Family Re-Union: Reconnecting Parents and Children in Adulthood - Hardcover

Kuttner, Robert; Trotter, Sharland

9780684827223: Family Re-Union: Reconnecting Parents and Children in Adulthood

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684827220 ISBN 13: 9780684827223

Publisher: Free Press, 2002

A journalist joins forces with his psychologist wife to offer useful advice to middle-aged parents on how to forge meaningful relationships with both their grown children and elderly parents.

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About the Author:

Sharland Trotter, Ed.D., until her death in 1997 was a practicing clinical psychologist and research fellow at Radcliffe College as well as former editor in chief of the American Psychological Association Monitor.

Chapter 1: Regret and Reunion

The New York Times Metropolitan Diary quoted a sardonic item sent in by a man with grown children aged twenty-two and twenty-six, proposing a message for his telephone answering machine:

If you require financial assistance, Press One.

If you are in emotional turmoil over an impending breakup with a romantic partner, and require a few hours of sympathetic discussion, Press Two.

If you are being treated unfairly at work or school and wish to displace your anger to a nuclear family member, Press Three.

If your car or household appliances need immediate repair or replacement, Press Four.

If you are telephoning to inquire about our well-being or to pass a few moments of pleasant topical conversation, please check the number you intended to dial.

Underneath the barbed humor is deep regret and longing, tinged with bitterness. Doubtless the twentysomething children could compose a message of their own: "If you are calling to criticize my lifestyle, press one. If you are skeptical of my live-in companion, press two. If you are worried about my career, press three. If you wonder when I am going to produce grandchildren, press four. If you feel that I'm insufficiently appreciative of all that you've done, press five. And if you just want to communicate love and support, well, that would be nice for a change."

We suspect that the conflict of the adult generations is the cause of as much bewilderment, regret, and self-defeating behavior as the battle of the sexes. Nearly everybody struggles with these issues and everybody has a story to tell. Few people discuss them comfortably. Often, all of us find ourselves reenacting family scripts of which we are barely aware.

Having observed innumerable families struggle with this dialectic of evolving closeness and distance, having seen it professionally in a therapeutic context, wrestled with it in our own family from both sides of the generational divide, having watched friends struggle, we discern a common pattern: As kids grow up, parents' expectations and demands often lag behind their children's actual developmental stage. As children become adults, many parents unconsciously deal with the loss of the parental role by continuing to infantilize their long-since-grown children. Many adult children become hypersensitized to what they take to be criticism, and demonize their own parents. Both sides seek relief from pain, conflict, and frustration in the lowest common denominator -- distance. Though everyone hoped for something better, patterns ossify. Paradoxically, achieving more authentic family connections is the key to real personal autonomy. Strategies for bridging these family chasms is the subject of our book.

Charles Dickens began David Copperfield with the suggestion that all of us want to be the heroes of our own life story. No audience to that drama is more intimate than our own families. No emotions are more charged. No set of hopes and fears is more poignant.

As young children, we want loving parents who will give us patience, support, and protection while we are growing up, and then plenty of room to become ourselves when we are grown. As adult children, we want from our parents a generous appreciation of who we have become.

As new parents, we imagine that we will be the wise and loving mothers and fathers that our own flawed parents never were. We will raise accomplished and appreciative children. And when our children are grown, we hope, they will come to understand what we did for them, and perhaps bless us with grandchildren. They will be grateful for the parents we are.

Children and parents spend a lifetime yearning for each others' affirmation. It hardly bears saying that life often mocks these hopes.

Achieving a satisfying blend of closeness and distance in grown families is a universal human challenge. Most people under the age of fifty have at least one living parent. Nearly three-quarters of adults have children. There is no escaping these relationships, even if one finds them painful and seeks to shunt them aside.

Everybody lives with fantasies of what might be or might have been. Everybody has a vivid mental picture of his or her childhood, and of parents as a mix of positive and negative role models to honor or rebel against. As we were writing this book, we found our casual conversation with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances suddenly enriched. As soon as we mentioned the topic, everyone had a story. And the stories were astonishingly diverse, yet universal.

