The Hardest Part of Parenting Nobody Talks About

 Nobody warns you about this part of parenting. The kids are older, more independent, and they don't need you the same way they used to — and somehow that is one of the hardest transitions of all. In this episode, I'm sharing Leah Davidson's Building Resilience podcast as part of my Mental Health Awareness Month collaboration with parent coaches. Leah is a Speech-Language Pathologist and Nervous System Resilience Coach, and in this episode, she breaks down why your calm matters more than your advice, how overfunctioning actually creates distance instead of closeness, and what it looks like to parent from regulation instead of reflex. If you have teens or adult children and you've ever felt the pull to fix, rescue, or hold it all together — this one is for you. 

Leah Davidson is a Speech-Language Pathologist and Nervous System Resilience Coach with over 26 years of experience in brain and nervous system health. She works primarily with women in midlife, helping them understand their changing nervous systems and build resilience from the inside out. 

She offers small group programs, an online community, international retreats, and an Advanced Training in Nervous System Resilience for coaches and helping professionals who want to go deeper in this work. 

You can find her here: 

📸 Instagram: @leahdavidsonlifecoaching 

▶️ YouTube: youtube.com/@leahdavidsonlifecoaching 

📘 Facebook: facebook.com/leahdavidsonlifecoaching 

 Struggling with anxiety in your family? If anxiety is causing tension, fights, or disconnect in your home, you don’t have to face it alone. I help parents bring more peace, confidence, and connection to their families. Let’s talk—schedule a free consultation today or email me: ccoufal@cynthiacoufalcoaching.com

