CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - How Parents Can Navigate Their Relationship with Adult Children with Dr. Laurence Steinburg

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

In this episode of The Calling Home podcast, host Whitney Goodman discusses the challenges faced by parents of adult children, particularly in the context of the changing societal norms and expectations. Dr. Laurence Steinberg, author of “You and Your Adult Child” & Professor of Psychology at Temple University, explains that his book was inspired by the need for guidance among parents of adult children, particularly in navigating the extended period of adolescence that is becoming increasingly common. He highlights the importance of understanding that brain maturation continues into the early twenties, and that experiences during this period can significantly impact future development. They also discuss the impact of financial dependence on the emotional independence of young adults, and the need for parents to adjust their expectations and avoid comparing their children's progress to their own at the same age.  Join Whitney’s Family Cycle Breakers Club for further support and discussion on family dynamics at CallingHome.co. Follow the Calling Home community on Instagram or TikTok.  Follow Whitney Goodman on Instagram or TikTok.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My guest today is Lauren Steinberg, a professor and author of you and your adult child. He's here to talk with me about how parents can navigate and understand adult child relationships in a world that is so different from the one they grew up in. I'm Whitney Goodman. Welcome to the Calling Home podcast. I'm glad you're here. Relationships with our adult children can be really tricky, especially as the world has changed so quickly and drastically from what most parents knew growing up. Adult children living at home are being financially dependent on their parents in their 20,

and even 30s, has become somewhat of a new norm in the U.S., which can be the source of conflict between parents and their adult children. And the thing is, there are no rules or guidelines on how to manage being a parent to an adult child under these different circumstances. So I'm so glad that Lawrence was able to sit down with me and talk about this, because I think there's a lot to take from this conversation, regardless of whether your parent or an adult child. So tell me, why did you decide to tackle this topic and write this book?

Well, to be honest, it wasn't my idea. I wish I could say that it was. AARP, the organization that supports and advocates for people who are 50 and older, had been hearing from a lot of its members that they needed help in their relationship with their adult children. and they had no resources to turn to. Now, these were not people who were estranged, necessarily, but they needed some guidance and some advice. And AARP has a long-standing relationship with the publisher, Simon & Schuster,

and they often do books together. And they contacted Simon and Schuster, and just luckily for me, the person they contacted there, happy to be my editor. And so he reached out to me and said, would you be interested in doing this project? And I said, sure, because it fit well with two things. The first is that the last book I wrote called Age of Opportunity was on adolescence.

And a lot of the book dealt with how adolescence had become longer and that it was taking people longer and longer to make the transition into adult roles. And I had thought a lot about and I've written a lot about the way that that was and wasn't affecting young people's psychological. development. Because there have been a lot of debates in the popular press about whether people were afraid to grow up or they were spoiled and they didn't want to grow up. And I saw no evidence that that was the case. But I had never thought about how the extension of adolescents was affecting their parents. And clearly, it is. We know that it is. So it was a nice kind of sequel in some ways to age of opportunity. But in addition to that, I have an adult child and an adult child in law and grandchild. And I was thinking about our relationships and they're all good relationships,

but there were challenges there. And that made me realize that you didn't have to be estranged to need help. And as most authors do when they, and maybe you did this with your book, when you have an idea for a book, one of the things you want to find out is what else is out there. So I looked online and I saw many, many books on estrangement. They typically weren't written by professionals. And so they were sort of memoirs of a relationship that had gone down the tubes. And I started to track down research on this. I mean, I'm a social scientist first and foremost.

And I went to the literature and said, what do we know about this? And I realized that the popular press had greatly overstated the prevalence of estrangement. I mean, by three times, really. And it turns out that this figure that kept being reported in the popular press was that one quarter of all adult kids were estranged from their parents. And that just seemed way too high to me. And I looked at where that number came from. Part of the problem is that there's no set definition of what estrangement is.

Yes, that's very true. And so that runs the whole continuum from people who haven't talked to each. other for, you know, a decade to people that just say they're not getting along well, but they still see each other all the time. And then I looked at, well, who were all these estranged people? Well, it turns out that 80% of the cases of estrangement are adult kids who are estranged from a parent that never really raised them. It's usually the father that they're estranged from. Their biological dad blessed or got kicked out or the parents but when the child was very young, and they never knew the person.

