Will you always try to help your adult children?
What would cause you enough consternation that you’d turn a blind eye?
If you don’t have children feel free to give your opinion. I’d like to hear.
I think I’ll always try to help my son. At 24 now, he’s turned into a very nice young man. I like spending time with him. As my “only”, he’s #1 in line for any help I can give.
He does not currently accept a lot of help. But I keep asking anyway.
I’ll continue to help as often and as long as they’ll let me. I suspect this is because they don’t let me do all that much and they don’t ask often. If they were demanding, ungrateful, or likely to hurt themselves, I might reconsider.
I’ll get back to you Friday afternoon.
I’m childless. My new wife has two 30-somethings. The elder man is fully capable & self sufficient. He also lives halfway across the country where his career has carried him. The younger woman struggles a bit with some aspects of adulting, but is doing generally OK. She chose to move to our metropolis and then seek work locally, so as to be near enough to Mom. She now lives 20-ish miles away across the vast suburban wasteland. They get together for a ladies day out shopping every 3-4 weeks, and yak on the phone every few days. But that’s all the close Mom cares to get.
If asked, Mom will offer advice. Mom never offers unsolicited advice even if Daughter is about to do something super-stupid. And if necessary Mom will do practical things like mostly cook a Feast while Daughter is full dealing with her brood. Mom is dead set against anything that smacks of any on-going obligation; no baby-sitting every Tuesday, no money, no hand-holding, and definitely no doing things for Daughter that she could / should do for herself but just doesn’t wanna. Such as investment decisions, taxes, evaluating jobs or residences, picking out a car, etc.
To me that feels just a bit distant / standoffish. Not quite my style, but not far off either. But one thing’s for sure: it has produced a daughter who’s not a whiny clinger. Which my gut tells me she might well have turned into with a more indulgent style of parenting in her early years.
For myself this is all theoretical of course.
I could see myself comfortably writing off a psychopath or criminal, regretting the fact I’d had any hand in unleashing that problem upon society. I could also see myself uncomfortably writing off a hopeless addict, but only after considerable effort to lead that horse to water & hold its head under until it drank of sobriety.
Otherwise, whether they’re likeable or not, they’re mine for the rest of our mutual time on Earth.
Like my wife, I would however distinguish between helping them and enabling mooching. Enabling any bad habit is itself a worse habit. Don’t do that. Easier to say than to do I know.
I’ve been blessed with two kids who are far better people than their dad. They rarely require help, but when they do it makes me happy to be able to lend a hand.
If you have kids, you never stop being a parent. You never stop wanting to help, but at some point, you need to stifle that urge and let them go do what they’re gonna do, on their own. That’s the natural course of things. I’ll be there for mine as long as they ask and as long as I’m here.
I will always help them, but I will never enable bad behavior.
Yes, I help my kids when they ask, and only once when my eldest didn’t ask.
Depending on what help they ask for, they may or may not get that exact help (I ain’t made of money and free time after all) but I help. My older three tend to not ask for help.
I take my cue from my parents who have made babysitting now and then, and other forms of help, a sort of retirement hobby. Sort of a way to enjoy offspring’s childhood without the full responsibility of parenthood. Heh, yanno, grandparenthood.
So tough love is a thing. You reach a not always easy to identify point where rendering one’s irresponsible young adult children additional help falls under the category of ‘enabling.’ When you’ve reached that point, you’re actually doing them a favor by withholding that assistance and forcing them to rely on their own resourcefulness to extricate themselves from their self-inflicted troubles.
I have no children. But my mother helped me all through her life and in her will. I didn’t feel that she was required to do so; but I’m glad that she did.
I helped her a good deal also, through most of my adult life, in other fashions. Maybe I wasn’t required to; but I’m glad that I did.
I think people in well-functioning families help each other, whatever their ages. The amount and type of help appropriate is going to vary a great deal depending on the particular families and particular individuals involved; and, of course, if the “well-functioning” part didn’t happen, or the “help each other” part isn’t happening, then it can be entirely reasonable for the help not to be happening either.
And of course it can depend on what help is being asked for. If what one’s child asks for is to hide the guns and ammo that they’re preparing to use to shoot up the neighborhood, one takes the guns and ammo and calls the cops. Visiting the kid in jail may then be entirely appropriate. But in a case like that you need to help put them there.
@thorny_locust makes a great point. It goes both ways in a functional family. I’m childless but have rendered great help upstream to parents & in-laws
Otherwise two thumbs up to @Chefguy, @DorkVader & @Cardigan just above there.
