Asking because I just sat through a family feud within earshot at a local coffee joint. Parents giving advice to son, who looked 30ish, all quite civil, full of the ‘can I speak for a minute’, ‘your minute is up’ and so on, with some ‘when we were your age’ and ‘you must/ will learn’ etc. Mum ended with ‘i don’t have to justify anything to you’.
My dad stopped once I got out of high school, but mum seems to chime in from time to time. I’m well into my middle age.
When should parents stop parenting and just let the kid fail/ thrive on their own? I just feel sometimes the parents are the problem, regardless of good intentions.
Yeah.
Generally my wife and I keep the, “oh crap is this going to be a shitshow” conversations between ourselves.
The only way the kids get a reaction beyond a raised eyebrow and an amused smile is if the fuck up in question is going to push the limits of my ability to fix.
If it goes beyond $1000, they might get a “what the fuck?!?” out of me, but it’s more in the nature of a momentary loss of control and is really just what my body does while my brain is trying to figure out how to cover it. However, if they fucked up, they already know it. If they fucked up by ignoring my advice, they know that too. There’s no need to rehash it.
Generally, the biggest problem I have is they want to be independent, so they tend to try to keep their problems to themselves until they grow too big to deal with.
If you ask my mom, she’d say I do the same thing.