And so it just seems to me that that's not what we usually think of when we think of estrangement. I mean, there is one study, I kind of joke about this in the book, in you and your adult child, where people reported being estranged from a parent who was dead. I mean, what does that mean? Right, sure. Right? I mean, I said, yeah, of course they're not communicating with you. They're not around anymore.

So then I realized all these people who were getting in touch with the ARP were not people who were estranged. And if anything, they need a book because they're so involved in their kids' lives, not because they're estranged from them. I mean, to the point where they're enmeshed, not estranged. And so I realized that there needs to be a book out there for parents that are still in active contact with their adult children, but are having issues that they find difficult to deal with. Yeah, you know, I think my experience really echoes what you're saying that, of course, sometimes the loudest voices are the ones that have been through the most extreme of cases, right? And those tend to be the things that we talk about a lot. And I find I struggle with that when I'm writing about these topics online because people will say, well, I was abused by my parents, so I can't even have this conversation with them. And we often leave out this whole group of people that isn't necessarily estranged. They don't have a bad relationship. everything has been fine, but they're finding themselves at odds, like you said, during a lot of these transitions in life. And parenting has changed tremendously over the last couple of decades, right? Yes. I see myself as a parent now compared to my own parents that we are living in

in completely different times. And I think that's where I'd like to start is that you talk about in the book that there have been two revelations about young adults in the last two decades, you know, in the research. And that I think these are really important revelations for parents of adult children to understand. I wanted to see if we could go into those two about how the brain is still responsive to the environment and the amount of like brain maturation that's happening during this period in the early 20s. Before 2000 or so, we really didn't know much about brain development during adolescence, much less beyond into young adulthood. Because the external appearance of the brain doesn't change much after we're 10 or 11 years old. So it looks just

like an adult brain. And so there was no reason to think that there was anything special about maturation of the brain after that. Obviously, we knew that people became more intelligent that had to be due to something going on in the brain. But it wasn't a focus of a lot of attention until people began using brain imaging and functional brain imaging where somebody is inside the scanner and we're asking them to do something and we can compare their pattern of brain activity. Let's say, I can have you in the scanner and you have a laptop computer screen in there and I can have you read something that's on it and I can record your brain activity. And then I can say, okay, I want you to read this out loud.

And I can compare the two patterns of brain activity and say, okay, well, this is what's happening when we're speaking words as opposed to just reading them. And so the first research that tracked brain maturation during adolescence came out in around 2000. And most of that work was focused on the period from, let's say, 12 to 18 or so. And it wasn't really until about 10 years ago that people started asking, is there a maturation past 18, that's important? And so the studies began to expand their age range. And what we found was that there's still significant brain maturation going on, at least during the first half of the 20s.

Now, there's some debate among brain scientists as to how late maturation goes on for. to me, I think a reasonable estimate is about 22 or 23. Some people would say 25, but let's say it's somewhere in there. It certainly isn't over at 18, window that. And one of the regions that is the last to mature is the prefrontal cortex, and that's a part of the brain that's very important for not only advanced thinking abilities, but for self-control, the self-regulation. And I think that parents who have kids who are 20, 21, 22,

23, know that they still do a lot of dumb stuff and they still behave recklessly and they take a lot of risks. I mean, I've been a college professor for almost 50 years, so that's the age group that I spend a lot of time with. And clearly they do a lot of things that are not evidence of maturity. Right. So one thing that parents need to recognize is that their kids are still going to make mistakes that are reflective of their relative neurobiological maturity. The second, and I think in some sense, is a more important revelation, is about what we call brain plasticity, which has to do with the malleability of the brain and the brain's ability to be modified in response to experience. What we now know is that there are two developmental periods where the brain is very, very plastic.