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Transcript

 This month's series of parent coaches has been so fun for me, and I love all of the different topics that we have been through. And today, we're gonna be talking about parenting adult children or children that are in the upper, 18, they might still be in our homes, uh, past that. Well, actually, might be in our homes after that. But parenting older kids that are adults or that are of the legal adult age, and how does that work and how is that different? And that is the stage that I'm in with my children, and so I think it's kind of fun because I can really speak to things that have happened in the last few years and how it still works with them. I have always loved this part of parenting best, and I know not every parent feels this way, but I love being friendly with them, being friends with them, enjoying their company, just being adults with them. That has been a... Just that's the true joy of my life. I'm not sure what it is about it exactly, but I'm just really liking this part. Um, the part that's hard for me in this stage, I think, is that I am a problem solver. And in most of my job as a school counselor, kids would come to me with different things that were happening with them, and most of the time I was needing to solve the problem, whether it was you have a problem with your teacher, you have a problem with your parent, you have a problem getting your homework done, you have a problem with your friends or whatever, and then we would sit down and figure it out. So I would give them ideas and tips and tricks to do. And we do that as parents, and I did that as a parent. But now when they call Sometimes, or maybe a lot of times, they don't want us to solve our problem. It's just like if you have a partner and you wanna tell your partner about your bad day, and they're like, "Oh, well, this is what you should do," you don't like that either. You know, that's... And that's just like our kids don't want us to solve all their problems or tell them what to do. Now, sometimes our kids do call us and say, "I need help. I can't figure this out." Or I remember calling my parents saying, "I just want you to tell me what to do because I don't know what to do in this situation." So we just have to kind of figure that out, and different kids are gonna be different. If you have more than one child, one child might want you to talk to them about how to solve things every time, and the next one never wants you to. So you really have to just, when your kids call you or come to you to talk to you, if you don't know, then you can just simply ask, "Do you want me to listen? Do you just want me to just hear you and just sit here and listen and support you, or do you want me to help you solve the problem?" If they, after you've listened a lot and they seem to be confused, you know, you could say, "Is there anything that you think I could do to help you?" Something like that, just so that they have the agency and the choice to say, "Yes, I want you to help me," or, "No, I just wanted you to listen," or, "I just wanted to get this off my chest," or whatever. Now, sometimes when they get things off their chest, and then, you know, they don't want you to solve it, there's so many times as a parent you're just, like, biting your tongue like, "Oh my gosh, I know what could fix this," or, "I know what you should do." But we have to really not do that, and we have to be... Even if they're telling us things that, inside we're rolling our eyes or inside we're shaking our head about it, we have to be as non-judgmental as possible. Because if we want our kids, and I'm sure you do want your kids to come and talk to you about the things in their lives, we have to be a safe space. And this goes for no matter how old they are. Even when they're, kindergarten and they're coming to us telling us about things, we need to be as safe and non-judgmental as they're telling us things as possible. Because even if you're just screaming inside about, "Oh my gosh, this is so crazy or terrible," or, "Wow, I wanna fix it," the more that we jump in with judgment or ideas or telling them what to do, the less they're gonna come and talk to us about the things. Sometimes we just need to listen, and even if we're not even if we s- feel sad about what choice they're making or... When they're adults, it is up to them. Then we just need to be there loving them and supporting them, and I think the more open and safe we are, the more likely they will ask for our opinion or help or problem-solving, and then we can say what it is that we need. There's been a few times when my kids were adults where they would tell me a whole bunch of stuff, and I would say, "Okay, I'm gonna put my mom hat on for just a second, and I'm gonna say this, and then I'm gonna take it off, and then we can go back." But I wouldn't do that very often. I would really try to be as open as you can. So I was thinking about this episode and my own children and then stories I hear from my friends who have adult children. I think there's a, a little bit of a caveat to this that I'll kind of explain and hopefully it makes sense. So I think that if your adult children continue to complain to you about the same situations over and over and over and over again, and they keep saying that they don't want help, at some... 'Cause this is what I tell kids about friend- friendships, and this is what you can, you can use the same thing with, when you have those friends that continue to tell you the same sob story Over and over and over again, and they don't want you to help them, and they don't... They just wanna complain all the time, that is draining on any relationship. But even with our children, and at some point we can say to them, "You know, we've, we've covered this territory many times, and I'm happy to help you try to solve this problem or talk to you about different ways to deal with it, but I can no longer just listen to complaining and sadness about it without, seeing any action towards trying to fix this." Um, and again, you can say that to friends, you can say that to your kids, and I think that's fair. And sometimes, you know, it's sad to cut off what feels like cutting off some of the relationship, but spinning around in complaints constantly with no solution is not good for them, and it's not good for you, and it's not good for the relationship. And th- now they may continue to do that because they're... It just seems like sometimes people just don't want the solution for whatever reason, and maybe they're just afraid of what it means to fix it. But at some point you have to step out of that because it is emotionally draining and it can somewhat harm the relationship sometimes. The other thing is if they're always asking for money, and it's just constant poor decisions, then they need more money, poor decisions, then they need more money. At some point there needs to be some sort of boundary to that. And I have seen parents that just continue to bail people out for the rest of their lives, and that's... I mean, as a parent, that's up to you. You can make that choice. But I don't think it's good for your adult child to, to never have any responsibility to fix or change any of those things. It just seems enabling and codependent, and there may be some things that you need to work on to try to get out of that situation. And obviously there's things that they need to work on, but I don't think that we should continue to constantly bail our kids out of things financially My-- I totally get