Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Welcome back to another conversation in the Parenting with Impact podcast. Diane Dempster and Elaine Taylor-Klaus here today. It’s almost January now. We have now been very actively supporting parents of young adults or emerging adults for three years.

We did our first four-week group in January of 2021. We opened it up to 25 parents, and we ended up running three groups for 75 parents because the need was so huge.

Then we started a coaching group for parents of young adults, and we now have two groups for parents of young adults.

Diane Dempster: By the time we record this, we may have three.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: We've run multiple four-week classes in addition to these ongoing groups. This is a big topic in our community. But we also do lots of support for parents of younger kids.

Diane Dempster: Parents told me all the time, “I want to know what it's like when they get older. I'm already worried about college and after college.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Parents of young adults often tell us, “I wish I knew this stuff 10 years ago.” So don’t tune us out.

Diane Dempster: I was thinking, when we first met at the International ADHD Conference in 2010, we were talking about the fact that there was not a lot of help out there for parents, period. Look how far we've come. But there is still work to do.

When we were at the International Conference in November, we noticed nobody except for us was really focused on these young adults. There are a lot of people focusing on elementary-aged kids and teens.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: But we’re here to help, which is why we are hosting a one-day virtual conference later in January. It's called Back on Track.

Finding experts to participate in this summit has been really difficult. There's not a lot of support out there for the young adults who are not yet on track or needing to get back on track.

There's not a lot of support for the parents and the guardians and the grandparents and even the providers who are supporting them.

Diane Dempster: The support is different, right. Parents come to us and say, “What do you mean, your program is for parents of kids from four to 44? How could that possibly be right?” That's one of the things I love about our work; we're teaching change management.

We're teaching coaching tools; we're teaching things that you can apply in virtually any context in any challenge in any family in any situation. It's not about the formula. It's about how do you make change happen, whether you're trying to make change happen with your kids living under your roof, or you're trying to make change with your 30-year-old living halfway across the country whose rent you're spending more on than you wish you were?

We're still talking about change management, neurodiversity and formed change management, and about your role as the parent. We're not focused on what do you with your kid; we're focused on what are you doing with you? That's what makes this special and unique and amazing,

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And complicated and challenging. But here's the larger context to this because we're doing a lot of work in this arena. We're supporting parents. We're living it ourselves. Then we're also figuring it out. Between the two of us, our kids range from 22 to 38. kay.

We’re walking the talk. Sometimes we're getting it right. Sometimes we're missing the mark. Sometimes we have those great conversations, and sometimes we’re not quite sure how to navigate this issue with this particular kid.

Diane Dempster: We might even lose our cool sometimes.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: But this is about us, not about them. What do we as parents need to be effective for kids who are no longer under 21?

Diane Dempster: Some of you may have 18-year-olds. They consider themselves grown up, or you consider them grown up. I remember when we first started teaching Saturday school, and we were talking about the tone of the home.

We were talking about what you want your kids to remember when they're 33 years old. What is it that you want to be the core of the relationship? We want to be able to have adult-ish relationships with our kids. Yes, you might figure out that you don't really like your kids, even though you love your kids.

I remember having conversations with friends about that with about their parents. What do you want at the core of the relationship? What does that mean for the stuff of life that you have to handle?

Most of our kids are complex, and we're going to need to spend some of our time dealing with the stuff of life, not just celebrating birthdays and holidays and things like that.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yes, and I do want to go back, because I don't want to leave what you said hanging, which was some people may feel like maybe we don't like the kids as much. Some of us may find the opposite.

The older they get, the more I like them, the more interesting they become. One of the reasons I had a third kid is because somebody said to me, “If I knew how much fun my kids would be as adults, I would have had more.”

Sometimes it can be really frustrating because they have their own thoughts, their own lives. I'm no longer able to shape their lives the way I once was. It's also kind of fascinating to see who they are and who they're becoming, to really see them emerge.

Diane Dempster: It's about helping them to emerge. It's about letting them be independent adults. The tools that most of us use, particularly when we've got neurodivergent kids, are more of those director/collaborative leadership, setting-the-pace tools.

But those don’t work as well when your kid doesn't live under the same roof as you do, or if they’re at college, or even if they're a grown-up living at home. Those are the three scenarios I hear about most frequently, and we're talking a little bit about all three of those.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: It's about communicating. It's about having important conversations without defensiveness. There needs to be receptivity.

