GRAND Magazine - July/August 2017 - 38

grand life
Reality check: no one likes to be questioned or parented as an adult.
Your adult child is learning and navigating their own
path. They need to be empowered by their mistakes
and live their own life. Truth be told, so do you.

Life in Three Phases: Child,
Parent, Grandparent

We often see our adult children as we've always
seen them, whether they're 13 or 30 or 50. We feel
like we have to guide our children or we assume they
might not know "how" to parent without our advice.
We see them making the same mistakes we made,
maybe we even hear our own voice in theirs-and it
makes us cringe. At our age, we may feel we see things
more clearly because we've gained an outside perspective-and we may not like the view.

Are you overstepping
your boundaries and taking
power away from your kids
as parents?

38 GRAND

JULY AUGUST 2017

Many of us want to "help" because we're trying to
fulfill something deep within ourselves-our deepest yearnings aren't being met. Our yearnings are our
deepest human needs. We yearn to love, to be loved,
and to be heard. We may simply yearn to matter. So
instead of addressing our deep desires and striving to
find our own purpose, we commandeer the lives of our
children and grandchildren.
When we offer unsolicited advice-no matter how
helpful we think we are, we're likely actually disempowering our adult children. We must ask ourselves if our
actions take away their autonomy. Do we make them
feel like we don't believe they can do it on their own? If
we put them on the defensive, they might pull back or
start to put up walls.

In our youth phase, we're discovering ourselves and
making mistakes. Those mistakes are what build us into
fully formed adults.
When we reach the adult or parenting stage, we
shift focus from ourselves to a tiny being. From the
moment we strap our baby in that car seat and leave
the hospital (wondering, "How on Earth are they letting
me take this tiny baby home?!"), we're focused on nurturing, protecting, growing, creating and parenting.
We have to figure out how to haul kids back and
forth to school, soccer practice, and swim lessons. We
have to get dinner on the table and figure out the
work-life balance. This immense responsibility in the
parent phase can be hard to shake when we move into
the grandparent phase.

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Relationships experts, world-class
coaches, and best-selling authors,
Dr. Judith and Dr. Bob Wright
are co-founders of the Wright
Foundation for the Realization of
Human Potential and The Wright
Graduate University and authors of
The Heart of the Fight

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GRAND Magazine - July/August 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of GRAND Magazine - July/August 2017