helping your kids financially, and I do do that, but I don't pay their bills, and I don't bail them out of poor decisions. I don't know if I actually verbalized this, but I think my kids know that. If it's legit things that just happen in life, I would love to help them get out of that. And I don't do loaning money to my kids. If I give my kids or anybody money, it's a gift. And I don't expect repayment, because I think that is just another layer of where resentments can come up. Uh, but again, you can decide how you want to do that, whatever makes you feel comfortable in your life. But, uh, I do remember, I don't have to bail my kids out a lot, probably because this has kind of been the, the way it is in our family, that I would be gladly gift you things when things are tight for whatever reasons beyond your control. But if you make a lot of bad decisions, I'm not going to help you take care of that, and they've known that forever. But once when my daughter was in college, and I, I find that college is one of those times where it is hard for them to be f-completely financially independent, because for one, they usually can't work full-time be-because they're in college, and they're busy with school and doing the things that they need to do there. And they just don't have all the skills, and they haven't made enough money to be financially independent most of the time. And so I was fine to help out as needed, but there were certain things that I expected her to pay for. She did have a part-time job And we just, you know, we had talked previously about the things she would pay for versus the things that I would pay for. But there was one time when she called me and said she couldn't afford her groceries that week, and she really needed things, and I said, "Of course, I will come." Uh, she was only 45 minutes away from me. Now, I don't know what you do if they're states and thousands of miles away, but probably Venmo the money. I don't know. I don't think they had Venmo when she was in college. But I I said, "Okay, I'm, I'm coming right there. I'm gonna help you buy your groceries." But while we were in the store and going down the aisles as she was picking out the things that she needed, I said, "We need to talk about what's happening with your money. What, you know, h- what happened this week or this month that messed you up? How do we overcome those barriers? How do we not have this happen again?" And so I feel like, you know, there's this love and support. Of course, I'm here. I'm never gonna let you starve or not have things that you really need. But at the same time, what is your responsibility in this? And I think that's part of the boundaries that we have as parents when they're adults, that, you know, we're here to love you and support you, but if you are, really struggling and, and constantly needing help, we need to talk about how do we fix that problem. Because you're not going to be a successful, independent adult if you can't figure out how to budget your money in a way that helps you stretch it through the time. And I feel like I've, I've been very privileged in my life, where my parents... And unfortunately, my parents bailed me out too many times, and I think I saw how handicapping that can be, and I just didn't wanna do it for my kids. I wanted them to have responsibility for the things that that they need, and not just make excuses for them. I also believe that if we are financially paying for something, And this kind of fits more with when we have 18-year-old kids that live in our home, like they're seniors or they're kids that have graduated, but they're still living in our home for whatever reason. I feel like if you're paying, especially if they live in your house, you're paying, you know, the bills of your house. You're paying for your house, your insurance of your house. You're paying for groceries, the living expenses of being in a home. And I feel like that obligates whoever you're paying for to be part of keeping up the household. So I think, even when we're raising kids and they're little, everyone should have responsibilities for the upkeep of the home, even if, they're just our children who live there. And that's just part of cohabitating with people. And I would tell kids at school all the time that complained about chores or said, "I don't wanna do anything. My parents make me do all this stuff," I would just talk to them about when you live with other people, you are responsible for helping to keep the household clean or, uh, running in some way, you know. And I think we can talk to our kids about what are the, what are those expectations. If I pay for your phone, this is the expectation, or you live in my home, these are the expectations. And I think that's only fair, that when we're financially paying for something, we should have some say in how it works, and they should have some ownership in what that means to have that service or whatever it is that you're paying for. And I think, I don't think it should be leverage in the way that I would see sometimes parents saying you know, "Well, I pay for school, so you have to major in what I tell you to." Or, "I pay for school, so you have to do..." That seems, uh, y- you have to be in wrestling because I'm paying for school or something. I don't really like that kind of thing. But, you know, if your child is, you know, misusing the phone and you pay for the phone, then, Or, you know, it's always breaking and you've gotta do all this extra stuff or whatever, I think it's fair to say, you know, "This is my expectation of paying for this, and this is what you need to do as a responsibility." And then the boundary is, what will you do if that isn't upheld? Say, "I will not pay for it anymore," or, "If it breaks, I won't get a new one," or, you know, whatever it is that you can come up with. But I think it's fair that when we're financially paying for something that there is a responsibility of our child in some way. If it's, if they're small and they, it's just, like, doing some chores around the house, or it could be you know, bigger as they get older. Or even if you're, if they're not living in your home but you're paying their rent at their apartment, you know, there are certain things that they need to... They shouldn't, tear it up or cause problems. Because you're on the lease or whatever that's paying for it, you should have some, some say in how that works. And I think just enjoy that they are now making more decisions on their own. And I like this time in my life where I can do the things that I wanna do. I still see them. I still enjoy being with them. I love them to pieces. But I also like doing my own thing and not seeing them for a while, not, being totally enmeshed in their lives, and them making their own decisions for what they do, and then just coming to me about, the things that they wanna talk about, and I am a safe place for them to vent and talk, and I sometimes vent and talk to them about the things that are going on my, in my life. And so think about it as just a fun, new adventure with your children, and if there are a lot of problems or there's a lot of fighting about money or bad decisions or whatever, just think about w- what kind of boundaries can you put in place, and just talk about how that's gonna be. And sometimes we do need to say, "Listen, I'm gonna put my mom hat on for a minute, and here's what I need to tell you or talk to you about." And then go back to just being that sounding board, that listening, uh, safe space. So I hope you enjoy this episode 

