Tips on how to parent your adult kid still living at home

More young adults are living at home with their parents these days.

Fifty-seven percent of individuals ages 18 to 24 are residing in a parent’s home, compared with 53% in 1993, according to surveys of parents and young adults published last year by the Pew Research Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan nonprofit.

Meeting their needs calls for “lighthouse parenting,” says Kenneth Ginsburg, a pediatrician and director of the Center for Parent and Teen Communication at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Ginsburg said he coined the term to help parents apply what research shows works best to establish a lifelong bond with their children, particularly with young adults. Lighthouse parenting is about “balancing your love and trust with your need to protect and guide,” he said.

“Just think about what a lighthouse denotes,” Ginsburg said. “It’s a stable force. It’s shining the path. It’s making sure you don’t crash against the rocks, but it’s trusting you to navigate the waters with its guidance.”

Ginsburg is author of the recently published book Lighthouse Parenting: Raising Your Child With Loving Guidance for a Lifelong Bond. He spoke to The Inquirer about how parents can navigate friction and challenges, including drug or alcohol use, with their adult children living at home. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

It is literally never too late to repair a relationship if your relationship is rooted in love. Start with three steps: One, tell them what you hope your relationship to be. Two, honor them as a growing, developing individual, and tell them that your role is to always love and guide them no matter how old they are. Three, if you haven’t gotten it right, how about you give the kind of apology that resets the relationship. It is shocking and transformative when you get an apology that actually has meaning. You say, ‘I am truly sorry for what I have done, or how this has impacted our relationship, or how you might feel that I don’t trust you.’ Then you do the course correction and say what you intend to do moving forward. You want to be a guide. You want to be in their life. You want to show up and listen. Only they know exactly the waters that they are navigating. Ask, ‘What do you need to be healthy? To be safe? To be successful? Tell me what you think you need, and what I can do to support your journey.’

Don’t buy into the thinking that ‘anything I do or say enables their drug habit.’ That model is not correct. Instead, you stand by your child and you look beyond what they’re doing. You begin understanding that there’s a why behind what they’re doing. You, as a parent, have the ability to not only explore the why, but to support them to not need the drugs or alcohol. So if the ‘why’ might be depression, anxiety, fear of failure, self doubt, stress reduction, whatever it is, there’s always better ways than drugs. Your role is to be an unconditionally loving guide. It is not to be a drug-addiction counselor. If you believe that substances play a large role in your child’s life, then you deserve and your child deserves to get a professional assessment.

If you frame it as, ‘You are broken, and you need help,’ nobody is going to move toward support. If you frame it as, ‘I love you. I see you. I know there’s a why behind what you’re doing. You deserve better,’ then you’re moving in the right direction. Nobody wants help if they’re perceived as broken, but if they’re seen in their very best light and see what they deserve to get past their challenges, then they’re much more likely to get there. Also, let them know that you not handing them off to a professional. You always remain available as a loving parent.

Many of the intense feelings humans are blessed with, like sensitivity, anxiety, and deep feeling, are not the ones society says are good to have, especially for men. But they are wonderful to have. It is wonderful to be sensitive and caring and to notice things that other people don’t notice, even if sometimes you get hurt by experiencing these emotions. When we speak to our children of their strength and of their gifts, rather than suggest that they stop feeling, you help them learn how to work with the superpower they have, while learning to manage their feelings.

Ultimately, your child is going to decide to contribute to the world in the way in which they want to contribute, and you don’t have an option of forcing them into the mold you desire. If they launch into adulthood feeling like they disappointed you, they’re going to feel like a failure. Focus on the things that you want your child to be when they’re 35 years old. Focus on the kind of human they’re going to be. Are they going to have healthy relationships? A sense of belonging? Will they be compassionate? Will they be resilient? Keep your eye on that ball, and it will take pressure off you and your child today and your relationship will be healthier tomorrow. Acknowledge that there’s a lot of different paths to being a good person.

You never stop being a parent. You will always love and you will always guide. You never want to be a roommate, nor a landlord, because your love is unconditional. But, you’re raising an adult to learn to be responsible in the world, and part of responsibility is contributing to the household. You have absolutely, not only a right, but an obligation to help your child learn how to function in a household. It’s good to know how to do laundry. Good to know how to manage your bills, right? That doesn’t make you a roommate. You’re still a parent, but the developmental need is different.

If there’s anything I could teach you, it’s not to look at the behavior in the moment. Instead, start dealing with any problem by reminding yourself how deeply and why you love. It is only when we start with the root of why we care so much that we really gain the power to guide our children past a problem.