The Words That Every Adult Child Needs to Hear

Melissa Nikovics
Born to a lifelong meth addict mother who was barely 16 and later disappeared for months at a time, Nikovics is struggling to overcome her disappointment with her wealthy father, who is battling stage-4 brain cancer secondary to pancreatic cancer. “I thought I had resolved our issues, but what I was doing was accepting, suppressing, avoiding,” she observes. In December 2022, while visiting him in the hospital after his surgery, she shared the hardships she had endured—and overcome—when he withheld support: poverty, bouts of homelessness, eventually teenage motherhood. “Nobody parented me.” She took refuge in sports. The incident that haunts her is stealing someone’s softball gear after her father refused to buy her a glove. “I exposed my shame at stealing. He said he was sorry. But when I asked if he had any regret, he said no.” Shocked, hurt, and angry, she cried; they argued. She learned she was not in his will because she had been born “in sin.”

“It’s not about the money. It’s about the validation as a human being,” says Nikovics, now a couples therapist near Minneapolis. “I now know that I suffer from moral injury. My efforts to resolve our conflict are justice-seeking. For my own moral compass I will show up, be there [for him]. But I also can’t define this as resolved when the injuries continue.”

Getting Past Old Hurts

Perennially blaming Mom or Dad can hinder growth and success.

By Eileen Kennedy-Moore, Ph.D.

Growing up means that we no longer define ourselves with respect to our parents. We probably never outgrow our wish for our parents to be proud of us, but as adults we can see ourselves as separate people with our own thoughts, values, feelings, experiences, and choices.
Growing up means taking responsibility for creating a life that is meaningful and satisfying to us. It also allows us to look at our parents with wise and kind eyes, to accept that no person and no relationship is perfect, and to understand that, as an adult, our current relationship with our parents is at least 50 percent in our hands. Growing up means not staying stuck in old hurts or engaging in parental blame, which serves only to keep us tethered to a limited and helpless self-definition: I’m irrevocably damaged because they weren’t perfect!

There is a long, ugly history of parental blame—especially mother blame—from professionals. The “refrigerator mother” of the 1940s supposedly pushed her children into autism. In the 1950s through 1970s, the “schizophrenogenic mother” allegedly caused her child’s mental illness by being both rejecting and overprotective.

Today, the popularization of psychology and parenting advice has expanded expectations of parents, of mothers in particular. A “good” mother is supposed to be always patient and empathically attuned, never angry, tired, bored, or overwhelmed. American society is quick to judge mothers as too permissive or too protective, too distant or too involved.

Society, of course, includes people questioning their own parents. Narcissistic. Neglectful. Controlling. Unloving. Demanding. Or not demanding enough. Maybe the parents just weren’t there for them in a way the adult child wished. Adult children sometimes blame their parents for everything negative in their lives: lack of motivation, poor self-confidence, career uncertainty, overwork, fears, anger, loneliness, conflict, relationship break-ups, and more. In therapy offices and casual conversations, it’s common to hear people complain about how their parents “messed them up.”

Focusing on parents’ flaws has one major attraction: We don’t have to examine our own imperfections. Seeing things as their fault absolves us of responsibility for our life. Judging someone else is easy. We can sit back and feel comfortably superior. Taking responsibility for ourselves and making changes in what we do is difficult and sometimes painful.

There’s a developmental shift in how we view our parents. When we’re young children, our parents seem god-like in their power. As teens working on creating our separate identities, we’re often acutely aware of our parents’ failings. Once we reach adulthood, ideally, we have a more balanced view, clearly seeing our parents’ strengths and weaknesses in perspective, perhaps even with tenderness.

Caught in a Blame Trap?
If you’re an adult but still in the stage of focusing on your parents’ flaws, maybe it’s because what they did was terrible and devastating. Some parents truly are viciously abusive or horribly neglectful. A parent’s mental illness or addiction can create a nightmare situation for children.

Or maybe it has more to do with being stuck in a blame trap, which hurts you more than them. Regardless of your particular situation, there are many reasons to consider moving past faulting them, even if they did things that made you feel hurt or upset.

Jeffrey Bernstein
In 2006, when Jeffrey Bernstein wrote a book on managing defiant kids, he targeted children ages 4 to 18. By the time the third edition appeared in 2023, it was aimed at kids 4 to 44. The Philadelphia psychologist started out treating children and adolescents, but the evolving reality of twenty-first-
century child-rearing turned him into a parenting coach specializing in resolving parents’ problems with their adult children. He finds it a great irony that because parents today are afraid of seeing their kids struggle, they do everything for them to avert discomfort—which is why a lot of their children wind up struggling as adults.

Young adults who feel as if they’re not matching the often bogus images of success of their peers, Bernstein finds, not only beat themselves up, they often declare their elders EIP—emotionally immature parents—incapable of meeting the needs of their child.

Not all young adults are on the same timetable of development, he says, “but most parents want to fix any perceived delays way too quickly. They become directive, and that gets in the way of being connected.”

