Can Parents And Adult Children Become Peers?

In family therapy sessions involving stressed relationships between parents and adult children, I have asked, What if each adult member of the family were to see themselves and every other adult member as respected peers rather than as either elevated parents or deferential children?

It may be hard to envision a truly level playing field in our very human families when, understandably, each son or daughter has spent their first formative 18 years of life in a one-down position, where parents exercised varying degrees of significant power and control.

At some level most parents do accept their responsibility to "raise" and to "bring up" their young to full adult stature and to take their rightful place alongside them all other adults on the planet. Yet perceptions of long held roles and rules for relationships don't magically change on the day teens reach their 18th birthday.

I'll always remember one former parishioner, a young woman who left home to work in another community some distance away, lamenting that while in her new community she was beginning to feel like a full-fledged, card carrying adult, that the moment she came home for a visit she again felt like the dependent, insecure teen in her family.

This may not have been the intention of her parents, but long held, familiar paradigms on the part of both parents and offspring aren't readily or rapidly changed. And the problem may not just be one of parents being reluctant to give up their long held positions, but newly established adults may have an equally difficult time picturing themselves as genuinely equal to their older parents. 

Of course equal doesn't mean identical. Parents may always claim a greater level of wisdom in some areas based on years of lived experience, but on the other hand young adults may have the benefit of a far better understanding of current life, culture and technology than their parents. In other words there are valued gifts, strengths and levels of insight on each side of the relationship equation.

As humans age, differences in age normally make less and less difference. For example, compare the gap between an adult parent and a preschool child to that of the same two decade-or-more age difference when the parent is 60 and the child 40. Which means an older adult son or daughter might benefit from realizing they are now in the age bracket their parents were when they pictured them, at 40, as extremely powerful. Likewise they could remind themselves that their parents also once felt diminished and as walking on eggshells in their relationship with their own parents (and that in fact many still do).

So what if we were to try a different paradigm in families made up of adults, to begin to connect with each other as flawed but precious fellow human beings, as good siblings might, and as they would any other respected peers.

After all, every adult family member, of whatever age, while always having lots of growing up to do, nevertheless deserves to be seen as being fully "of age," having been "raised" and "brought up" to function as mature grownups.

Sadly, while chronologically "coming of age" happens at 18, actually feeling the part may come much, much later, if at all, resulting in a lack of a feeling of warmth and closeness to other family members we all wish for.