When we began this book, we had both just turned fifty, with newly separating grown children and one surviving parent in her eighties. So we were engaging these relationships on both flanks, as adult children and as parents. By profession, we were a practicing clinical psychologist and a journalist/editor. As a therapist, one of us was also hearing about these issues from her patients. As we discussed this book project with friends, more than one ruefully said, "I hope I have a better relationship with my grown children than I've had with my parents." This double sense of loss is often the shameful and largely unexplored secret of the middle-aged.

This dialectic of connection, separation, and secure autonomy is not just a drama for two-year-olds, adolescents, and young adults. A rebalancing of distance and closeness recurs throughout the life course, with different particulars at different stages of development, right on into old age.

If there is a single message of this book, it is that more satisfying relationships within adult families are worth the struggle; that change is possible except in the most pathological of families. Indeed, general systems theory tells us that if one part of any system changes, the rest of the system necessarily changes. This is also the fundamental insight of family therapy work with family systems. The irony is that many family relationships are built on patterns that seem hopelessly immutable but that nobody really likes. A family system often mobilizes its resources to resist change, even as each of its members craves something better. Improving these patterns can be immensely rewarding.

In a small minority of families, parents have been so abusive that efforts at reconnection will only bring renewed pain. We address this subject in Chapter 7. In such families, the challenge for grown children is to heal themselves and come to terms with a devastating loss in order to move beyond it. But this does not describe most parents. In most of the human family, relationships are not pathological, yet in some sense unfulfilled. Before concluding that our families are hopelessly toxic, they deserve a thoughtful second look.

ONE FAMILY, ALL FAMILIES

We conceived this project almost eight years ago. It was motivated, in part, by the conversations we found ourselves having with other parents of separating young adults, all of whom hoped that their relationships with their adult children would be rich, close, fulfilling, and mutually appreciative.

In our own case, this universal wish was reinforced by yearnings from our two families of origin and from our experience raising our children. One of us, Bob, had lost a father at age nine and had a mother who was loving, bordering on overprotective. At fifty, Bob still had a great deal of unfinished business involving his father, which influenced his relationship with his children, and, indeed, all his relationships. Sharland was the daughter of a father who was distant emotionally; she had lost both her parents as a relatively young adult, when our children were still very young. Her father, a taciturn man, had withdrawn further into himself as his health failed. Her mother, a gentle woman, had then abruptly become very ill. This history of incomplete connection with her aging parents intensified her desire for authentic, respectful relationships with our kids after they left home.

The general wish for close connections to our adult children was further affected by our experience with the older of our two children, Gabriel, a very independent-minded son. Having a firstborn who tested limits sometimes made us feel like inept parents. There were times when we managed to find just the right blend of firmness and love. Other times, the two of us would have clashing styles or strategies as parents, and we would find ourselves in unproductive and demoralizing three-way conflict. Nor was this good for our daughter, Jessica, whose tacit role in the family system was to stay out of trouble.

As Gabe approached high school, we all hit a wall. We had the sense that this was a boy who could grow up to be an original, successful, and self-aware adult -- if he could navigate the shoals of adolescence and learn to play to his ample natural stengths. But often, we found ourselves stuck in a cycle of reactivity, where small conflicts would set off a string of emotional firecrackers that ricocheted around the family system. And in a world where alcohol, AIDS, automobiles, and a variety of pharmaceutical temptations surround teenagers, the risks, the stakes, and our foreboding increased almost daily. Gabe's scrapes were still relatively minor, but his creativity and his schoolwork were not managing to engage with each other, and we wondered what perils lay ahead.

By the end of Gabe's ninth-grade year, we made a painful decision. We enrolled Gabe in a one-of-a-kind, year-round school, the Cascade School in Whitmore, California. We had resisted this course. Initially, it felt like a shameful indictment of us as parents and a confession of failure.