Infancy and this adolescent young adulthood period. And why is that important? It's important because it means that the experiences we give our adult children matter a lot for their future development. Their brain is still responding to this. And so making sure that they have adequate stimulation and novelty in their lives, which helps the brain mature and function more effectively and efficiently. And I think a lot of parents just didn't recognize it. This is still a very important time in their kids' development. Yeah, I think it's so important that people really take in what you're saying here

that this is a time in life where kids are still growing up, changing, and developing key life skills to function well in adulthood, right? And there's also this acceptance that, like, yes, we can accept. a lot out of young adults. And in very many ways, they are full functioning adults, right? But there's also this idea that we have to have a little bit of grace, you know, and the ability to say, my kid's still going to be making decisions that aren't great at this time, that they might need a little bit more guidance, they might need a little bit more help. Because I hear a lot from people, especially on the internet, that's like, oh, they're 18, they're an adult now, they're responsible

for everything in their life, they need to grow up, move out of the house, and move on. And it sounds like what you're saying is that parents and adult children could benefit from being given the ability to, like, use these years for exploration, growth, and change. Right. Delaying adulthood in the way that had been criticized so much might not be such a bad idea, depending upon what you spend the time doing. And so when, I hear from parents who email me or when I am in conversations with them and they say, my son hasn't found himself yet. He doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. And then they'll say, I'll ask how old is he? And they'll say, well, he's 25 already, 26 already. And I'll

say, you know, in today's world, that's normal. I mean, that's not, that's not reflective of the fact that he's floundering in some way. And so one of the main themes of the book is that for a parent, you can't compare your child's progress into and through adulthood using the timetable that you followed when you were at that age. Yes, you obviously were that age at some point in time, but the times were very different then. And we know that all the majors transitions into adulthood have been pushed later and later. People stay in school for longer, which means that they stay financially dependent on their parents longer. And we know, I mean, there are some data on this, not great data, but we know that the proportion of people in

their 20s and 30s who rely on their parents for some financial support has increased steadily, particularly in the last five years or so, that it takes, and that all these things kind of have cascading effects. If you're in school longer and you're financially dependent on your parents longer, then you're going to delay establishing your own residence and household, which means you're probably going to delay getting married. We know the age of marriage has gotten later and later, and now college-educated people typically don't get married until sometime in their early 30s, which upsets and bothers many parents. I'll tell you off any story.

I got a call from a journalist who was writing a piece on the book, and her angle was on the delayed age of marriage. And she said, your book is really helpful because I have a son who's 30 and one who's in this early 30s, and neither of them is married, and I'm worried about them. And I said, you don't need to worry. that's normal for their age. And we talked for a while, and then she said, do you know any nice girls?

So she was Larry. She was joking, of course, but I think there are a lot of parents with kids in their early 30s who are worried that they're never going to find that person and that they're never going to maybe have kids. And these parents are looking forward to becoming grandparents someday.

And I think just helping parents understand and what the new timetable of adulthood is, is very important. I highlighted that part that you're talking about in your book, because I think you used was it census data to show that the average middle class young adult about 13 years ago, like, sorry, what did it take? Like 13 years to go from graduation to starting a family. And it took their parents' generation eight years to make the same journey. And so you suggest that parents, like, adjust their expectations by about five,

five years. Right. So if you're, if you're judging, how is my kid doing, you know, she's 35 years old, don't compare to what you were when you were 35, compare to where you were when you were 30. And that will give you a more accurate comparison. I guess what I see is the biggest struggle, though, is that the world has changed in such fundamental ways, that when parents look through the lens of, like, this is the path that should be followed because this is the path that I followed. I find that that's where a lot of conflict is born. And so I wonder why do you think it's been so hard for parents, you know, of older generations to really realize how much the world has changed and how much that has impacted their own

child's journey through some of these milestones? Well, I think it's a couple of things. The first is that we all come. into different stages of parenting with expectations about what it's going to be like. I think that most of today's parents with adult children did not think that their kids are going to be moving back home. They did not think that they were going to have to subsidize their living expenses. They did not think that they were going to take six years to graduate from college, not four years to graduate from college. And so these are, you know, what we refer to

was violations of expectations. Violations of expectations are hard to deal with. I mean, they are challenging because your whole life as a parent. You just assume that, you know, once they're off to college, I'm done, you know, with active parenting. And now that's not happening. So I think it's hard for parents to take that. I will say that's hard for the kids, too. It's very hard for the young adults. They didn't expect to be going to their parents hat in hand when they were, you know, in their early 30s saying, I need some financial help from you. They don't like it any more than their parents do. And I think that it's kind of hard for everybody to accept because the world has changed so

much. And as I point out in the book, the cost of housing has gone up five times faster than salaries have gone up. And so particularly for young people living on the East Coast or the West Coast in the cities where young people tend to gravitate toward. They can't afford to rent. They can't afford to buy. They need help from their parents.

