Autonomy a lesson not all parents teach

She had trouble understanding why each time she and her husband visited her parent's home, she came away feeling slightly depressed and glad to be leaving and going back to her own home. She was twenty-two years old, had been married for a couple of years and had graduated from high school five years ago. The youngest of three children, she had always felt loved but was aware of the fact that it was very difficult for her parents to adjust to the empty nest after she left. As a matter of fact, although it was difficult for her to admit to herself, she truly believed that her parents wanted to remain overly-involved in her life, such things as the friends she made the amount of time that she spent with her in-laws, the way she kept her house. Even more personal decisions like having children seemed to be of more interest to her parents than she would have desired.

Her husband had begun to express feelings that he felt her parents didn't want her to grow up and make her own decisions. As a matter of fact, he had recently stated that he felt they were down right meddlesome and she knew that he was developing some negative emotions and feelings toward her parents which had previously not existed. Although she had tried to pass it off as her parents caring a lot for her and being interested in her welfare, she truly had begun to develop some resentment toward them, thus explaining why she felt uncomfortable during the times that she and her husband visited them or they came to their home.

Many parents have a great deal of difficulty in allowing their children to separate from them in a healthy psychological manner as their children develop and mature. There can be many complex explanations for this potential problem and I will attempt to explore some of them.

• Some adults with a high need for control simply have difficulty in letting their children separate from them and become independent. They are often very over-protective during the early years of their child's life. They encourage a dependency upon themselves which makes healthy psychological development difficult for the children as they grow older. Parents are often unaware of their own shortcomings as keeping their children dependent upon them feeds some unhealthy psychological aspect of their own personalities. A resolution for this is often difficult for both the parent and the child and can lead to a variety of problems including negatively affecting the marriage of their offspring.

• This difficulty in moving from parent/child to adult/adult type relationships can also be a result of the adult/child's lack of ability or willingness to move toward an autonomous relationship with their parents. For example, the child may at times promote unhealthy aspects in the relationship because it yields economic gains with their, "I'm your child and need your financial assistance," yielding economic input from the parents. This reverting to previous parent/child relationships in order to gain sympathy isn't healthy for both the parent and child.

• The parent/child relationship often fails to develop into a healthy adult/adult relationship because of a failure in both parties communicating their expectations of each other and then working toward the appropriate relationship. I have seen adult children with a fear of explaining to their parents about relationship issues because they are afraid that they will somehow offend their parents or because they believe that their parents have some stereotyped idea as to what the relationship needs to be like in order to be satisfactory to both the parent and the adult child.

There are other reasons that dysfunctional relationships can exist between parents and their adult children which I will discuss in future columns. However, in any of the above scenarios, a healthy discussion of feelings and expectations can often yield very positive results in terms of improvement in the relationship.

Copyright c 1993 Harold H. LeCrone, Jr., Ph.D.