opens up into an exhilarating yet bewildering number of paths and options, involving choices, decisions, emotions, and experiences.

This is when everything that has been poured into them as children—all the values, the "sanskaras", the anchors of education, and self-confidence, will stand them in good stead. Some parents believe that there is very little that they can now do as a parent that will drastically change their child for the better or for the worse. This may be true, as the parent’s role in moulding the child is clearly over.

However, as all parents will endorse, their involvement in their children’s life is by no means over even after they become adults. It is the quality and nature of what they provide as a parent that changes during this phase. The parent is now expected to be there but in ways that make the demands of when they were much younger seem almost easy in comparison, or to use a better word, more well-defined.

Parenting twenty and thirty somethings is a whole new universe. The interplay between parent and adult child is one that involves respect, setting boundaries, sharing mature conversations, and nurturing mutual understanding of a high order.

Always a Parent is based on the understanding that the thin line between advice and interference often blurs during this stage of parenting, and this is where both parents and grown children need guidance from the outside.

Issues of higher education, careers, finances, sexuality, choice of partners, marriage, heartbreak, health, new family alliances and children, attitudes, and even political opinions, come into the picture. An overwhelmingly large number of young Indians do want to or have to involve their parents in all these areas of their lives. Sometimes this shift to a new, more abstract plane of parent—child relationship proves mutually deeply fruitful, and sometimes, can be the source of much frustration and personal conflict.

Both parents and adult children recognise the huge benefits of this continued interconnectedness. Yet, many also struggle to find a balance where manipulation, unhappiness, blame, and unfair advantage are kept firmly out, and a newer, deeper, and mutually workable equation emerges.

Always a Parent explores every aspect of adult parenting, using real-life stories, thoughts, jottings, counselling sessions, and family-dining-table discussions as a source. The goal is to help parents and their grown children to tap into all that is good as well as to steer clear of the age-old pitfalls in building the upper storeys of the edifice that is parenting. The book offers life-lessons that are authentic, and of lasting human value to the entire family, so that no parent or adult-child needs to feel cheated, or used, or unappreciated, or manipulated. Rather, both can continue to honour and enjoy being a parent or a grown child.

Interestingly, each time I mentioned that I was writing a book on the relationship between parents and their grown children, the reactions were subjective. If the person listening was a parent of a grown child, the suggestions about what I must include in this book were mostly to do with what the adult child must understand about the parent, and change about himself or herself. And if the person I was talking to was a grown child, invariably the suggestions were about how I must bring out the issues related to what parents need to learn, modify, and introspect about in relation to their grown children! Both sides appeared to be convinced that the onus lay squarely on the other to handle this relationship well, and tackle its inherent problems.

At first, this put me in a bit of a dilemma. I found myself contemplating over whether I should write this book from the point of view of the grown child, or the parent of that grown child. Clearly, the relationship is such a nuanced and complex one that there simply cannot be any one point of view on this subject.

While the title "Always a Parent" suggests that the book addresses parents of grown adults, the book itself examines various aspects of the issues involved from the inside. It looks at the dynamics and the evolving and changeable nature of this relationship from multiple angles.

One young woman even remarked, A book about parenting grown children? Whatever for? Who listens to parents after the age of twenty-one anyway?

To clarify, this is not a book about how you must listen to parents or how to make grown children obey you!

Always A Parent looks at the many ways in which the parent and child relationship continues to remain one of our most important relationships once it has moved beyond the early years. It looks at managing the new imperatives that come with the maturing of children, and the ageing of parents in such a way as to avoid the usual pitfalls of overdependence at one end of the spectrum, and neglect and disconnect at the other end of it.

This book offers solutions to unresolved family knots. It highlights how cleaning up our communication can save the family and the individuals in it, and help them remain connected in a healthy and enabling way.

The definition of the Indian family is such a widely varied one, that there are literally as many combinations and living arrangements as there are families. Joint, nuclear, semi-joint, patriarchal, matriarchal, single parent homes separated by geography but together, and more. There are also multiple levels of social and economic strata in this country.

The contents of this book apply to just about every kind of family, across class, caste, community, and country lines, because the issues it examines between parents and their grown children are not necessarily culture or class-specific.

–Gouri Dange

1

Give me some space

PRIVACY

AND

BOUNDARIES

The ability to form and respect boundaries between grown children and parents is a good insurance against prying, stepping on toes, micromanaging each other’s lives, and having unrealistic expectations.

Healthy boundaries between two individuals or sets of people are at the very core of a functional and beneficial relationship. Everything you will read in this book pivots on this aspect of all human relationships—strong and sound boundaries.

Interestingly, contrary to what many families fear or believe, boundaries do not distance people, they actually make it easier for people to get closer, to trust one another, and to love!

Boundaries are not walls and locked doors; neither are they moats and chasms to cut people off from each other, as some people fear. Boundaries of the healthy kind are invisible but very real limits that one sets in a relationship, so that the personal space remains one’s own. This does not mean that the other person, be it parent, spouse, child, friend, lover, or friend, is blocked out; it only means that there is an agreement on the distance set between people.

Boundaries refer to a mutually respected understanding of the space and autonomy around each individual. These vary for different aspects of our lives. Each one of us establishes physical, mental, psychological, spatial, financial, and spiritual boundaries around ourselves, and accepts the same boundaries of other people around us. Without them, the daily, as well as larger negotiation of a relationship becomes difficult and jagged.

Sumitra, homemaker and mother, found this concept difficult to handle at first, with her first child.

I grew up without any secrets from my mother. I was not allowed to lock my bedroom door, and my mother would get very upset if I didn’t tell her everything that happened in school and then, college. So, when my daughter expected her own mental and physical space right from the age of six or seven years, I felt shut out. I wondered if this was normal. I also suspected that she might be lying or stealing, or doing forbidden things, and that was why she did not like me opening her school bag or tidying her desk. We began to have big fights over this.

It took Sumitra a while to accept, then respect her daughter’s need for privacy and setting limits, and not interpret this as distancing and unloving behaviour.

Boundaries can be formed between parent and children early in the relationship, together, and these are, or ought to be put in place gradually over the years. Sudden fencing off from each other when children grow up into young adults is difficult and painful for everyone concerned.

In well-functioning families, physical boundaries are the first to be set in place. Quite naturally, as children grow, there is less hugging, kissing, and baby talk. Bodily functions, bathing, and changing clothes become private activities, and parents do less for them physically. The child starts sleeping separately, and in some instances, has her own room, and desk space, too.

The next level is emotional boundaries. This is when both parent and child outline their own identities separate from each other, and lovingly accept that they will not necessarily be functioning in an identical, and always-in-sync way with each other. Children in such families are entitled to their own opinions. It is considered perfectly acceptable when they do not share all their thoughts and emotions, have secrets of their own, and exercise some choices that don’t necessarily match those of their parents or other siblings at all times.

Boundaries are part of the maturing process where we become individuals separate from our parents, and adults in our own right.