Transcript of Leah’s Episode

 If I'm being honest, what I have found is that one of the hardest parts of parenting doesn't happen when your kids are little. It happens later, when they're older, more independent, and they don't need you in the same way anymore, when the role you've lived inside for years quietly changes and nobody tells you how to regulate that and adapt to that. So last week, we talked about navigating and befriending your nervous system when you're parenting younger kids, and today, we're talking about parenting older kids, teen, young adults, and grown kids. And we are going to talk about how your nervous system shapes connection in this stage far more than effort, advice, or doing ever will. Welcome to the Building Resilience Podcast, episode 267, Parenting Older Kids Without Overfunction. Welcome to Building Resilience, a podcast where theory, practical strategies, and inspiring stories show you how to unlock your best life. I'm your host, Leah Davidson. As a certified life coach, speech-language pathologist, and nervous system resilience expert, it is my mission to teach you how to be more resilient to life's adversities. I will show you how to manage your mind, befriend your nervous system, process your emotions, and even eliminate stress. It's time to do more than just survive. It's time to thrive. Let's get started. Hello, hello everybody. Welcome, welcome. How are you doing? Now, I wanna remind you, in case you haven't heard, I have been making some transitions and fine-tuning my niche with more of a focus on midlife. We are still going deep on all things nervous system, but as I am in the midlife season, I see how a lot of the stuff out there talking about the nervous system doesn't quite resonate with all the things that happen in midlife. So, that is where the shift of my focus is coming from, and many people in my community are also midlifers, so it felt like a very logical and a nervous system aligned shift. So, for that reason, I've relaunched the Nervous System Journaling Club to the Midlife Nervous System Rewire community, and I want to invite you to come on in and join us. The link will be in the show notes. Okay. So today, we're continuing the conversation about the role of regulating your own nervous system. Last week, we talked about younger kids, and today older kids, including young adults I wanna talk about how regulation changes when your kids no longer are directly almost borrowing from your own nervous system, as we talked about last week, how your kids feel and use your nervous system more than the words or the actions that you use. And while this changes as your kids get older, they actually still feel your own nervous system a lot. So as kids get older, your role as a parent, or for me as a mother, changes. You're still their mom, but you're no longer needed in the same constant physical and very obvious way. And of course, for many women, this brings up a mix of emotions that they don't always feel allowed to name or often talk about that. Grief, confusion, relief, sadness, excitement, longing, and a sense of where do I put all this energy and care now? And sometimes at the same time, the nervous system strategies that you've relied on for years, anticipating everything, managing everything, trying to fix everything, holding things together for everybody, they don't work the same way. And they can start to create friction instead of connection. So it's almost like a developmental shift for you and your nervous system. Now, when your kids are little, as we talked about last week, they almost always borrow your nervous system. They sense your system. They pick up on all the subtleties. The calm of your nervous system settles them. Your tension activates them. But when kids are older, they don't borrow your nervous system in the same way. They don't borrow your regulation anymore. They react to it. So if your system is anxious or tight or braced, they don't absorb it like they might have done when they were younger. Now they're gonna push against it. And if your presence carries urgency and expectation or emotional weight, they feel pressure. So you can use an analogy like riding a bike. When kids are little, it's like you hold onto the bike for them as they ride. But as they get older, you're no longer holding the bike, but you're walking or sometimes running beside them. And if you decide to keep reaching for the handlebars to control or steer, even if you're well-meaning, even if you're lovingly doing it, it doesn't feel supportive to them. It can actually feel very intrusive. And this can really feel confusing as a parent because what once looked like your love and care now lands as control, even when your intention hasn't changed at all. So we may feel the shift. We may interpret it as being rejection or being dismissed or a lack of care. So sometimes what we do is we try to push even harder. We're convinced that we have the solution, and this usually doesn't go over very well. We are so used to reacting, and so we end up almost parenting from what could be considered more of a parenting reflex instead of response. So we step into this reflex to fix, a reflex to advise, a reflex to smooth things over, a reflex to hold emotional space even when that was never