There are a lot of questions that I get repeatedly and one of those questions I get is how
to be a good parent to young adults because people are struggling with that. They know
how to handle things when the child is fully dependent upon them but what about
when they're not, how do you help them then? I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach all about parenting,
good communication, relationships all through the lens of self-government
all around the world and in this video we're going to be talking about helping
our young adults and still being a parent figure in their life while letting them go it alone too.
I have four children and my youngest one is 17. He is a senior in high school so he is just getting
ready to launch into adulthood himself, which means that all of my children are actually in the age
range of young adult at this time and I have learned a lot on this journey of raising young
adults. Now I didn't learn all of the lessons that I'm going to be teaching you on my own children.
For many years, I raised treatment foster children, they were all between the ages of 12 and 18 and I
ended up graduating many of them into adulthood and helping them see themselves through some
of those bumps called adult life as well. So I've learned a lot of things along the way and in this
video I'm going to share with you four mistakes that you don't want to make followed by the four
things you do want to do and I'm going to use my children as examples because each of them taught
me a valuable lesson. When I list the mistakes, I'll say don't do this, when I list what should happen
and the lessons that are going to be good for you to learn, I'm going to say do do this. So number
one, don't step completely back and just let them run their whole life without you being involved
at all. Their prefrontal cortexes, the part in the front of the brain that does all of their logical
processing is not fully developed until they are between the ages of 18 and 25 years old. This is
all through those years of young adulthood that that prefrontal cortex is putting all the final
touches on that logical development that they need for success in their life. This means they're gonna
have to bounce things off you from time to time so don't do that thing where you say well you're 18,
get out, don't call me again, live a nice life because then you're putting your child
at a disadvantage. What you should do is establish roles and how you will communicate with each other
now that your child has reached adulthood and you are no longer the primary caretaker for
that child. So when my oldest child, Quinn, finally reached this adulthood time where he was going to
live independently on his own and do all of the adult things, I realized that we needed to have
a new plan for our relationship. So up until that point, I was the one who told him oh Quinn do this,
okay don't do this and then I kind of guided him through things you know. I mean I wasn't
telling him everything, we were working him up toward adulthood but I definitely maintained a
leadership you know role with everything that was happening at home. Well now he was
going to be going off and living in his own place so he needed to know obviously that our
roles had shifted but I didn't want to take a full step back from his life so we had a
conversation one day. I remember I decided it was time for this conversation. I went to his work
and I was waiting for him when he came out from work one night and he was like well that's weird
you know there's mom. So he got in my car and we talked and I said you know Quinn, I realized that
here we are getting ready for this big step in your life and we've got to decide what our roles
are now because my role as your mother is going to be different than it was before
and you need to remember that. So how do you see my role as mother in your life now that you
are going to be a young adult instead of a teen and he thought for a minute
and he said well to give me advice I guess and to make sure I don't do anything stupid, to be
a person I can talk to and I said yeah, that's my role. I am there for guidance, for wisdom, for
support and if you are gonna do something stupid, I'm also gonna be a mom that's brave enough to say
something about it. He said I know you will be mom and so he was grateful for that. So we need to make
sure that we establish roles so then I said to him well what do you think your role is going to be
in our relationship? Hmm, he hadn't considered that before and he said well, I guess my role now
is I'm going to be a little bit more like a friend but I also need to be that type of friend
that really respects you and listens to you and thinks of you as a valuable person in my life.
So I guess my role is that now I'm example to all of my younger siblings and I am now a person who
communicates with you a little bit more like a friend and I said yeah, that sounds about right.
So we talked about it and what that would look like for him in his life and he ended up sitting
down and having a conversation with his siblings about his role and my role and the changes
and who he wanted to be for them. So, he really adopted those roles and went the distance.