No one anticipated this, I think. And so now here it is. And there are no rule books. Nobody really knows. And maybe you hear this from people that you work with. Their kids are moving back home and they're having conflicts about things that they just weren't prepared for. I mean, people write to me, you know, should I expect my kid to do chores? or should I expect them to be, you know, at dinner every night?

And, you know, a lot of these young people who have moved back home have been used to living on their own, either in a dorm or off campus. And they've been drinking and smoking marijuana and having sex and, you know, all these things. And their parents probably knew that this was going on. But it's one thing to know that your kid is doing these things when she's off at college. It's another thing to know that she's doing these things when she's two doors down the hall from you. You know, I've been wondering, like, maybe one of the reasons that people are delaying marriage so much now is that it's hard to do the exploration of romantic relationships and sexual relationships when you're living with your parents.

A hundred percent. It's hard to differentiate yourself in any way because I think when a kid goes back, I find this with myself. When I go to visit my parents, I'm back feeling like that more childlike version of myself. And I think anybody, especially, in their early 20s, that's working through that stage of finding themselves, they get back in their parents' home, and everyone kind of goes back to their old roles, but they don't want to be there. They don't want to be there, but the difference is, so this happens a lot during, you know, spring break, let's say, or during the summertime, and parents and adult kids fall back into their teenage, you know, years dynamics. But everybody knows that this is coming to an end at Sunniport, right?

I mean, you come home for spring break and 10 days later you're leaving. And so you can just sort of hold your breath during this time period and wait for it to sort of pass. Even summer, it's only a few months long and you'll survive living at home. And your parents will survive living with you too because it's not so easy on them either. But when somebody moves back in after finishing college, they don't know when they're going to be moving out. And so the uncertainty about that, I think, adds to the tension and the conflict. And also, remember, that in America, we value independence above everything else. And we look down, I think, on adult children who have moved back home, even if it's not their fault because it's not expected.

It's not normative. There are places in the world where this is the way that people live. I mean, if you went to Italy, no one would be surprised to hear about the 33-year-old who was still living, you know, with his parents, particularly if he wasn't married. It wouldn't be denigrated at all. As I say in the book, the movie was called failure to launch. It wasn't called congratulations on moving back in with your parents. And so we, you know, we see there's a kind of failure either on the part of the young adult or on the part of the parents. But as it's becoming more common, now it is the most common living arrangement for, people in their 20s in the United States. And just to make this point even more vivid, it was never that at any point in time of the 20th century, never. Even during the Great Depression, you didn't have half of people in their 20s living. It was never that way in the late 1800s either. So this is a completely uncharted, you know, waters for families to deal with. And there isn't the right the answer. So that was part of the challenge of writing the book was if somebody comes to me

and says, should my kid do chores or not, if she's moving back on? I can't tell you yes or no, but I can tell you that you're going to have to have a conversation about it so that you both are on the same page. And that was a struggle for me. How do you write a book that is a book advice where you're not giving that kind of advice? You know, the advice was. The advice was, was these are the conversations you have to have. These are the issues that are going to come up. This is what you should anticipate. And here's where sources of tension are going to be.

And here's what to do when the tensions arise. But I think through that and through what you're saying right now is that you're giving parents this framework to work with where, like, if this is happening on this scale, it's likely not just a problem with my child or my family, which I find is where a lot of parents, go, right? It's like, what did I do wrong? What's wrong with my child? What's happening here? And parents during this stage of life, especially, I think, young adulthood, they become a little bit,

I don't know if competitive is the right word, but comparative as well. Like, where's your kid going to school? What are they studying? Are they getting married? Everyone's kind of measuring themselves against each other's child's timeline. And it becomes this like pressure cooker of expectations being unfulfilled. Yeah. And I think that, you know, we tend to, in this country, derive a lot of our identity from our occupations. Somebody says, tell me about yourself.

One of the first things you say is what you do for a room. And so when you run into an old friend and you say, oh, what's your son up to these days? And your response is, well, he's still finding himself. and they're thinking he hasn't found himself yet he's 27 years old and so it seems like not only does he not have a career he doesn't know who he is and that may not be the case but it is a kind of competitive thing and parents need to get over that and again stop using the time table they followed to judge their kids or other kids the other issue which I think is think you mentioned before, which has to do with how parents are so different nowadays.