asked for. And I will be honest, I have lived this and to a certain extent, am still living it. I have kids who at times get snippy and frustrated or sharp with me, and of course, that pushes my buttons. I start thinking about, like, the nerve they have after all I've done for them, the sacrifices I've made, so my nervous system then gets even more activated, even defensive and tight, and I'm ready to engage. I am ready to meet their fire, their level of dysregulation with my fire and my level of dysregulation. I like to say I see their fire and I will raise their fire, and then we will just be one-upping each other all the time. But after some very messy situations where dysregulation on both ends turns to a lot more conflict than what I want, I have learned to try instead of trying to make them calm down or to be reasonable as I see it or to even see it my way, I am learning that it is better just to focus on regulating myself The more regulated I am, the more choices I have. I have the choice to ignore what doesn't need engagement. I have the choice to respond calmly instead of reflexively. I have the choice to be present without absorbing their stress. And importantly, I have the choice to set boundaries without escalating anything. Because regulation certainly doesn't mean tolerating mistreatment. It's not about turning a blind eye to disrespect or even abusive behaviors, but it's about coming from regulation so you can be clear about what your boundaries are and what you wanna enforce. And remember, boundaries are not about forcing others to do something. They are about protecting yourself and what you will do if those boundaries are crossed. So when we keep and enforce boundaries when we're regulated, we can do so more effectively and from a place of love Now, many of us are still kind of under the illusion that we can control our kids regardless of their age, that we can control them into regulation. We can try to force them to calm down or to make sense or to do something different, but trying this way often backfires. You can't regulate older kids by controlling them. Now, don't forget, as these kids get older or are older now, even they're emerging adults, they are also navigating identity shifts, independence, relationships, pressure, uncertainty, and often all at once. So of course, they are also gonna get regulated just like we do. And what we also know about their brain development is that their brain, their CEO, their front- prefrontal cortex, is developing, and it is only going to be more fully developed by the time they hit their mid to late 20s. So regulation can actually be a challenge from that perspective too, developmentally. But as parents, if we respond to their dysregulation with urgency or advice or emotional intensity, and again, don't take it personally, I do this all myself, their nervous system can end up reading this as pressure and not care and concern as you likely mean, and so that can impact connection. Now, connection at this stage doesn't actually deepen with more effort. It often deepens with more restraint. If we are interacting and dysregulated ourselves, it just adds more pressure for them, more to care about, more worry, and that will create even more distance. So think about it this way. You don't lean into somebody to create closeness. You create enough space for them to come toward you. So your own regulation can help create that space your kids need to figure things out, to be a bit irrational, and to build the resilience as they try to figure these things out. So the space you're giving them by you being regulated and often just letting them fend for themselves to figure things out, not to jump in to save them or not to jump in to criticize them or even advise them, that space is not indifference. It is actual respect, and trust me, this can be hard to do. I have tried to control regulation many, many times. I've tried to advise and fix and protect and rescue. I still do it, and I try to catch myself so that I'm not depriving them of the experience they need to build their own regulation and their own resilience And creating that kind of space that they need does require a very different nervous system than maybe the activated one that I often go to. Now, which brings us to the real work of this stage. The focus is not actually about them or on them. It's about you With older kids and young adults, regulation stops being about managing their emotions, their temperaments, their reaction, their words, but becomes about managing more of your own. And that can look like staying grounded when they pull away or just letting conversations be incomplete, allowing disappointment for both you and them without collapsing or hardening or feeling guilty or apologizing to them. This is where your own nervous system regulation becomes self-trust. A trust in you and a trust in them. Trusting that you don't need to chase closeness, trusting that your own worth isn't measured by how needed you are, and trusting that connection doesn't require your over-functioning, and trusting that they got this, that they need all the experiences, that they can figure things out on their own, that they have the resourcefulness, or if not, they will develop it. So your calm then becomes a boundary