Work & Family Life | Front Page Feature

What about grown-ups…and how we get along with our parents

To our parents we’re all still works-in-progress, even on graduation day and no matter how old we are.

By Frank Pittman, M.D.

ello, Arthur. This is your mother. Do you remember me? …Someday you’ll get married and have children of your own and Honey, when you do, I only pray that they’ll make you suffer the way you’re making me. That’s a Mother’s Prayer.

In “Mother and Son,” the Mike Nichols and Elaine May skit from the early Sixties, the son is a NASA scientist interrupting a countdown at Cape Canaveral to take an emergency call from his mother, who wants to tell him she’s going into the hospital to have her nerves X-rayed because he hasn’t called lately. Within minutes, this competent adult is reduced to infantile blathering.

At least in part, we are all still children throughout our lives, but never so overtly as when we are in the presence of our parents. We wear the mask and perhaps the clothes and posture of grown-ups, but inside our skin we are never as wise or as sure or as strong as we want to convince ourselves and others that we are.

We may fool the rest of the people all of the time, but our parents can see past the mask of adulthood. To them, we seem always to be works-in-progress. In part, this is because they fear they will lose us if we grow up and become secure and independent.

It is less threatening if our security and independence don’t carry us too far away. It is easier to treat a grown child as an adult if we stay around for any fine-tuning they need to provide. A parent’s work is never done. There are always little nips and tucks by which we can be made better.

Stripping away our masks

Parents who would like to show that their child is still imperfect—and is still in need of parental attendance—have a variety of time-honored techniques at their disposal. For example, they can simply remind us that we are not quite who we pretend to be. They can bring up stories from our childhood at the most amazingly deflating moments, like telling a new boss a few of the gems our second-grade teacher had to say about us.

Lindsay shows off her bread-baking skills to her Mom.

Or parents can fail to cheer our successes as wildly as we expected. More subtly, they can cheer our successes too wildly, forcing us into the awkward realization that our achievement did not truly warrant the fireworks and brass band.

Parents may also undercut our sense of mastery by making us distrust our values. They may feel betrayed when their children adopt different styles and habits. But each generation’s job is to question what their parents may have accepted on faith and to adapt the previous generation’s system of values for a new age.

No parents a generation ago could have anticipated the world we find ourselves in now. Children don’t get to be grown-ups until they understand that grown-ups don’t have a magical ability to see the future.

What it takes to be an adult

These days many parents have become the villains of their children’s lives—the people the child blames for his or her shortcomings or disappointments. I’m sure our parents did make a lot of mistakes—like most parents, including my own, and including me. But that was then and this is now. A lot of parents reached adulthood as they raised us and they are better people now than they were then.

But if our identity comes from our parents’ failings, then we remain forever a member of the childhood generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which we identify ourselves in terms of what we do, not what has been done to us.

Our parents cannot grant us this adulthood. We must claim it for ourselves. To move into an adult position with our parents, we must do several things. For example, we must:

Take responsibility for our own life, not necessarily doing it perfectly but accepting the blame for our missteps. A hallmark of maturity, and surely the biggest factor in success, is the willingness to seek and accept expertise, coaching and supervision, and then the willingness to make our own decision after hearing the opinions of others.

Give up any lingering childlike sense of parental power, either the magical ability we give to our parents to solve our problems or the dreaded ability to make us turn back into a child. When we are no longer hiding from our parents or clinging to them, and can accept them as fellow human beings, then they may do the same for us.

Forgive parents for all the ways they didn’t raise us right—whether their errors were in loving us too much or too little.

How to tame your parents

Here’s what you can do to get your parents to see you as an adult and treat you with respect. These techniques are guaranteed to work better than whining childishly or storming like an adolescent.

Tell them about you. Tell them what you like and what you don’t like. You be the expert on you.

When your parents try to tell you more about you and your shortcomings than you really want to hear, ask them about themselves at your age. Explore them, not you.

Thank them for their criticism and ask them what their experiences were that led them to their opinions.

Ask for your parents’ advice before they have a chance to give it. If they know you are taking it seriously, they may be more helpful.

Say how much you value their opinion and add that it influences you in particular as you make your own decision.

Share as much as you can. Secrets and lies will make you ashamed of yourself and will make your parents think you are hiding things from them—like a child.

Include them in your social life. Invite your parents to do things with you, whether they like to do such things or not. Accept their invitations in return.

Ask them to tell you family stories. And when they tell stories about you, give them the necessary information to change your position in the family myths.

Tell them whether you need cheerleading or criticism at the moment.

Remember that they too want to feel needed and want to be good parents. Help in structuring them to do so.

Find things your parents can do for you now. Think of the expertise and information you need, and give them ample opportunity to feel useful. Reveal some of the old secrets you may have kept from them at the time. They may actually be surprised and relieved that you weren’t worse.

Don’t criticize your parents to others. Praising them instead to your friends will free you from your adolescent pout with them. Name your children after them—not your pets.

—Frank Pittman, M.D., is a psychiatrist and family therapist practicing in Atlanta. His books include “Private Lives” and “Man Enough.” This article was excerpted from “GROW UP!: How Taking Responsibility Can Make You a Happy Adult” (St. Martin’s Press).