I mean, today's parents were very involved in their kids' lives. I mean, they searched for preschool like it was a matter of life or death. You know, when they'd go back to school nights in elementary school, they would come with their own notebooks so they could write down everything every teacher set. They went to all the soccer games, and they weren't just there. They were on the sideline screaming at the coach. at the referee or at the kids. When their kids were in high school, they wanted to be the cool parents that really had meaningful conversations with their kids and their kids' friends.

And, you know, when it came time to applying to college, the parents were really involved in the process. I mean, to the point where some of them wrote their kids' application essays, let me just say this. I'm 71. My parents didn't even know where I applied to college. I mean, they told me they would pay for it. They didn't ask where do you want to go. They just say, let us know, you know, where to send the check. And I was very close to my parents. But parents' involvement these days is so intense and it lasts so long.

My undergraduates at the university have to turn their cell phones off during parts of exam week because their parents are texting them too much. They interrupt in their studies. And so a lot of my students, and these are kids who are, you know, between 18 and 23, 24, they're in touch with their parents every day multiple times the day. In my generation, you had kind of the obligatory Sunday afternoon phone call from the pay phone in your dorm and you couldn't wait to get it over. And the idea that you would talk to your parents every day when you were in your 20s

would have struck us as being so bizarre. And so parents are, they're privy to a lot of information about their kids' lives. And that's good in lots of ways, right? We want parents and their children to be close with each other. But it opens up things that parents may not really want to face. As you know, and maybe you've done some shows about this, we're in the midst of a mental health crisis, you know, among American teenagers and young adults. The teenagers, that gets more press attention, but it's there for the young adults as well.

if you look at the statistics on depression and anxiety and substance use and abuse. And so for parents who are very involved in their young adult kids' lives, they may see depression and anxiety and substance abuse up close. And even if those problems existed in the past, they didn't perhaps see them up close in the past because they weren't in touch so often. They weren't that close. So I think that then leads a lot of parents themselves to worry as you would if you found out that your child was severely depressed. And then the parents become depressed or anxious.

I mean, I know many parents with adult children who themselves have to go into therapy because they're so worried about their kids. You know, it's hard to find the happy medium in that involvement, right? write about in your book how most serious mental health problems, of course, you know, we know that they show up some time, a lot of the time during that young adulthood, those later teen years. And I think the more educated that parents have become, you know, they're consuming content exactly like the one we're recording right now. And it can create this heightened level of anxiety of like, I need to be on the lookout for X, Y, and Z symptoms, because I'm going to make sure that my kid doesn't go down. You know, and I find myself getting.

caught up in that, that I'm wondering, you know, for those parents, where do you think the line is, you know, on how involved they should be, how on alert they should be? And I imagine that's a nuanced answer as well. Well, you know, I think that you should be looking for signs that something is amiss. And it's going to be different if your child, if your adult child is living with you than if you have a long-distance relationship where you're going to have to make inferences from telephone calls or from brief visits. But if your child seems stuck, if your child has, you know, I have a chapter in the book on floundering and how to tell. So if you see your child kind of, you know, bouncing around from career to career to career, they're having

some trouble, and maybe it's related to depression in some ways, or they keep getting into bad relationships, bad romantic relationships, and then kind of making semi-commitments and then breaking up, and then moving on to the next bad relationship. So something is the matter. And so, you know, I think if you're seeing this sort of thing, it's fine to ask your child, or, you know, how are you? This seems like you're struggling in some ways. And can I help? Do you want to talk about it? Or do you? you think you should talk to so professional about it. One of the difficulties for parents is accepting the fact that once your child is 18,

these decisions are their decisions to make, and they're not yours, and they don't need to talk to you about the therapy, even if it's being paid for by your health insurance plan. If they and their therapists together say, we should involve your parents in this, then fine. But be prepared to perhaps be supportive. of about your child getting psychotherapy for something, but not finding out what's going on in the sessions. Because part of what's happening during this period of life, and I think this is a good framework for people who work in mental health, is that it's another individuation process. I mean, we think of individuation as occurring when your child is a toddler, when they

become sort of temporarily oppositional. We talk about the terrible teams. It happens during adolescence. when kids are now questioning your authority as a parent and no longer idealizing you. And I came to realize as I was writing you and your adult child that it happens again, I think, in the late 20s or around 30. And I think that it's very important for your adult child to feel that they are capable of handling adulthood without their parents handling it for them. And that is why when we spoke earlier about where you draw the line and how involved should you be and what you want to give all this advice and how do you know how much to give or how often to give, it's hard because giving too much advice conflicts with your child's need for independence and autonomy. And I think that because of the financial circumstances that many young people find in themselves, there's a conflict between the financial dependence of young adults on their parents and their need for emotional independence.