In what way do you mean “help”? Emotionally, physically, economically??
I generally offer advise or wisdom, when I believe he is making a foolhardy decision, that may take him a significant amount of time and resources to recover from. Otherwise, I am always there if he asks. I generally do not provide economic bail outs, but will provide advice if asked.
Help. In any way you see it.
Of course I help my children. Lots of bucks have passed over to them.
Advice, they take, sometimes.
Favors, like sitting the kids or help hanging wallpaper and any physical labor may be outta my abilities anymore. But I’d do my best.
Some days I think I’ve done my share. Other days, I feel less.
Little more needs to be said.
My parents were always glad to help me (mostly monetarily, that’s what they had to give), and I am always glad to help my daughter. I can’t imagine her ever doing anything that woud change my mind about that.
Once again, I get to the end of a thread to find Omar Little has said what I intended to say. 
Our 3 kids are 32-35, and they really don’t seem to ask for - or even want - much help. I’ve stated before that I personally found it a challenging transition to parent adult children. Not only do you lose the authority to lay down any rules or express expectations, but they really don’t want to hear what you have to say. It can be SO FRUSTRATING to see your kids make ill-advised choices, which you know are going to lead to distress. You see them making mistakes we made when young, but they do not want to hear of your experience. Then, you anticipate they will be calling you to help them out of a situation that could have easily been avoided.
We do not want to interfere with their lives, but we would like to be aware of what is going on with them. And we don’t want to be called ONLY when shit goes wrong. We are not terribly impressive people, but we DO have some amount of life experience which we would be happy to impart. It is terribly rewarding when one of our kids asks us our opinion/experience - whether about jobs, home repair, gardening, relations… And it is somewhat disappointing when you know you have something to offer, but they do not ask. Generally, we err on the side of biting our tongue or - at most - will make 1 water-testing comment to see if they want to discuss more fully.
Our relationships with each of our 3 kids vary greatly, and with each of the kids has varied over time. Right now it is pretty good to excellent with 2 of them, not great with the third. So with that one, we’ve lessened the number of phone calls, and he doesn’t call us. A couple of years ago we had a pretty stressful experience with 2 of our kids. While we didn’t think we were the sole party at fault, my wife abjectly apologized to my son over the phone - and he refused to accept that. And we have never directly addressed that since. That kinda shifted my attitude to my son. It is kinda sad that we don’t have the authentic caring relationship I woulda hoped for when raising them, but I’m not sure what all of us - with our varying individual strengths and flaws - can do. If that situation had been somewhat worse, I could imagine hitting a significant “pause” button on our relationship. Blood is quite important IMO, but it does not outweigh EVERYTHING else.
Financially, we send the same amounts to each of them for birthdays and x-mas. But we give more material assistance to the one who lives nearest to us, as she is the least financially comfortable and has 2 kids. It kinda sucks to be sending sizable checks to someone you feel you don’t really have an authentic personal relationship with, but sending the cash causes us less distress than not sending it.
No, I will never stop helping my kid. This year I found out I had more capacity to take on sacrifice for my child than I would have ever thought possible. It’s easy to talk big before you have kids, but when you are actually faced with that choice, between what you think you need and what your kid needs, it’s a different story.
So I will always help my child.
But I will not enable my child, because I’ve seen that end in tragedy.
Sometimes helping looks like, “You do it yourself.”
Sometimes helping looks like, “You broke the law, now go face the consequences.”
My son currently requires substantial support and is currently in therapy pretty much the entire day between ABA and special education. One of the big questions on our minds as parents is whether or not he is ever going to be able to live independently. There are positive signs he will, but predictions are difficult at this age, so we have to sit with the uncertainty and wait for his life to unfold.
I’ve made peace with the possibility that he could be living with us forever.
This is so different from how I was raised, in a culture where children are expelled from the house at age 18, and I actually left at 17 and legally emancipated, so I had zero expectation of help whatsoever.
But I am a different person and he is a different kid.
However - as his mother, I know what his limitations are and what they aren’t. And I’m never going to stop holding him to a high standard relative to what he’s capable of. He’s a brilliant kid, and fully capable of contributing to the household in some way, fully capable of learning to manage money, he’ll probably be a good driver – even in the worst case scenario, in which he never overcomes severe social deficits, I can think of many things he will probably be capable of doing. Even now he helps me do his laundry after swim class, and I’m trying to think of a regular chore he can do.
