The Nest Is Never Empty
Tips for Parenting Your Adult Children

Letting Go of Guilt

Guilt.  It can be wonderful in bringing truth and righteousness and justice to the surface.  But it can also haunt us as parents of grown children.

Let’s be honest.  All parents make mistakes in raising our children.  We can be too tough and not tender enough or too tender and not tough enough.  We can be too quick or too slow to act.  Rarely do we have all the facts when we react to help us act precisely right.

This means that mistakes were made and in the future we cannot let those mistakes cripple our child or our relationship with our child.

Here are some things to consider when guilt for the past creeps in.

1. Reasonable – what is a reasonable response that helps me feel free and lets my grown offspring be accountable for current behavior.
   
2. Responsible – even if our children have a less than perfect upbringing, when they become adults they are responsible for their own maturity.  If our addictions to gambling, alcohol, sex or something else negatively influenced them, we need to apologize for bad decisions, ask for forgiveness and go forward.  Once you have made amends, don’t let it cripple you or give excuses to them.
   
3. Change – Once the child becomes ‘of age’, he or she must be the driver of change.  Some have more to overcome than others, but it is still possible.  The world is filled with people who grew up with disadvantages but ended up strong.  So admit error, ask for forgiveness and encourage change in your grown children.  As Stockman and Graves rightly say, “We must refuse to allow the adult adolescent to make us carry the past as his/her excuse for the present.”

My parents had two issues that caused them to overprotect my sister and it ended up causing her to be less than fully responsible on some adult issues.  One, my father was the youngest of three, so he always favored her because she was the youngest.  However, it caused her not to be tough and scrap for her place in the world.  Two, my sister had pneumonia as a teen and this produced some kind of ‘guilt’ in them so they overprotected her.  Again, she learned to live of off others and not be responsible for herself.

My hope for you is that guilt from past mistakes, once acknowledged, will not cause you to be crippled or to cripple them.  Clear it up and go on.

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