with them, and that can feel very uncomfortable at first because for many mothers, doing less feels like caring less, even when that is not true at all. So then in real life, dealing with these older kids and young adults, what does regulation actually look like? Well, often it starts with a pause before engaging in any interaction. And you are pausing not to find the perfect words, but to check in with your own state. Am I regulated right now? Am I anxious for connection? That question alone can shift the entire interaction. Silence matters more in this stage than we're taught to believe. Just keep your mouth shut. And I'm not talking about a cold silence or withdrawal, although that can be hard not to slip into as well, but a silence that isn't trying to control the outcome, one that is just there while you listen. So my husband and I joke that when we're talking to our kids, we are learning more and more to almost pretend it's like we're grabbing some popcorn, pulling up a chair, and watching the show, the show of their life, their ups, their downs, their stories. And as much as we wanna jump in, which we sometimes do, I will admit, it's hard not to, and some of our kids actually want us to jump in, but we have to wait for them to ask. But we are only the audience to the movie, so we really do need to stay quiet. Now, it is hard to do after years- Of being more involved and more vocal, but we try to stay quiet, and I do emphasize the word try. Although to be fair, like I said, some of our kids want more input than others. Now, another key shift is letting go of over-functioning for closeness. We used to have a saying when I worked as a speech language pathologist with clients who had traumatic brain injury when I was working on teams, that you should never be working harder than your client because honestly, we often did. I mean, some people really wanted the support and the therapy, but some just didn't. They were being forced to be there by their lawyers or by their insurance or if they were younger, by their family members, but it never worked out well if that was the case. It was very stressful to work with clients like that. So you learned that they also needed to have buy-in. Some of them were just not ready or did not have the capacity at that moment, and that can actually happen with your kids as well. They are transitioning. They are growing and blooming and pruning, so that puts a lot on them. And so trying to maintain the whole relationship on you can start to be a lot for your own nervous system. So if closeness to them costs your nervous system, if it requires this constant vigilance or worry or self-adjusting or self-abandonment, it is not sustainable. You need to take care of you. It is not abandoning your child or not caring, but it is taking care of you because really the most powerful thing you can model now is not advice or answers. It is how to be regulated, how to stay anchored in yourself, how you tolerate discomfort, how you don't chase or you don't collapse, how you come back to your own center over and over, over again, how you build and lead your own life. Now, you're still loving the members in your family and the friends that you have, but you're not putting yourself last all the time. And then in turn, that teaches them more than words ever could. So to help you start to reflect on where you're at if you have older kids, a couple things to consider and reflect on or maybe even journal about. Where am I confusing effort with connection? Because often that is what we do. We think more effort, more rescuing, more enabling means more love and more connection. What emotions come up when my child doesn't need me the way they used to? It's really important to build some awareness about this, and again, it is all normal. But it's good to see what is happening for you. And finally, what would it look like to trust myself and then to trust them instead of trying to manage the relationship? We definitely want to be asking these questions or reflecting from a place of curiosity and regulation and not a place of shame. Parenting older children really does ask something different of our nervous system. It is a big transition for those of us with kids when we're in midlife. There is less doing, less fixing, but a lot more regulation, a lot more restraint, and a lot more trust in who we are beyond the role that we played for so long, and who they are now, and who they are becoming. Your nervous system matters even more now. It still sets the tone, but your own regulation is really the secret to a healthier, more connected relationship with your kids, with your partner, with yourself. And a reminder to come join us in the Midlife Nervous System Rewire community. These are exactly the kind of conversations that we are having in the community. I hope you found this helpful, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the Building Resilience podcast. If you're interested in learning a little bit more about managing stress, building resilience, and leading a more purposeful life, then make sure we're connected on Instagram and Facebook at Lea Davidson Life Coaching. You can also subscribe to my weekly newsletter at www.leadavidsenlifecoaching.com/newsletter. Looking forward to connecting.