Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Some Tips For Being a Good Mother to Your Adult Child

A good mother always instructs her children with the hope that they'll mature into successful, respectable adults. However, there comes a time when children feel that they've been given enough parental advice and want to make their own decisions. This usually occurs well before children are capable of facing world on their own. Nevertheless, when a child reaches early adulthood, he or she does have the right to make decisions beyond the sphere of parental influence-a transition that's always harder for the parent than for the child. 

Relinquishing parental control over your children requires you to break longstanding parental habits, especially in terms of how you communicate with your child. To successfully transition from responding to your child as a "child" to responding to him or her as an adult, it's essential that you recognize your child's status as an adult, which means that, however strange it feels, you have to let your children follow their passions and dreams without taking them to task at every little turn. But there's no need for you to feel as if you're on the outside looking in, not when you can share in your child's adult interests. If you feel like your child doesn't want you to do this, it's probably because you've been acting like your child is still a child. Start to respect you're his or her adulthood and you'll be amazed at the new avenues of communication that open up. 

Accomplishing this won't be easy; it means that you'll have to support some of your child's life decisions even if you disagree with them. This doesn't mean supporting your children as they walk into harm's way, but it does mean being extremely honest with yourself about whether you advise your child out care and concern or merely out of personal opinion. If your children start using drugs, for example, you should step in. But if they're simply doing something that you don't personally approve of, like getting a strange piercing, it's time to back off. You don't want to sacrifice your relationship for the sake of superficialities. 

The most crucial step in maintaining a healthy relationship with your adult child is to never stop examining your own behavior. Are you acting like the mother of an adult child or the mother of an adolescent? For over a decade, you've been used to setting inflexible rules and giving necessary ultimatums, which makes it's easy to revert back to your old ways. Motherhood doesn't end when your children reach adulthood. But, in order to be the best mother possible, your parenting style should respect the individuality of your adult children. 

You're motherly advice is still valid, but it's essential to remember that you're now speaking to an adult, not a toddler or an adolescent who has no idea what the adult world is like. Adjusting you're communication style to respect your child's adulthood will take time and effort, but once you finally make the transition, you'll enjoy a relationship with your children that's just as pleasurable as the relationship that you had with them when they were still children.

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