Parents and their young adult kids have a lot in common.
- On the positive side, they love each other, both want the young adult to be happy and successful, and both want the transition to adulthood to go smoothly.
- On the other side, both parties experience stress and anxiety and feel stuck or stalled in the transition process.
Stalled adult children are anxious and depressed because they are not moving forward, but see their peers engaged in college, finding work and careers, or getting married. This causes parents to be anxious and depressed. By the way, anxiety and depression are close relatives or often different sides of the same coin. Anxious people are depressed that they are anxious, and depressed people are anxious that they will never get over the depression.
Anxiety is Contagious
Anxiety is contagious, and sometimes it’s unclear where this originates. I worked with a neurodivergent, Asperger’s young man with ADHD, desiring to learn to drive. His mother would get into the driver’s seat and ask him if he wanted to practice driving on his permit. He sensed her anxiety, bordering on fear of him getting behind the wheel, and immediately opted out of the offer. This allowed both parties to relax but delayed this son’s transition to greater independence. This mother and father found a friend from church to teach their son to drive, and he passed his driver’s license test on the first try. The lesson is that both parents and adult children need to manage or reduce the level of anxiety for the sake of both parties.
Practice This Breathing Technique
In the last ten years, I have developed a technique that involves a certain way of breathing that can pull down the anxiety and help both parents and adult children calm down. By the way, once one’s pulse gets over 100, we are not thinking straight, and our amygdala, the fight, flight, or freeze part of our brain, takes over. Recently, I worked with a young adult son and his single mother to teach them this breathing technique. The following five-minute video will explain this technique:
If you like this and it makes sense in reducing your anxiety, please practice it routinely so you have it available when your anxiety starts to rise. Finally, watch this together with your adult child and discuss how it might help both of you reduce your anxiety and allow for a calm discussion of how to move forward, both in the parents’ letting go and the adult child stepping up to become more self-sufficient and independent. If they prefer to watch it alone, that’s fine. Maybe follow with a discussion of how you may each use this technique.
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