So, Your Kid’s an Adult:
A Crash Course in
Navigating Your
College-Age Kid’s
Move Back Home
By Allison Crooks, Associate Marriage and Family Therapist &
Sally Gibbons, Associate Professional Clinical Counselor
Surprise! Your kids are back home. Apparently indefinitely. They’ve been grieving the loss of countless cherished facets of college life while they half-heartedly finish their classes online and conform grudgingly to social distancing and stay-at-home orders. They (and you) still have no idea what next year will hold.
You are trying to be understanding. You are trying to be encouraging. But you’re struggling with your own stress and anxiety as you work to adjust to this ever-changing extraordinary situation.
Accommodating a young adult child’s decision to live at home can be challenging in more normal times. In these unprecedented times, it requires still more compassion and creativity -- for and from you both -- to cope with the disruptions and uncertainties accompanying the move back home.
The good news is that the elements you need to navigate this terrain can help you forge a new, age-appropriate family dynamic that you will enjoy for years to come.
Here are some key considerations for charting this path:
Collaborate with Curiosity
One of the hardest shifts to make is to avoid reverting to old patterns -- patterns that made sense when we were parenting younger kids who needed our guidance and structures to stay safe and to grow.
Of course, everyone regresses: Not only do parents draw on their old parenting styles, but our children often find themselves behaving more like their adolescent selves as they rub up against restrictions that they had thought were finally lifted. We need to notice this in each other with compassion and then reset.
Be curious: In order to build mutual, respectful, and balanced relationships, we need curiosity about each other. Curiosity reminds us of our separateness. Who is this person who has come home from college? Who am I now with her? Who are we when we are together?
Reimagine relationships: To create new ways of interacting, families need to actively discuss boundaries, roles, and expectations. Here is where your curiosity and collaboration take center stage. You have before you a competent, educated young adult who has likely been practicing navigating roommate life for some time now. Set up a time to have a direct conversation about what works for them and for you.
Do it together: Approach this new task of reorganizing and redefining your family system as a team. You are in this together. Working to problem-solve this complicated dynamic from a position of curiosity, compromise, and mutual respect will help it feel that way.
Manage Conflict
While conflict is inevitable, the way we navigate and resolve our upsets and disagreements makes a huge difference in our overall experience. If we can approach conflicts directly, and from a place of curiosity about our own and others' experience, conflict can actually be a source of growth in our relationships.
Anticipate it: Start by working together when there is no conflict occurring to brainstorm areas where arguments or disagreements are likely to arise (e.g., differences in lifestyles, priorities, needs). Ask your adult child for their ideas and suggestions -- experience from their recent college life is worth learning from.
Develop a plan: Be proactive. Agree to raise difficult issues rather than letting them fester. Remember to choose a time when both parties have the energy and capacity to do so in a constructive way. Be mindful of others’ schedules and demands. Sometimes hard conversations might need to wait, and that’s okay.
Call a pause: Once we get activated, it takes our bodies (and that includes our brains) up to 20 minutes to settle into a place where we can productively re-engage with the issue. Everyone in the home has permission to call a pause and is responsible for recognizing when a conversation has become unproductive. A pause must ALWAYS include an agreement to return to the conversation once all are ready to do so. It’s about taking a moment, not about shutting down.
Draw the Curtains…
with Compassion and Creativity
We may not need literal curtains, but we need to create spaces to be apart. Before returning home, our adult kids had dorm rooms, dining halls, classrooms, and coffee shops that created spaces for self-exploration. You had more space, too. Although the social dimensions of these spaces are now sharply limited, the importance of respecting our kids’ and our own need for privacy remains.
Get out, under or behind: With everyone living on top of each other, we need to prioritize closing doors, taking walks, and creating privacy by repurposing spaces.
Practice compassion: We all need validation and understanding as we come to terms the scope of this unprecedented situation, including its losses and disappointments.
For your adult child: Remember the enormity of this move home. Friends typically provide vital support to our adult children in regulating and processing emotions. Our grown kids frequently ask themselves, “Am I capable?” They do so now unmoored from many go-to social supports and with their futures largely on hold and uncertain.
For you, the adult parent: Parents are experiencing their own extraordinary life shift. Stress and fear may be magnified by concerns about what we can’t control, about financial and personal losses and grief. You may have partners or parents of your own. Many familiar coping strategies are unavailable or limited and hopes for a new stage of life are on hold.
Take advantage of online resourcing tools:
Explore free resources that can help you regulate and reset, such as iChill app, Headspace, Calm, and Resilence and Emotional Video Series by UCSF
Utilize the resources you already know and love, like online versions of your favorite yoga, Pilates, or other exercise class via free online platforms (like these)
Find more support and resources here
Know that it's okay if this is hard -- because it is.
Remember that this too shall pass. Even if we can’t perfectly predict the “new normal,” we will return to work and school, retail and restaurants in some form.
The Reward: Family 2.0
Weathering the COVID19 pandemic with college-age kids indefinitely at home will call on everyone’s ability to collaborate with curiosity and compassion, to manage conflict, and to create spaces for privacy and self-care. When all is said and done, this situation, hard as it may be, is an opportunity to develop a new family dynamic that matches the changes in roles that have already begun to occur, and it supports developing relationships that will be satisfying and suited to new, grown families down the road.
You and your adult child would have been facing all of this eventually.
Here’s your crash course.
Meet the Authors
Allison Crooks, Associate Marriage and Family Therapist
Allison Crooks, AMFT 95633
Supervised by Stephanie Macadaan, LMFT
Allison Crooks is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, working with individuals, couples, and families in private practice near Beverly Hills, CA. Her areas of specialty include working with older children, teens, and parents. She has extensive training in areas of anxiety, depression, trauma, grief and loss, as well as parenting and child development. She has first-hand experience navigating the complicated dynamics of a college-aged child merging households with a parent.
Sarah (Sally) Gibbons, Associate Professional Clinical Counselor
Sarah (Sally) Gibbons, APPC 4111
Supervised by Michele Conklin Montrone, LMFT 83523
Sarah (Sally) Gibbons is an Associate Professional Clinical Counselor offering trauma-informed therapy with a focus on anxiety and depression. She works in private practice near West Los Angeles, CA and in a community mental health setting at the Southern California Counseling Center. She also holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University and has taught undergraduates for over two decades. Sally is the mother of a twenty-two year old daughter.