If he had to boil matters down to one thing, he says, it’s that “we parents forget that our kids are not us. They’re different from us. Sometimes they have to take a more circuitous route.”

1) Blaming your parents is a dead end.
You may be absolutely correct that your parents should have done something differently, but then what? Yelling at them and telling them they’re terrible won’t undo the past. Even if your parents admit and apologize for their every mistake, it doesn’t erase what happened. And it doesn’t get you where you want to be.

Dwelling on your parents’ mistakes can be easier than facing your fears, disappointments, and uncertainties about your own life decisions. But the more you focus on what they did wrong, the less mental energy you have to think about how you want to move forward with your life.

2) There’s no such thing as a perfect parent.
Wouldn’t it be nice if your parents always instinctively knew what you needed at every moment and were able to provide exactly that? Wouldn’t it be great if they were always cheerful, patient, and available?

Unfortunately, parents are human. The job of raising kids can be a joy, but it’s also exhausting, stressful, frustrating,
tedious, and unrelenting. Kids are often messy, noisy, and unreasonable. Plus, parents have other demands—jobs, housework, meals, and other family obligations pulling their attention and energy in multiple directions. Expecting your parents to be perfectly attuned to you at all times is unrealistic.

There’s also no such thing as a perfect childhood. You may wish that your childhood had been easier or better somehow, but everyone faces challenges. People also respond in less-than-perfect ways when they’re tired or stressed. As Lisa D’Amour points out, “Parents are just ordinary people who happen to have had children.”

3) The context matters.
It’s important to understand whatever mistakes your parents made in context. That context encompasses the stresses and resources they had at the time, including their own upbringing. It’s harder for parents to respond in healthy ways to their children if they have no model of how to do so because they never received caring responses from their own parents. Understanding where your parents came from doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but it makes it easier to let go of blame.

We all bring a unique set of strengths and weaknesses to the job of being a parent. Your parent might have been a terrible housekeeper but a great playmate, or a poor playmate but great support in a crisis, or a wreck in a crisis but an inspiration for your love of nature and always kind to your friends. Focusing on what your parents were able to give you may help lessen your anger about their mistakes and help you move away from all-or-nothing thinking.

Intentions matter, too. Few parents deliberately try to make their kids suffer, and they do the best they can, given their abilities and circumstances. Sometimes, even with good intentions, they do things that hurt their children’s feelings. Critical parents, for example, often believe that their comments are helpful, not hurtful. This doesn’t make their comments OK, but recognizing their intention makes it easier to deal with their criticisms and talk about them. Love means trying again.

4) Your parents aren’t the only factor influencing you.
Our parents are our first relationships, our first role models, and our first mirrors, helping us figure out who we are. But they are certainly not the only contributors to our identity or where we are today.

We are all born with a particular temperament and genetically based characteristics. We have other relationships with friends, relatives, neighbors, classmates, teachers, coaches, sweethearts, coworkers, bosses, and more. We also make decisions about what we want to do and how we want to act.

The older you are, the more your current life circumstances—plus a certain amount of luck—have to do with your own choices (including, perhaps, the choice to seek therapy), rather than what your parents did or didn’t do.

You’re not a kid anymore, and you’ve changed. Your parents probably have, too. It may be possible to create a new and different relationship with them by focusing on the areas where you can connect. Often people who weren’t great parents can be wonderful grandparents. Or, you may find that your relationship with your parents works best if you concentrate on certain activities and avoid others. It may, for example, be easy to chat about sports but best to avoid political discussions.

Try to find compassion for your parents. They probably did the best they could under the circumstances. You can condemn the behavior without condemning the person. You can forgive someone for hurting you, even if they don’t recognize their wrongdoing, just because you don’t want to carry the burden of resentment. You can choose to see your parents as flawed and struggling but also well-meaning and lovable human beings, just like you.

A side benefit of seeing your parents with compassion is that it may become easier to find some for yourself.

Edward Cassas
When Edward Cassas says, “My father was the catalyst for all the grief in my life,” he isn’t hyperbolic or metaphorical. At age 8, he woke one morning in Brooklyn to a house full of police and learned that his mother was dead. His two older brothers went to live with godparents, but he spent the next few years nearby with loving grandparents.

No one talked about it, so only gradually did he piece together that his diamond jeweler/pool hustler/racetrack handicapper/Mob-adjacent father, “Brooklyn Jimmy” Cassas, had killed his mother. It was a crime of passion.

He couldn’t articulate it at the time—the profound loss that cried him to sleep every night—but he felt deeply betrayed. When his aging grandparents struggled to keep up with the athletic adolescent, he went to live with a family friend in upstate New York. But one day, after a bad breakup, the guardian he loved as a father went into the woods with a rifle and never came out. Cassas moved in with neighbors, but the pain of living next door to one more location of loss was overwhelming, and he moved to Georgia to be with an older brother serving in the Army.

