SO, YOUR KID’S AN ADULT: A CRASH COURSE IN NAVIGATING YOUR COLLEGE-AGE KID’S MOVE BACK HOME

BY ALLISON CROOKS, LMFT AND SARAH (SALLY) GIBBONS, APCC

One of the hardest shifts to make is to avoid reverting to old patterns -- patterns that made sense when we were parenting younger kids who needed our guidance and structures to stay safe and to grow. 

• Everyone regresses: Not only do parents draw on their old parenting styles, but our children often find themselves behaving more like their adolescent selves.  We need to notice this in each other with compassion and then reset.

• Be curious: In order to build balanced relationships, we need curiosity about each other. Curiosity reminds us of our separateness.  Who is this person who has come home from college?  Who am I now with her?  Who are we when we are together?  

• Reimagine relationships: Create new ways of interacting by actively discussing boundaries, roles, and expectations. You have before you a competent, educated young adult who has likely been practicing navigating roommate life for some time now. Set up a time to have a direct conversation about what works for them and for you. 

• Do it together: Approach this task of reorganizing and redefining your family system as a team. You are in this together. Problem-solve this complicated dynamic from a position of curiosity, compromise, and mutual respect.

While conflict is inevitable, the way we navigate and resolve our upsets and disagreements makes a huge difference in our overall experience. When we approach conflicts directly, and from a place of curiosity about our own and others' experience, conflict can be a source of growth in our relationships. 

• Anticipate it: Start by working together when there is no conflict occurring to brainstorm areas where arguments or disagreements are likely to arise. Ask your adult child for their ideas and suggestions -- experience from their recent college life is worth learning from. 

• Develop a plan: Be proactive. Agree to raise difficult issues rather than letting them fester.  Remember to choose a time when both parties have the energy and capacity to do so in a constructive way. Be mindful of others’ schedules and demands. Sometimes hard conversations might need to wait, and that’s okay.  

• Call a pause: Once we get activated, it takes our bodies (and minds) up to 20 minutes to settle into a place where we can productively re-engage with the issue.  Everyone has permission to call a pause and is responsible for recognizing when a conversation has become unproductive.  A pause must ALWAYS include an agreement to return to the conversation once all are ready to do so.  It’s about taking a moment, not about shutting down. 

We need to create spaces to be apart.  Before returning home, our adult kids had dorm rooms, dining halls, classrooms, and coffee shops that were spaces for growth and connection.  You had more space, too.  Although our social dimensions are now sharply limited, the importance of respecting their and our own need for privacy remains.

• Get out, under or behind: With everyone living on top of each other, we need to prioritize creating privacy- closing doors, taking walks, and repurposing spaces.

• Practice compassion: We all need validation and understanding as we come to terms with the scope of this unprecedented situation, including its losses and disappointments. 

  • For your adult child: Remember the enormity of this move home. Friends provide vital support to our adult children in regulating and processing emotions. Now, they’re trying to manage without many go-to social supports and with their futures largely on hold and uncertain. 

  • For you, the adult parent: Parents are experiencing their own extraordinary life shift.  Stress and fear may be magnified by concerns about what we can’t control, about financial and personal losses and grief. You may have partners or parents of your own.  Many familiar coping strategies are unavailable or limited and hopes for a new stage of life are on hold.  

• Take advantage of online resourcing tools:

  • Explore free resources that can help you regulate and reset (iChill app, Headspace, Calm)

  • Utilize what you already know and love, like online versions of your favorite exercise classes

  • Find more support and specific resources here

• Know that it's okay if this is hard -- because it is. And remember that this too shall pass. Even if we can’t perfectly predict the “new normal,” we will return to work, school, and the lives we miss, in some form. 

Weathering the COVID19 pandemic with college-age kids indefinitely at home will call on everyone’s  ability to collaborate with curiosity and compassion, to manage conflict, and to create spaces for privacy and self-care. When all is said and done, this situation, hard as it may be, is an opportunity to develop a new family dynamic that matches the changes in roles that have already begun to occur, and it supports developing relationships that will be satisfying and suited to new, grown families down the road.

You and your adult child would have been facing all of this eventually.  Here’s your crash course.

Meet the Authors