There are always reasons and intentions behind the actions we take, even if we aren’t aware of them. Many of them are subconscious or done as second nature because we’ve done those same actions for years, while others may be deeply rooted in our wants or anxieties, since desire and aversion are two of the most potent forces that govern our actions.
As such, if you find that you can’t stop helping your adult children, even when they don’t need (or possibly want) your help or they would benefit from becoming more self-sufficient, there are some very real psychological reasons why this keeps happening. Understanding them can help you decide whether it’s time to take a step back and how to go about doing that.
1. Your identity is tied to being their parent and caregiver.
Essentially, it might be that you don’t know who you are outside of being their parent. It’s possible that your sense of self has revolved around being a parent for so long that you don’t remember what it’s like to exist outside of that identity. This is especially common in large families, where parents have been caregiving for well over 20 years or more.
It’s been so long since you focused on anything other than parenting that it’s difficult for you to extricate yourself from that path. Helping your adult children isn’t just second nature to you so much as it is the foundation of your daily life, so it barely occurs to you to do otherwise. And it’s understandably incredibly difficult to break free from a habit that has governed your daily life for this long.
2. You have a lack of faith in their autonomy because you still see them as adolescents.
My former partner’s parents are truly wonderful people who would do anything to help their adult children. Unfortunately, they still treat them *as* children, and still call them “kids” even though they’re in their 40s and 50s, respectively. They’ll still remind their kids to send their relatives Christmas and birthday cards, call or text to ask if they’ve taken their vitamins and had regular dental visits, and so on.
Many people will forever see their offspring as perpetual eight-year-olds, but that can be difficult for everyone involved in this situation. In your zeal to help take care of your adult children and help them live the happiest, easiest, and most successful life possible, you may be infantilizing them and preventing them from maturing into autonomous adults.
Furthermore, if you have perfectionist tendencies, you may feel that you’re the only one who’s capable of doing things the “right” way and can’t trust your children to do so on their own.
3. You’re hardwired to take care of other people’s problems for them
I was discussing something with a friend of mine the other day, and came to a rather poignant epiphany, which I expressed to her as this:
“My family made me carry burdens that were never mine to shoulder, so as I aged, my back formed in such a way that others saw fit to pile responsibility onto it.”
Psychology calls it parentification, and if you grew up in a similar dynamic, you may have also been taught from an early age that it was your duty to fix other people’s problems as they arise.
As a result, when your adult children struggle with life’s many challenges, you feel obligated to step in to carry them. It may not even occur to you to let them learn how to handle these problems: you simply see them as assigned to you by extension, so your children’s struggles are yours as well.
4. You want your child to succeed by any means necessary.
It isn’t necessary fear that drives many parents’ actions so much as a strong desire to see their child succeed in their endeavors. This may be especially true if you’ve supported their journey up until now, seeing their anxieties about potential failure, and their dedication to pursuing their goals.
As a result, it may be that the reason you can’t seem to stop helping them now is that your life purpose has become inextricable from their own. Instead of pursuing your own goals, you’ve aligned your purpose with theirs. If they fail, so do you. And if they succeed, then you’re succeeding right alongside them.
5. You’re making up for perceived missteps or neglect in the past.
There are countless reasons why a parent may feel that they didn’t do their best when their kids were young. Some parents suffer from severe post-partum depression that prevents them from bonding the way they’d like to, while others may have struggled with physical or mental health issues, chronic illness, financial woes, or other troubles during their children’s childhoods.
If you feel that you weren’t present enough, patient enough, generous enough, or any other type of “enough” when your children were little, you may be over-compensating now that you’re in a place where you’re able to do so.
Psychologically, in a situation like this, the help you’re offering may have little to do with them and is more about making you feel better about your own perceived shortcomings in the past.
Your kids may have expressed the fact that they don’t need or want help anymore, and you might have interpreted that as rejection or ingratitude, when in reality, you’re all just on different pages as far as intent and understanding.
6. You’re worried that you might be made redundant if you don’t.
If you were raised to believe that your value to others depends upon your usefulness to them, you may worry that your adult children will discard you if you stop doing things that benefit or otherwise help them. Maybe others have treated you that way in the past, and you assume that even though you’re their parent, your kids may end up doing the same as soon as you’re no longer useful to them.
These fears may be even more intense if you have grandchildren. On some level, you may worry that you’ll lose access to them if you don’t keep helping their parents, as if your own children would punish you by denying you visitation rights.
7. You’re irrationally afraid that something bad might happen to them if you don’t.
Many of our responses aren’t necessarily rational ones. Psychology has taught us that people can have unfounded fears or phobias for a wide variety of reasons, such as a friend of mine who’s terrified of butterflies because she’s afraid of being blinded by the dust on their wings. True story.
It’s possible that when your children were younger, your anxiety about their well-being caused you to have irrational fears about what might happen if you didn’t do a particular thing.
For instance, you may have become superstitious about cutting their food a certain way in case they choked — even when they were older — or worrying about hoodie strings choking them in their teens, etc. These fears may not be based in any kind of reality, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel real to you.
8. You’ve always fixed everything for them, and that’s still hardwired.
If it’s one thing psychology has taught us, it’s that learned thoughts and behaviors are hard to change once they’re ingrained. Neurons that fire together, wire together after all, which basically just means the more you do something, the stronger the connections for that action become in your brain, until they’re basically an automatic habit.
As such, if you’re out in public and a small child yells “mom!” or “dad!”, you may automatically look to see what’s needed because you were programmed to respond that way for so long. You spent years attending to your child’s every need, from cuts and bruises that needed cleaning to demands for snacks, help with glue incidents, or night terrors that needed soothing.
You’ve gotten so accustomed to being the “fixer” in their lives that you continue that role even though your children are now fully grown. Any need of theirs instantly reactivates that instinct in your brain, and you’ll run to their aid before you even realize it’s happening.
Final thoughts…
It’s noble and lovely for parents to want to help their adult children, especially when they’re struggling with the rising cost of living and a seemingly endless number of life stresses. The key is to recognize whether you’re helping them for their own benefit or for yours, as well as whether they’ve asked for help and appreciate your efforts.
If they’ve expressed to you that you’re overstepping, or you feel that you’re giving more than you’re capable of right now, take a step back. You’ll find a healthy balance with them again when the time is right.