Cascade combined a strong academic program with peer groups, wilderness education, theater, and its own version of toughlove to allow teens stuck in self-defeating personal or family patterns to become authentic and compassionate young adults with the capacity to constructively pursue their dreams. Happily, in his two years at the Cascade School, Gabe was able to connect to his own strengths as a person; to throw himself into creative work with self-discipline -- and find real satisfaction; and to cultivate social, emotional, and leadership skills.

When Gabe did come home to finish high school in our community, with the same kids with whom he had started kindergarten, it was as a seventeen-year-old with new adult insights. And, miraculously enough, he was as interested as we were in building a closer family relationship. This, we realized, would have to be a relationship that radically changed the traditional parent-child idiom in which the parent is the source of authority.

After Gabe graduated high school and went on to theater conservatory in London, and as our daughter was entering tenth grade, we began to think more systematically about this challenge of constructing a close but not confining, lifelong relationship with our grown children. Though Gabe was now far away, we finally had the loving and mutually respectful relationship with our son that we had long sought. As he was becoming a more interesting and complex young adult, the relationship was becoming richer. But would it last?

Every parent, though perhaps not with the same poignancy, has some version of this wish. Parents, after all, spend nearly two decades interrupting sleep, juggling work and family, changing diapers, containing crises, stressing their marriages, making financial sacrifices, helping with homework, meeting with teachers, sharing in triumphs and setbacks, and often suffering what seems a brutal lack of appreciation -- culminating in the teen years when many children, defining selves, are particularly contemptuous of their parents. The deferred reward, if there is one, is a satisfying, mutually appreciative lifelong relationship with adult children and grandchildren. Yet many parents feel that after all the years of diligence and sacrifice, their grown children have little use for them.

So, as imminent empty-nesters, we began work in earnest on this book. We were fortunate to begin with an emotional vocabulary and a set of professional skills, Sharland as a clinical psychologist, Bob as a writer and editor. We also had a personal story with something of a gratifying happy ending -- or beginning -- in that our daughter was becoming a young woman of strong connections and good values, and our adult son had traversed childhood and come out not just whole, but emotionally available, self-aware, talented, and very good company. In early 1994, Sharland began researching the literature in several different fields, and conducting her own set of intergenerational interviews.

REUNION AND LOSS

Family Re-Union has turned out to be a different book than the one we set out to write, because our lives took an unexpected and tragic turn. In late 1994, we learned that Sharland had incurable, metastatic cancer. For three years, she remained mostly well and living an active life. The coming together in our own family would be more profound and abbreviated than we imagined.

Sharland continued the work on this book, as a research fellow at the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute. She continued seeing patients as a clinical psychologist. Remarkably, Sharland was able to integrate the reality of impending death into her work as a therapist, her role as a mother, wife, and friend, and as an author. Beyond the devastating tragedy that it was, her impending death became the basis for celebrating and more fully exploring life. She approached the last phase of her life not with dread, but with curiosity and engagement.

A month before her death, Sharland told an audience at Radcliffe, "If one is very lucky, a sense of foreshortened time can deepen relationships immeasurably. Although I did not anticipate an end-of-life stocktaking for another twenty-five or thirty years, I am able to see this process that I've been thinking about, reading about, researching, this process of how one comes to terms with one's children as adults, with new intensity and clarity. Mortality allows one to invite intimacy, if one dares look it in the eye. My own children are growing in the face of my impending death. I can see it, feel it. Most importantly, we can talk about it more openly than I would have thought possible. So there is one final paradox: death, oddly, can be a gift of enriched life."

Sharland's candid, exploratory manner of facing her illness and death also invited a profound family reunion. Her engagement with mortality, far too soon, became a quite unexpected chapter in the lifelong drama of attachment and separation in our family. Strangely enough, it was a realization, too briefly, of the yearnings behind the book. In wrestling with Sharland's impending death, each member of our immediate family got to know and respect and love each other more deeply, not just as parents and children but as people.

Although only one of us is composing the words of this particular paragraph, the book is still, emphatically, a joint endeavor. Major portions of this book are mostly Sharland's work. The narrative voice and wise insights are essence-of-Sharland and this is very much a loving collaboration, written in the first ...

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