A new book focuses on caring for "difficult adult children."
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 | | Eleanor Davis |
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"A mother's internalized mandate to protect her child does not end when her children are grown" |
We have a mainstream directive for raising children in our society: You provide them with support, shelter and care until they're 18, and then they're supposed to be, more or less, self-sufficient, launched into the world as adults. This framework leaves out millions of parents whose children struggle with substance abuse or mental illness, who may be providing active care to their adult children for the rest of their lives. |
A new book, "Difficult: Mothering Challenging Adult Children through Conflict and Change," by Judith R. Smith, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Social Service at Fordham, seeks to define and explore this often painful type of parenting. An estimated 8.4 million Americans care for "an adult with an emotional or mental health issue," according to a 2016 report from the National Alliance for Caregiving, and 45 percent of mental health caregivers are caring for an adult child. |
For "Difficult," Smith writes, she spoke to 50 mothers of adult children who were not fully independent, who had issues from severe mental illness to persistent unemployment. All of these mothers were over 60, and many were also dealing with their own declining physical and emotional health. Smith writes that half the women she spoke to were doing this with incomes under $17,000 a year for a family of two. |
"My research revealed that a mother's internalized mandate to protect her child does not end when her children are grown," Smith writes, and she outlines the stigma and worry they feel about their children's problems. She seeks to lessen this stigma for parents, more and more of whom will be in the same situation as her book's subjects in the coming years, with young adults increasingly reporting mental health issues, particularly during the pandemic, and the opioid crisis continuing to take lives. |
There is very little social support for these parents and their children: According to the National Alliance for Caregiving, the majority of adult caregivers have trouble getting services for their loved ones like day programs or peer support, and close to half say they struggle to find treatment for substance abuse. Just as for younger children, mothers are spackling over every gap in the system, sometimes destroying themselves in the process. Sixty-two percent of parents who are caregivers for adult children say their caregiving role has made their own health worse. |
I spoke to Smith about how she chose the term "difficult adult children" to refer to this population, what can be done to help caregivers and their children in the near term and why it's important for all parents to come to terms with their own ambivalence, because it is normal to have mixed feelings about our roles. The following conversation has been edited and condensed. |
Jessica Grose: Tell me about the choice to use the term "difficult adult children," and what it means for the mothers in your book. |
Judith Smith: As I was doing my research, one friend said, "No, no, no, you can't use that word. It's pejorative." But as I say in the book, this is how difficult is defined: It's something hard to do, it's something hard to manage, and it's something hard to understand… |
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