Before I get to my next three lessons for you, hit that subscribe button and don't forget to click
the notification bell as well so that you can make sure that you get more videos like this
in your feed. Don't assume that your child is able to fully self-control without any of your help. Do
help your child establish goals that they need for self-control so that they can navigate some of the
tricky things of life. My daughter Paige who is now 23 definitely needed me to help her when she was
just an emerging young adult with her boundaries with technology. So in our family, our children did
not have cell phones when they were really young and for most of them that wasn't a big problem.
Well Paige got a cell phone when she was 18 years old and she was doing pretty good at governing
herself on it but then as she hit college, things started to kind of spiral out of control a little
bit and she had to reign it in. She knew things were going wrong and luckily, we had established a
pattern for goal setting. So, all through the years when our children were growing up, we had special
meetings with them that we called mentor meetings and in the mentor meetings we would talk to them
about certain goals that they had, things that they were trying to overcome, areas of their life that
they wanted to self-govern better. We continued to have this type of meeting with our children but it
was on a much more casual basis. So, we decided that we would just have regular phone calls
and just kind of see how things were going and ask them how they're doing with their goals and
different things but it wouldn't be anything that was like we were really in charge of them, We would
just be a person that they could talk to and they could decide to ask questions to because we were
opening the conversation. So, because Paige always was a goal setter in our home, she continued to set
goals for herself and this helped her definitely curb a little bit too much technology time which
she had for a little bit at her very beginning of her college career. Don't suffocate your young
adults with too much questions and too many texts and involvement and everything in their lives.
So my daughter London definitely is an independent spirit and she likes to do things her own way. So
when she hit adulthood even though she and I had a real closeness and we could talk about anything,
she also wanted to have some freedom to kind of go it alone a little bit or at least feel
like she was. And so as her mother, I made sure that I didn't overdo the monitoring that might
happen when somebody just leaves your house. Now, we still do talk on a regular basis, sometimes even
daily but I try to make sure that it's all about empowering her, not checking up on her all the time
which I think is really important. So they need to know that we do want to check on them, that we care
but they also need to know that they truly are living their own lives and making good decisions.
In fact if we're not checking up too much, then they actually will share more things with us.
Don't talk about all the fluffy stuff all the time. Do go deeper. So Porter, my last child at home, who
is just getting to adulthood. In fact in many ways, he behaves just like an adult. He is doing college
work, he's enrolled in college even though he's 17 years old, he has three jobs. He plays on sports
teams, in clubs as well as high school teams. He is going, going all the time and he is really
self-governing himself and his life. So truly he does behave like a young adult normally behaves
by taking so much responsibility for himself. So there's something that I've learned from Porter
and that's that porter actually does want a connection, he does want to go a little
bit deeper in our conversation. He wants to know more stuff. So if I kept our conversations fluffy
things like movies and things that didn't matter, it really wouldn't feed him like he needs. So
talk about real stuff with your children. In fact before your children reach adulthood, if possible,
try to talk to them about real things. Even if you don't agree on certain things like politics, maybe
even a couple of religious choices, I know nowadays that's more common than it ever has been before.
Even if you don't agree, make sure you're talking about what you really think and then tell them.
You know what? As a gift to you, I will always be an open book. I will always tell you exactly what
I think. I will never tell you something just to make you feel better or just to agree with you for
the sake of agreeing with you, that would be a lie and I would never do that to you. When I told that
to Porter, he looked at me with admiration and he said you know what mom, that's good because I need
to know that I always have somebody who will talk straight with me. They want somebody to talk to
them like an adult so definitely talk about real stuff, not just gossip, that's not really real stuff.
Talk about important things and even if you don't agree, make sure that they know you don't hold that
against them, you're just always going to be rock solid so that if they ever need you or any of
your wisdom, you're there. If you've enjoyed this video which has a lot to do with self-government
and our relationships, I know that you'll enjoy a full class that I'm giving everybody for free
here on my channel which is called The Expectation Trap versus The Cycle for
Success. So, click on that link now and enjoy that full class which really will help you master
yourself, your days, your attitude and increase your happiness overall. Click on the link now.