We had a difficult experience as new parents, as my son was born within days of the state shutting down due to COVID-19. I have no relationship with either of my parents, my aunt and my husband’s mother live in another state, so pretty much all we had was my FIL, who had committed to helping us with childcare because he said he wanted to and nothing was as important to him as his grandson. But when the pandemic hit he did not change his highly extraverted behavior at all, decided to start serial dating on Tinder, attend concerts, fly all over the world, and effectively abandon us to go have fun post-retirement. He left us in the middle of a national child care crisis with a newborn to pick up the pieces, and as a result, we lost about $50,000. He doesn’t call, he’s out of the state or the country 90% of the time and he maybe shows up for a few weekends a year. When he’s home, he will say things like, “I’ll watch him while you go out on a date” but then we come home at 9pm and my son’s up watching YouTube videos, like my FIL couldn’t be arsed to put the kid to bed, even. There’s not even any emotional support coming from him, because he refuses to take my son’s disability seriously. It’s all, “His motor skills problems are all in his head” and “kids are so overdiagnosed these days” and it’s so fucking insulting given all we’ve had to go through this year and the fact that he doesn’t even know our child.
It’s been such a bad, isolating experience for us, I know we could never do that to our own kid. Now if my kid waits to be as old as I was when I had him, we’re going to be 80 when he becomes a parent. But we’ll do what we can.
I want to emphasize, though, that I have found it critical to set boundaries and make time for myself in order to be as supportive to my child as possible. That means teaching him that sometimes Mom needs a break and he needs to go do his own thing. Sometimes that means having my husband take him out of the house so I can have some quiet time. If I didn’t do this, that level of sacrifice wouldn’t even be possible.
Nah, my non-existent children are on their own!
I didn’t bring you into this world, and I can’t take you out of it!
My parents, particularly my adoptive father (who, it should be noted, was highly abusive) were fond of giving me advice. A favorite canard was “Life isn’t fair” any time I pointed out some injustice (either in my own life or the world at large.)
I now understand what he was talking about, because as a parent you want your kid to be able to cope with the fact that, well, life isn’t fair. Learning to cope with that is a big part of developing into a functional adult.
The difference is, my parents had little to no empathy for me as a child, so this advice fell on deaf ears. When my son is going through something, I may find myself imparting the same advice, but the difference is I’m demonstrating empathy for what he’s going through. “I’m so sorry you’re feeling disappointed, honey, but sometimes we don’t always get what we want.”
His latest thing is everything has to be perfect. “Make it perfect! Make it perfect!” Usually he’s doing this while dictating to me what I should be doing in a perfect way, like constructing a cube or something and the blocks are kind of janky so it’s not working the way it should. Or these terrible hedgehog blocks we got (they’re like plastic blocks with spikes on them that stick together.) Oh my god were those frustrating, even for me, as an adult.
And it was like this long, protracted thing, this is a huge lesson he’s got to learn in life. Sometimes things aren’t perfect. In fact, they rarely are perfect. So how do I teach this to him while still remaining empathetic to his experience, so that he doesn’t feel like I’m just handing out advice to dismiss his emotions the way my parents did.
It’s tricky.
The kinda thing I was suggesting was, we were/are far from perfect, but we made a ton of mistakes which we’d be happy to help our kids avoid making. We’ve bought several houses/cars, had several jobs, raised 3 kids at least decently, had friends/acquaintances good and bad… But we have ceased being surprised when one of our kids makes a big decision which impresses us as ill-advised, withot having even mentioned it to us beforehand. Their choice. But if they aren’t going to pass it by us ahead of time, we are less interested in bailing them out when it goes sideways.
I’ve never been a huge fan of “reinventing the wheel” or learning from avoidable mistakes. And I value the availability of just bouncing ideas off people with whom I know I share common background and (at least some) values. We ARE very happy that all 3 ended up liberal atheists, and none of them are “mean” people. So that’s good!
It is weird - when our kids were young, our main goals were that they be relatively healthy, financially independent, and as happy as they can be. I guess a part of our naive thinking was also that we would be helping mold these incredible adults who would be our lifelong best friends. Well, the result of exposing your kids to diverse experiences and encouraging them to develop how they wish is that they end up being people who are not exactly what you might have expected/hoped for. Which is great - but it was stupid for us to think they would be our best friends. The same way we loved and respected our parents, but we were more involved in our lives than in our relationships with our parents.