And so I think that there are often unexpressed negative feelings in both generations. You know, I hear from parents all the time. They're giving their child money, but it doesn't look like they really need it. And, you know, they're not spending it on their necessities. They're living what the parents think of as an extravagant life. And so I think there are some basic questions about, for parents that I write about a lot, does giving your adult child financial help entitle you to have a say in how that money is used?

Does loaning your child money to make a doubt payment on the house entitle you to help pick that house out or to veto their decision? Right. And these are tough, tough issues because every time, every time you intervene, there's the potential for your child feeling like this is infantilizing me. I'm trying to grow up here. I don't need you to tell me what color my living room should be painted. I don't want you to tell me that. I would rather live with a color that I hate than feel like, you know, my mommy and daddy are making all these decisions for me. And I think that the economic strain has really inserted some emotional, you know, I know you've written a lot about toxicity and stuff, but I think that it contributes. It can contribute to toxicity in family relationships. Absolutely.

Because, I mean, money stands to mean a lot of things, right? And so when you as a parent are thinking, okay, if I contribute financially in this way, I will be allowed to assert control an X, Y, and Z way. then you're not really giving money to be helpful. You're giving money to secure control, right? And I think adult kids can, they can feel that. And like you're saying, it can definitely interrupt that process. And so I like the principle that you included in your book because I think what we're talking about here is like when to bite your tongue and when to say something, right? And that it's like, speak up when you must. But unless your child specifically asked for it, keep your opinions to

yourself, and I find I have the same experience that you do, that parents tend to hang out on these extreme ends of that. It's like you have the ones that never give an opinion, never say anything, and the others who are like, oh, you shouldn't wear that shirt, you shouldn't get that car, you shouldn't eat that for dinner, you know, and they get really overly critical and involved. Right. And I think it kind of rubs salt into this wound when, when you, you find out that your child is getting advice from other people. Yeah. So it's not like you feel like you have all the information to work,

because why would you be asking your friends all these questions about what car you should buy? You know, I've owned a lot of cars in my life. How come you're not coming to me to ask my opinion, you know, about this? And this comes up also in the issue of grandparenting. And when your adult child becomes a parent. and now you're watching them interact with their baby, when you're watching them interact with their young child, and they're handling a situation in a way that you wouldn't have handled it

or that you didn't handle it when you were raising them. And should you speak up or not? And one thing that I learned, and I learned this by becoming a grandparent, is that the parenting advice that people get is generationally, you know, And strange. So right now, people see their kids doing things, and I hear from parents all the time about this, that they think this is crazy. Why are you doing this? And it turns out that's what their pediatrician told them to do. Or that's what the child wearing advice books that they're reading tell them to do. Or that's what their friends are doing. And so you need to remember that the advice that you got, the grandparent, the advice that you got when you first became a parent is not the same as the advice that they're giving today. doesn't mean that the advice that you got was bad advice. It doesn't mean that the advice that people are going today is necessarily better advice. But if you look at the history, and, you know, when I write books for parents, so I know a little bit about the history of parenting advice books,

the advice is always changing. And the way kids are raising their children today is very reminiscent of the style of parenting that was popular in the 1930s and 1940s. It became unpopular when, you know, Dr. Spock's book came out, but now, you know, I think today's parents would think that Spock's advice was just too chill. I mean, it's just Spock's book begins with trust yourself, right? As I say in my book, if somebody like Spock were writing that book today, it would begin with trusted data because everything about parenting is data driven today. You know, and keep track of how much your child nurses and, you know, what time they go down for their naps and how much many minutes of sleep they're getting every, you know, and I think this is enabled in part because

