Bonus: Relating to Your Adult Children (Part 1) - Relating to Adult Singles

Barbara Rainey's Top 10 Interviews

Click Here to Listen to the other parts in the series
Relating to Your Adult Children (Part 1) - Relating to Adult Singles
Relating to Your Adult Children (Part 2) - What Adult Children Need When They Get Married
Relating to Your Adult Children (Part 3) - Walking Through Crisis With Your Adult Children

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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Relating to Adult Singles

Guests: Dennis and Barbara Rainey

From the series: Relating to Your Adult Children (Day 3 of 5)

Air date: March 1, 2017

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Bob: As a parent, what do you do when one of your adult children faces difficulty—they come to you, asking for help? Do you help out? Dennis Rainey says, “Maybe, but be careful.”

Dennis: If you've got a child who has a pattern and a habit of irresponsible behavior, I think you dare not rescue them.

Barbara: I agree.

Dennis: You can't rush in and say, "Oh, let me help!" And some parents get their sense of importance and their own personal self-identity in terms of their relationship with their adult children. What they don't realize is they're raising children to become dependent upon them and not learn the lessons of life God has for them.

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, March 1st. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. As a parent, how can you tell when you ought to step in and help out and when you shouldn’t? We’ll talk about that today. Stay with us.

1:00

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us on the Wednesday edition. You hear —it's almost become a cliché — people will say, "Kids grow up so fast." And they do grow up fast; but there are times, when you look at them, and you think they ought to be more grown up than they are, and they haven't. Part of our assignment, as parents, is to help finish that job —to make sure we have pointed them to what adulthood is supposed to look like and gotten them ready for when full adulthood arrives. Then, when that happens, our relationship with them needs to transition away from what it's been to something different; doesn't it?

Dennis: We have to move from being authoritative parents to affirming them, as adults, and then begin to relate to them, not as a parent in charge of them, but instead relate to them more as a peer, although we'll always be a parent with them.

2:00

Bob: That's right. You've been defining adulthood this week as —what is it?—independently dependent; right?

Dennis: Independently dependent upon Jesus Christ.

Bob: That's where you want your children to be.

Dennis: That's right. We want our children to have a faith of their own and learn how to live life under God's authority.

Barbara —who joins us again on FamilyLife Today —Barbara and I have —well, it sounds easy in the studio; but it's been an interesting process of releasing six of our children now through this transition phase toward adulthood and watching, now, five out of six get married. Hello! It's an interesting process—trust me!

Bob: Barbara, welcome back to the program.

Barbara: Thanks.

Bob: We’ve talked about the transition that begins when the kids leave home for college, or for career, or maybe they’re still home for awhile as they get established in a career / in a job.

3:00

We’ve also said we’re aiming for a day that is a full-release day / an emancipation day. Did you memorialize that / did you ceremonialize that? In other words, did you have a dinner or an event, where you said: “Congratulations!—here’s the title deed to the car,” or whatever you did to launch them into adulthood?

Barbara: We did more of a ceremony upon graduation from high school, going into college and on their own, than we did going into adulthood. The real ceremony, when we officially said they were adults, was when they packed up the U-Haul® and pulled out of the driveway —that was the real ceremony.

Bob: Right.

Dennis: I think there are times when we, as parents, need to help our kids out —getting started—but we do need to be very careful that we’re not using our position in life to just carve out a place for them where they don’t have their own identity.

4:00

Bob: You know, I think most of us are aware that when children get married, we're supposed to have a new relationship with them. But there is a phase between, I don't know, the end of college and the time that they get married —that may be a couple of years —and they are adults but not married. That's kind of an awkward phase for us, as parents, to know what our responsibility should be —particularly, I think, for girls.

Barbara: I think it's a little bit different for girls. Two of our children moved into that phase, unmarried —one was a son, and one was a daughter. It was different with our daughter than it was with our son. I felt a little bit more responsibility to help her with things. For instance, we went to visit her when she was still single and living in Atlanta. She picked us up from the airport, and we're driving down the freeway. Dennis said: "Your car feels kind of funny. Have you had it checked lately?" And she said, "Oh, yes; I had the oil changed,"—whatever. Well, when we got where we were going, he got out and looked at it. Her wheels —I mean, the tires on her car were nearly bare.

5:00

Dennis: You could see the steel belts.

Bob: Oh, really?—yes.

Barbara: And she just—even though she did some minor car repair with her car when she was in college—I mean, you know, we told her, "Go get your oil changed," and all that kind of stuff—she never really was responsible for it totally on her own. And now she was, and she just didn't—she had no idea why her car was shaking. It didn't occur to her that there was anything wrong with it. She just thought it was the car, or the road, or whatever. We felt a little bit more a sense of responsibility to protect her and to help her take care of that.