Avoiding ‘Enabling’ Your Adult Child
See also: Meeting Your Adult Child’s PartnerIt is natural for parents to want to look after and protect their children. After all, that’s what you do from the moment that they are born. However, as they reach adulthood, there is a point at which protecting can turn to stifling, and support becomes enabling unhealthy behaviours that prevent them from maturing as adults.
Our page on Increasing Independence explains that children need to grow up and become independent from their parents. It is a necessary part of life, and part of the role of parents is to teach independence. We all know, however, that it is hard to see your child struggle—and many parents may step in to help when perhaps they should be stepping back. This page explains more about what is meant by ‘enabling’ and how you can avoid it with your adult child.
What is Enabling?
Defining enabling
enabling, n. a process whereby someone (i.e., the enabler) contributes to continued maladaptive or pathological behavior (e.g., child abuse, substance abuse) in another person. The enabler is typically an intimate partner or good friend who passively permits or unwittingly encourages this behavior in the other person; often, the enabler is aware of the destructiveness of the person’s behavior but feels powerless to prevent it.
APA Dictionary of Psychology
Enabling is therefore defined as permitting or even encouraging unhelpful or destructive behaviour in another.
As the box above shows, it is most often used in situations of abuse, particularly substance abuse. It describes behaviours where someone allows their partner access to the substance that they abuse because it avoids conflict, or because they feel powerless to stop them.
However, the term is also used for parents who ‘baby’ their adult children into adulthood, and don’t allow them to develop the skills they need to solve their own problems. They are enabling lack of maturity, and development of a sense of dependency and often entitlement. Other terms used for this are ‘over-parenting’ and ‘helicopter parenting’.
It happens because it is natural for parents to want to support their children.
The problem arises when ‘support’ goes too far. Instead of helping, you are holding your child back.
When you jump in to solve your child’s problems, and don’t let them work out their own solutions, you send them the message that you don’t believe they are competent. This is powerful, especially from a parent (and for more about this, you may be interested in our page on Transactional Analysis). However good your intentions, you are setting them up to believe that they can’t cope—and eventually this becomes reality.
It is therefore important to move from enabling to empowering your children to address and solve their own problems, and become responsible, independent adults.
Identifying Enabling
There are some helpful signs that you may be either enabling, or at risk of enabling, your adult child. They include:
They always bring problems straight to you, before trying to solve them themselves—and you always jump in to help.
You never let your child experience the consequences of their own actions. You want to protect them from harm, and so you help them—but this means that they never learn from experience because their actions never have any impact on them.
You are constantly having to help your adult child out of financial crises, and they never seem to learn how to manage money.
-
They are still living at home, having never moved out, beyond the age of about 25. This is not the same as ‘boomerang kids’, who move back home after a period of living independently, and who plan to move out again within a fairly defined period.
You are still paying for their car or phone after the age of about 25.
They don’t have a job. They may either find it hard to keep a job for some reason, or show little interest in getting one.
You find yourself making sacrifices so that you can help them, and may be overwhelmed by the need to help them.
They demand your help, and seem to feel that they are entitled to your time, money and attention.
You worry about doing anything in case it upsets them.
Problems Caused by Enabling
It should be clear from this list that enabling is bad news for you as the parent.
It drains your physical, financial and emotional resources, and may even make you resent your child, so self-care for parents is essential.
However, it is also bad for your child.
Enabling behaviour means that they become comfortable relying on you, instead of on themselves. This means that they will struggle to manage once you are no longer there. At some point, they will have to do things for themselves—and they are likely to find that they don’t have the skills they need. Even just taking care of themselves in simple ways, like cooking, cleaning and doing laundry, may be a struggle.
Enabling behaviour can also be bad for your child’s mental and physical health. It is not healthy to rely exclusively on other people as an adult. They may not have the resilience to manage when life knocks them about. They may become anxious when they need to solve problems alone.
It is therefore important that you avoid any enabling behaviour.
It is ideal never to start—but it is also never too late to stop.
Stopping Enabling
The first step to stopping any enabling behaviour is to understand that it is unhealthy for both of you.
One helpful way is to think about the long-term consequences of your enabling.
It may seem that you should help to avoid conflict now, or help them out of a hole. However, what are the longer term consequences of your help? Consider whether you are teaching them the right skills—that is, the skills that will help them to thrive as adults—or the wrong ones, about depending on others for ever.
After all, you don’t stop being a parent just because your child becomes an adult—and it is still part of your role to help them grow and develop.
The second step is to be clear that stopping this behaviour will not be easy.
Your adult child is not going to find this easy. They may not want to cooperate with you, especially if your enabling has been going on for a while and they are comfortable with the situation.
It is therefore essential that you explain what you are doing and why. You need to give them the information about how you are enabling them, and that you want to stop for everyone’s good.
Third, you need to set clear boundaries for behaviours that you will not support any more.
You need to be clear about what is not acceptable, and what help and support will still be available. For example, you might say that you are no longer going to provide money, but that you are available to provide advice, or talk through options with them. You may even want to set limits on how much you are prepared to talk with them about each particular problem as it arises.
Our page on Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Child may help here.
Top tip: Small steps
Remember that you don’t have to stop all support immediately.
Instead, you can help them to move towards independence just as you would with a younger child (and our page on Increasing Independence may be helpful here).
For example, don’t make a phone call for them, but do talk through what they might say by asking them questions about what information they will need to convey, and what the other person might reply.
Don’t throw them out on the street, but do ask them to make a contribution to the household budget and/or general running as an intermediate step towards living independently.
This support is no longer enabling, but empowering.
Fourth, you need to hold to those boundaries once declared.
It is important to understand that there is likely to be resistance, even if your child has agreed the boundaries with you.
It is really important that you keep to your boundaries, because one slip will tell your child that you are vulnerable. Just like a toddler having a tantrum, they will keep applying the pressure until you give in if they think there is even a small possibility.
You will probably need to keep reminding them that it is for their own good as well as yours.
Top tip: use a holding response
Develop a holding response to demands.
For example, instead of saying yes or no immediately, say “I need to think about this. I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”
This gives you time to decide exactly what you are going to say, and remember why holding to your boundary is important. It also avoids you being emotionally manipulated in the short term.
Finally, be clear that you can’t control their behaviour.
You can only control your own. Setting boundaries is about what you are prepared to accept, and how you respond, not about controlling them.
A Final Thought: Moving From Enabling to Empowering
Moving from enabling to empowering may seem like a very small step.
However, it is a crucial one. It marks the point at which you move from giving them all the answers to helping them to work out their own solution. Eventually, they won’t even need you involved, and you will have broken away from enabling altogether.