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Relationships
Connecting When A Child Becomes an Adult
Use these tips to move from playing roles to creating adult relationships.
Posted June 14, 2019
Lunch with our grandson progressed from edamame to sushi as we made our way through our bento boxes. Polite conversation followed predictable paths—details about his upcoming summer job; commentary on being Treasurer of his fraternity during sophomore year; living arrangements for the following fall. We showed real interest in details as I tried to deposit them in my memory bank so that later he could observe that I had been listening carefully. Periodically, I had noted the light in his eyes drop behind an invisible curtain. He seemed to be cocooning his real self by retreating into a curated veneer designed for social presentation, hiding passions that layered beneath.
I searched for the key to unlock the mysteries hiding under his perfect but slightly guarded demeanor.
Finally, I announced “It’s amazing to watch you be adults now. We probably know it better than you do!”
That did the trick. Assured that he was no longer trapped in our perceptions of how he had been as a child, the way he had expressed himself as a teen, or aspired to be seen as a College Man, he tentatively dropped the shield. He noted how different he had felt this summer, being able to spend a day in Manhattan and return to his suburban home after one in the morning, no questions asked. He described his ambitious spring break trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, one that he and his friends had organized and jubilantly executed. He talked about next year’s courses with genuine excitement and curiosity. I restrained myself from asking him about any romantic involvements.
Our grandchildren live in a different world than the one we grew up in. The ways and rules of their generation are not those that we or their parents lovingly taught them to respect. Nowhere is the divide greater than in managing closeness through sharing.
Part of the challenge for today’s young adults is learning to live in the world of their own peers, accepting that it is their world and that their parents and grandparents had lived in different cultures. Their grandparents are digital immigrants. Another part of that challenge is finding an adult position within their own world and accepting this means they will no longer share their lives with the older generation in quite the same ways. Like a security blanket offers a transitional object to a three-year-old, a transitional interest—perhaps food or films or sports or an issue in the news—provides a bridge that can be crossed in moving from an adolescent’s accountability to the young adult’s right to protect their own privacy.
Maybe they think that we are not interested. That we will not understand. That we will judge them negatively. That we will be disappointed in their choices. That we will be hurt when their choices vary from those we might have made. Some parents may support the individuation and others may fear or resent it, perhaps viewing separation as a rejection of intimacy, a judgment of their own choices. What happens when parents are jealous? Confused? Fearful? Angry?
Navigation of earlier milestones can provide clues. As a grandparent, when were you able to communicate with them in person, face to face, or directly by email or telephone, rather than having communications routed through parental channels with potential censorship, ghosting, or mediation? When could you arrange plans to get together with them without first checking with mom or dad? When did they take charge of their own schedules with the right of assigning priorities? Once they could drive, could they meet you somewhere? Initiate a visit to your home? Once they could fly unaccompanied, could they meet you at a distant location? If you lived a flight away, could they get to you on their own? Once they were in a foreign location with you, could you feel comfortable leaving them on their own, perhaps with guidelines? When did they begin to reach out, to contact you from time to time without your beginning the conversation? Did they have an agenda? What was it—and did it vary? Are they comfortable skipping a “family” function because of their own activities? Priorities? How did you both handle other adult privileges, like alcohol, sex, managing money? How is the relationship affected when their friends visit? What about a serious romantic relationship?
When a teen becomes an adult, when and how are family boundaries redefined? What can cause a shift in organizing family values or activities: Sports? Religion? Food? Events? Institutions like school, church, community centers, clubs? Can rules and styles of communication adapt to shifts in the balance between privacy and openness?
Young adults need to break ground, going where older generations have not been — whether in education, in geography, in relationships, in partner choices, in ambition, in accomplishment. How do parents or grandparents react to opportunities they themselves might have missed — to learn something, to do something, to not do something (like reporting back to base), to manage daily living needs like food, sleep, or laundry?
As a young person claims a new and personal perspective on wardrobe, time, commitments, priorities, and, above all, intimacy, the basis of bonds needs to shift. It can retreat into the rote role behavior from an earlier time, as our luncheon had begun. Or it can evolve into a new way of relating, using those shared experiences to be fully present, to allow each moment to open into its own new connection. Laughter can arise from the misunderstanding about what you had thought you had ordered or the juxtaposition of a robin lost on a spring snowbank, rather than upon hearing the punchline of a joke told a hundred times before.
The payoff for everyone is enormous. Not only does the young person gain permission to continue to grow into a more nuanced and evolved life, but those who are older can be viewed as their own evolving selves, no longer trapped into roles with prescribed behaviors and expected reactions. My strengths with aging (wisdom, perspective, decades of memories and stories) and my frailties (less desire to cook, inability to thread a needle without aids, hearing loss, and technological limitations) can become a part of me, the person I am today. I’ve always found that the more honest, the more real, the more complete a person can be, the more I love them. It works both ways.
Do you filter your primary experience through roles—those you play or those played by others? Through expectations? Through rituals that sometimes become emptier each time you repeat them? Have you tried focusing on the present moments as a way to reclaim your immediate sensory experiences? to be able to communicate with someone else? Have you ever tried sharing a few deep breaths, allowing you and someone else to gather oxygen from the same air, to dispel your carbon dioxide together? What happens when you add a smile through your eyes or a touch of your hand?
Copyright Roni Beth Tower 2019