Diane Dempster: Part of that is figuring out the important conversations and what you know. One of the things we talked about is what role you have. If you've got an adult kid, right, you might still be their landlord. Or you might still be their roommate. Or you might still be helping them with their finances. We talk about agreements all the time.

There may be realistic agreements to put in the context of those, but I remember really distinctly when my oldest, who is now almost 39, was 21, living with us, and I would say, “Okay, I'd like you to at least let me know if you're not going to spend the night, so if I wake up at three in the morning, and I don't notice your car in the driveway, I know you're somewhere safe.”

But I couldn't say, “You can't sleep over at somebody else's house.” He was a grown-up. He had to live his own life. We had to figure out how to be better roommates.

I had parents the other day whose kid cooks dinner at two in the morning. It might bother somebody that they're banging pots and pans around at two in the morning. That's probably not a very healthy roommate relationship. But that doesn't mean you have to make your kid go to bed.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I’ve had that conversation with at least two different parents or grandparents in the coaching groups: how do you navigate with the kid without wanting to control their lifestyle but still make sure that it's respectful and not disruptive to others in the household? That’s one of the conversations.

Diane Dempster: When it comes to things like sleep, a lot of us have night-owl kids, and they're up at all hours. We can see that is causing problems for them, but they have to decide that it's causing problems with them before they start changing their behaviors.

If we're terrified that they're not getting enough sleep, and that's causing problems, we're going to handle it very differently than if we are saying, “This person gets to decide what their schedule is going to be.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: What that leads me to is what I would call an enrollment conversation. When our kids are younger, and we see a behavior that's concerning or may need to change, we still have some authority to say, “This is something you might want to work on.”

When kids are older, there's a way to say, “This is going to be important for you to have a handle on before you leave before you leave home, because you're going to have to do it independently.” We have to have that conversation a little bit differently.

The term that's coming to me is enrolling. We want to figure out ways to be able to enroll our kids into making conscious choices for themselves and healthy choices for themselves. They not choose what we would choose. But the starting point is to get them to make a conscious choice at all.

Diane Dempster: When I was in my 20s, I dated someone who worked the third shift. He would get up at eight o'clock at night. We'd go on a date. I'd come home I go to bed and he'd go to work. He slept all day while I was at work, and it worked out actually kind of well.

But he wasn't unhealthy. He had blackout shades. He did all this stuff to make sure that he was getting sleep. It was a conscious choice. If your kids are saying, “Hey, this is working for me,” and you’re scared, that’s not the right way.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: You shouldn't do it that way. We talk a lot with parents of young adults about their agendas, and supporting them in their agendas and helping them even figure out what their agenda is. A lot of times, they don't really know.

My eldest is 29 and came to me recently and asked for some help. I tried to give a lot of space and latitude and, and so I created the space that they could come and ask for help and invite me in to working with them.

But they wanted me to step out pretty quick. It wasn't, “Come in and stay.” It was, “I need a little help here. Get me on the track here and then back off again.”

Diane Dempster: That's really what the champion is designed to do: jump in, help them get back on their feet, and then let them go again. It's not always easy if our kids aren't grounded in the first place. Our kids may not want us to be involved.

The focus in the work becomes, “How do I begin to make this creative and create the space for this person to be willing to get help, whether it's from me or from somebody else?” 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I think kids often struggle with not wanting us to over-direct but also maybe not knowing what they need, or maybe needing help and not knowing how to ask.

Again, it's all about relationship. These are often kids who need a win. We talked about that with little kids, but it's every bit as true with young adults. They need a success. They need to see a glimmer of hope. When I listen to success stories in our community, usually there is one shift, one transition point one, something where a young adult started to gain some traction in one area that opened the possibility to ask for help in other areas.

A lot of them feel scared and hopeless. There’s a real need for their own sense of hope and possibility. Often, they feel like they're not doing what the world thinks they're supposed to do. They're not sure what it is, and they kind of get lost so they need to at least have that first step on a path. What's coming up?

Diane Dempster: It's like the string space approach, but it's about grabbing the opportunity as a premium as parents. It's like noticing the opportunity and stepping into the opportunity. I have a client whose kiddo was home, having left college and struggling to get a job.

One of the things the kid loved to do was cook. This became a thing between mom and this young adult. They would go to the grocery store together once a week and take turns planning the menus. This kid was really good at it, so then that person feels the strengths.