there are all these apps that you have on your smartphone that help you record these things. When I was a young father, it's like, you fed your child when your child was hungry, and you didn't feed them when they didn't want to eat anymore. You put his child down when they seemed tired, and you let them sleep as long as they could sleep. You know, I know young parents now, who they put their kid down for a nap, and then they look at their watch two hours later, and they say she's not up yet. She's not supposed to sleep more than two hours at this time of day. I'm going to go wake her, and I think, oh, my God, I mean, who would ever wake their child up for a nap? But that's what their doctors are telling them to do. And so I think you do a lot

of tongue-biting when you become a grandparent and you're watching this because it won't help. Yeah, it doesn't help. And, you know, I think what's so important about the message that you're giving right now is that everything that we do has context and is present in the moment in time that we are living, right? It cannot be isolated from that context. And so that's important when we look at the way that our parents parented us, and it's important when they look at the way that we are raising our children. And I think if we can all hold those two truths at once, we can have such better relationships with grandparents, parents, whatever, because we can and say, you know what, it's not about what happened.

You know, you write about this in your book when I was your age, because when I was your age, the world looked nothing like this. And so it doesn't really matter anymore. That, to me, is like the biggest takeaway from this. Yes, I think so too. And I tried to be compassionate toward both generations. I didn't intend this to be a book that the adult children would read. But the ones who have gotten a lot out of it, when I was your

recording the audio book version of you and your adult child. And so when I'm about to tell you, it didn't get into the book because the book was already written by that point. But I'm recording the audio book. And I'm working with two people in their late 20s, the producer and the sound engineer. And they had to listen very carefully because they would stop me when a sentence didn't sound right or when there was a click in the background or something. So they were paying really close attention.

And it was for each of them, a young man and young woman, it was their first exposure to the book. They hadn't read it before. So they're listening to me narrate it. And after the first day, narrated for about three hours or so, the producer, young woman, takes me aside and she said, my parents have got to read this book because they don't understand me. And three days later, the sound engineer said the same thing to me. He said, I'm going to buy my parents a copy this book because they don't get it. And so I do think that it is harder to be a 20-something or a 30-something today than it has been in lots of previous generations.

It's really, really hard. You know, when people ask me, what's behind this mental health crisis? And I'll say, well, it's not any one thing. It's lots of things. and there's no shortage of things to feel depressed about, you know, everything from climate change to the housing crisis, to the uncertainty of the economy, to the political divisiveness, to threats to women's reproductive autonomy, to racism and bigotry, you know, the list just goes on and on and on. And so when people try to pin it on Instagram, and I think, come on, I mean, yeah, maybe, maybe for the 13-year-olds, that's a source of depression. But the 28-year-olds are not depressed because they're not getting enough likes on Instagram, you know. They have other things that they're worried about.

They're legitimate things to, you know, to feel anxious and depressed about. As an adult child and as someone who is navigating this space, I feel. found that your book was very compassionate to both sides of the spectrum. And I know for me that can be a difficult place to inhabit, you know, trying to give both people grace and that compassion. And so I think for anyone listening, you know, that's either an adult child or a parent of an adult child, the book could be very helpful to them. I'd love if you could share, Is there anywhere else that people can find you or get more of your work? Sure. So I have a website. It's Lawrence Steinberg.com. That's Lawrence with a you.

And if you go to that website, you can read about me and my work. And there are links to all the books that I have written. and I keep kind of a running web page of press interviews and op-is and things like that. You can find all the stuff on that website. If you have a question that you'd like to direct toward me, I'm happy to answer an email. I did emails all the time. I'm very easy to find. I'm at Temple University, and my email address is my initials, L-G-S at Temple. WDU. But if you don't remember that, you can just go to Temple University's website and you can

track me down easily there. Great. And we'll be sure to include all of that in the show notes as well. Thank you so much, Lawrence. I really appreciate you speaking with me today. Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed the conversation. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode. I just wanted to remind you that this month inside the calling home community, we are talking about accepting your parents. If you you found this episode to be helpful or interesting, I really think that you'll enjoy what we're talking about inside the calling home community this month. If you're interested in weekly articles, you can sign up for the Emotional Home Improvement Association. And if you're

looking for groups, community workshops, worksheets, videos, scripts on how to bring up tough issues and articles, the Family Cycle Breakers Club is the best option for you. I lead the groups within the community and it's a great way to take this podcast even further than the information that you're getting here. You can join Calling Home at www.callinghome.com. That's callinghome.com. And I hope to see you there. I will see you next week with another solo episode. Thank you.