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How parents feel, think, and judge themselves as they enter their third decade of the most challenging job of their lives is intimately connected to how their kids turned out: It’s the ultimate performance review, said a client recently.
It’s also a decade when old and new roles, rules, boundaries, and expectations as well as different circumstances, responsibilities, and prerogatives co-create a new dynamic between the generations. For parents, it ushers in a shift in personal priorities and a transformation of parental identity that is ultimately reintegrated in a new and enduring relationship with grown kids that reflects that transformation.
That’s our “work” in the third decade—revising our relationship with our kids and revising our own identity as a result. It’s our actual as well as our psychological task.
Current conditions as well as the culture have created a different path to maturity than the one we followed, with fewer signposts and signifiers along the route, which is why the very concept of adulthood has been unlinked from most of those signifiers—the diploma, the wedding, the life work— and replaced, at least by the younger generation, with an inner, felt state of independence. This may be very different, as they say, from the financial facts on the ground.
Parents contributed $500 million to their adult children last year. And interdependence, in which both generations give and take of their time, energy, resources, and reliability, isn’t usually achieved until the end of the third decade, except in low-income, often immigrant families, in which children may be expected to contribute to their parents even before they can legally work.
However, the other conditions that determine the eventual contours of the relationship most of us want with our adult children require us to abandon our authority over their lives and acknowledge their right to make their own choices, however much we may disagree with them.
“Supporting their efforts to get what they want is different from supporting their goals,” explains one parent. “No, I don’t think giving up on law school at the end of two years is a good decision, but I applaud his willingness to find out what it is he wants to do before he’s locked into it.”
Says another, “My judgment about whether to pay for something is based on three things—whether they want it, whether they need it, and whether I can afford it without borrowing from my own future. It has very little to do with whether I approve of it or not. If they're really grown up, my approval shouldn't matter."
The parallel developmental track we’re on in our third decade is one that also demands that we divorce our assessment of our success or failure as parents from who they turned out to be (as well as reminding ourselves that they’re not “there” yet). Even our unexpressed feelings of guilt or regret about how we raised them continue to influence our relationship with them.
Our frustration, disappointment, sadness, envy or despair must give way to a more balanced perspective on how much influence we had or may still have on who our kids are, and how much responsibility we actually had or have relative to their character, behavior, and life management.
What's most important about that personal parental performance review is how it shapes the way we feel about ourselves, regardless of whether it’s supported by any other data, input, or reality-based perspective.
Our judgment about the kind of parents we’ve been is almost always based less on how our kids turned out than other factors, especially what our particular cultural niche in society—where we fit in—tells us about what words like happy, functioning or successful mean, and by the approval or approbation of those in our milieu.
A young adult or even an older one who works at a steady job, still lives at home, doesn’t pursue much beyond satisfying his basic needs, yet respects our values is doing as well as one family expects (and better than many).
Another family may have a different standard or understanding of what happiness, success, and “doing fine” mean, and may be disappointed if their kids aren’t living up to their potential by exhibiting those qualities their milieu expects good parenting to produce. Letting go of our dreams for them not only frees them to dream their own, but it’s key to our own developmental progress.
By the end of the third decade, the transformation of our identity from parent to post-parent is accomplished, marked less by who they have become (or not) than by a shift in our mental and emotional energy and investment from one dimension of the self to another that represents our final psychological individuation from them. Close to our 60th birthdays, it also coincides with other changes in our lives, some of which are equally resonant, like retirement, the death of our parents, relocation, even grandparenthood.
This is when those who haven’t already done so often use that liberated energy in other personal or professional pursuits—that “reinvention thing” boomers are exhorted by their milieu to embrace. It’s less tied to our kids’ progress through young adulthood than at earlier points in the third decade; it only happens when we feel truly separate from them regardless of what’s happening to them, and thus free to decide how much we will or want to be involved in their lives, understanding that that’s not entirely up to us, either. To say that a mother is only as happy as her least happy child indicates that our own development is not yet past parenthood.