It builds the relationship which gave them the permission to talk about the other stuff because they were in a better space mentally, and they had established a relationship in a way that really enabled mom to have a different kind of conversation with them because it wasn't mom harping all the time. It was actually a relationship. This is what we say all the time. I’ve got to have a relationship first.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: It always comes back to relationships because relationships are the foundation of trust. I'm sure after a dozen years on some level, we have fallen out of trust with our kids. They've fallen out of trust with us, and they've fallen out of trust with themselves.

Absolutely. A lot of parenting emerging adults is about finding a place where we can trust them again, in in creating a relationship where they can trust us again, and then beginning to invite them to trust themselves. Because that's the access point for them.

Diane Dempster: The double-edged sword in that lane is that parents of kids in high school are feeling the clock ticking. Parents in our group have spent six months just focusing on the relationship. And it's hard, because you think, “What do you mean, I’ve got to spend a year watching my kids play video games and doing nothing?

Simple sleeping all night.” We're not saying that. But if you don't have the relationship, you can't inspire change. You do have to take the time, whether it's a month or two months, to maybe back off and really figure out how do I recover from this relationship? You all know that my favorite tool is transparency.

Maybe you say to your kid, “You know what, I've been harping on you. I'm scared about what's going on. And I'm sorry, and I just want to figure out how to be in a relationship with each other so that I can better support you.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Transparency is a huge one that comes up so often. We do success stories for the podcast, and when I've asked some of these parents to be on the podcast, very often, their first response is, “Well, I don't feel like a success story.”

Diane Dempster: Because their kids are not fully there yet.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: They’re not fully there and independent. But then once we start talking about it, they see how the relationship is better because communication is better. The kid is participating in the home better.

They may not be grown and flown, but there is progress. We just have to remember to slow down and look at the incremental progress and not just look to the outcome.

Diane Dempster: This is one of those places that are hard because we're talking about wanting our kids to be out there living on their own, so we do have that milestone in mind. It's a great reminder to go back and look at the process, not the outcome over and over and over again, because you're going to get exhausted if you're waiting for that one magic day.

It'll come. Ideally, for most of us, it will come. My first one was about 28 when things started to click and get into place.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Sometimes there were areas where I would see kids really moving forward and then regressing in others, and they're still doing that well into their 20s.

I we have one family where the kid is back home after dealing with significant issues and challenges and addiction and their parents are figuring out how to support them. There are a lot of things that could lead to that kind of forward, back, forward, back, forward back.

Diane Dempster: I've got one parent who has their college-age one under control, and suddenly their 33-year-old older sibling is having a moment in their life where they're really struggling. The cool thing is, they've got the tools, and they know how to do it, and it's just It's just frustrating because they thought this kid was doing okay, and they're not. I think that they are now are doing okay.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: We often talk about progress like a spiral. We're spiraling forward, and sometimes we're on the upswing and sometimes we're on the downswing, but we're moving forward when we stay in connection. We need to wrap this conversation.

I want to recap what I heard, I've heard of a strength-based approach. These kids need a win, process over outcome, the importance of transparency. For those of you in our community, we're kind of recapping some of the tools that we teach.

Diane Dempster: Be clear about your role and about putting the relationship first. Be clear about understanding what your role is. It's focusing on influencing change rather than leading change. There's the slight difference there, but ultimately, these are adults.

You can put boundaries and controls and things like that in place, theoretically, and sometimes that stuff works. But sometimes it really doesn't. It just depends on your family dynamic.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I made a lot of choices my parents would have had me make differently. My kids make choices that I would have had them make differently. When my mother says something to me, my response is usually, “What do you want me to do, Mom? It's their life, right?”

Sometimes we have to remember, even though they're our kids, they're their own adults. They're still their own independent, separate adults with their own ideas, their own agency, their own lives to live. Our job isn't to get them to live it the way we think they should live it.

Our job is to help them live it to the best capacity they can for what they want, and to invite them to be conscious about how they live their lives.

Diane Dempster: They're adults, but yes, they're 30% behind their peers in terms of some areas of their executive function development. That makes it hard, so let's not pretend that this stuff is easy, because it's not.

That's why we have the groups we have, because this stuff is hard to navigate. You absolutely can do it if you do it consciously, so that they can begin to do things consciously.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: All right, my friends. Happy 2024 to you! We hope this is a year of peace, relationship, and connection. And we hope you'll join us for the summit in a couple of weeks for the one-day virtual conference. And anything else I...

Diane Dempster: You know, thanks for what you're doing for yourself and for your kids. At the end of the day, you make the difference. Take care, everybody.