Living mostly on his own, he joined friends to pull off a prank that ended badly—with juvenile detention. By then, a legal technicality had sprung his father from prison, and, still a minor, Eddie moved back to New York to live with the now remarried ex-con. The kid hoped to muster some forgiveness for his father, but at times he couldn’t even look at the man. He felt he was disrespecting his mother’s spirit just by living there, but he also saw it as the ticket to a better life. And wasn’t he owed one? At 18, Cassas took himself back upstate to college on his father’s winning bets.

At 21, he had the first of his four children. The marriage didn’t last, but his motivation did: “to be the best father I can.” Also to seek justice for his mother—not by revenge but by doing well in life. With the wisdom he continues to wrestle out of all the early pain, Cassas, a professional recruiter in Sacramento, California, has also launched a community, Post-Traumatic Growth Champions, on LinkedIn to help others harness the superpowers they’ve gained as survivors.

What Every Struggling Young Adult Needs to Hear

Someone needs to believe in your troubled adult child. Why not you?

By Jeffrey Bernstein, Ph.D.

Mary, a new parent-coaching client of mine, told me, “I don’t know what to do anymore to help our 26-year-old son,Tim. He flunked out of two colleges and each time lied, claiming he was passing his courses. It is as if he tells us what we want to hear, and then when we try to get the truth, he gets angry at us.”

I responded, “Would you be willing to tell Tim these four words: I believe in you?”

“But Tim lies to us. He has ruined all trust we had in him.”

I told Mary, “I get that you are frustrated with Tim’s choices and behaviors. I feel for you because I know that seeing him struggle is upsetting and draining. I also recall that you shared that Tim has a younger sister who is thriving in college and an older brother who is doing great at his job out of college.” “When you say it like that,” Mary replies, “I feel myself shift. It’s as if I lose my anger and realize what Tim feels he is up against.”

I told her, “I empathize with your frustrations with Tim. Yet, isn’t it quite likely that he feels pretty lousy about himself? What is the downside to gently reminding him that he has value and can do valuable things to help himself?”

I get to see and hear the most pressing struggles that create obstacles to the success of adult children today. They include:

*Having a limited ability to self-advocate. While technology provides a vast, instant ability to explore (and find answers to) boundless stores of information via digital devices, many young adults are not able to seek out help for themselves that truly counts when they need it. This may include:

• Approaching versus avoiding challenging academic material and seeking collaborative academic support where warranted.
• Having confidence in their ability to get and hold a job or to be able to accept the give and take that goes along with working with others. Their underlying self-esteem deficits get in the way of flourishing in the world of work.
• Initiating problem-solving reparative conversations when struggling at college or work and when facing friction in relationships with peers or partners.
• Gaining the two crucial skills (perhaps the two most important in life) of learning to calm themselves down and of problem-solving to navigate inevitable challenges that come their way.

*Growing up in a world that is digitally close together yet emotionally far apart. As Sherry Turkle, a leading expert on the digital technology/psychology interface, states, “We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true.” Tragically, I often see teens and young adults in my office who struggle with feeling as comfortable in the real world as in the digital one. The fleeting sense of comfort found in video games and social media provides a false security about true connection.

*Being unable to reflect on personal victories. A core finding of positive psychology is the need to take inventory of and feel empowered by personal strengths. I see many bright and talented young adults who are not able to empower themselves by reflecting on their past successes.

The Importance of Validation
Like everyone else, struggling adult children need to feel validated. Being validated promotes their emotional well-being and helps them feel heard and understood. Acknowledging their experiences grappling with challenges can reduce their feelings of isolation and frustration.

Parent validation helps adult children in multiple ways: It enhances self-esteem and improves communication, trust, and resilience. Tina has an adult daughter, Jodie, 31. After Jodie’s long, winding road of substance abuse and chaotic relationship partners, Tina was highly skeptical that she could make it in the real world. Tina said that learning to validate her helped raise Jodie’s self-esteem and self-worth. Tina elaborated: “When I let Jodie know that I appreciate her efforts to stay clean, I see it boosts her self-image.” It was gratifying for me to hear a few months later from Tina that, after staying clean and pursuing her interests in animals, Jodie felt successful in her job as a tech at a veterinary clinic.

Scott, the father of 33-year-old Elijah, experienced firsthand how validation promotes open and effective communication. After focusing on validating Elijah’s fears and anxieties instead of reflexively trying to “fix” him, Scott experienced more productive discussions about problems and, eventually, potential ways for his son to make some progress. Elijah finished a software engineering boot camp and just got hired by a start-up company.

Validation can motivate struggling adult children to take action to address their issues. The positive reinforcement solidifies their belief in their abilities and the significance of their contributions, leading to increased self-esteem and a desire to excel. Validation catalyzes continued hard work and dedication, as individuals are more likely to invest time and energy in endeavors in which their efforts are acknowledged and validated, ultimately driving them to achieve even greater success.

Invalidating experiences, on the other hand, such as when parents are dismissive or critical, can exacerbate emotional distress in struggling adult children. Validation, instead, helps reduce their distress by providing emotional support and understanding of their struggles, leaving them feeling less alone. Validation respects the autonomy and independence of adult children. It allows them to express their feelings and make choices about their lives—while still feeling connected to their parents.

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