Yeah, Jules is here on this Martin Luther King Day.
And if you hear this happen before, So your adult child, you're adult child now tells you things about their childhood or maybe things that happened that you may have forgotten about don't match what liney and your memories don't line up obviously, and maybe they're describing, you know, problems, hurt, loneliness, fear from moments that you probably have forgotten about or barely remember, or maybe you remember things completely differently because
you're coming at it from a different perspective, and so you want to correct them, and that would be the bad move. It's validation versus agreement. And Julie is here to talk about that this morning on Mental Health Money. Julie, good morning, how are you.
Hey, I'm good. How are you?
I'm doing fine. This probably happens a lot.
It happens a lot, sometimes in really big ways and sometimes just in little ways, like you know, your kid will say, hey, do you remember when this thing happened? And you're like, yeah, that's not how I remember it at all. And sometimes it can be a much bigger conversation. If your adult child has some significant problems or challenges with how they were raised. So it can happen in
ways big and small. But as parents, it can really be hard for us to hear that we did anything wrong or that anything we did had a negative impact on our kids, because all we want is what's best for our children, right, and so that can be a hard thing to hear.
Of course, And of course a younger version of yourself knows a lot less in the current version, and you're also a lot more calm, especially from a guy's perspective, And there are things that you probably remember and cringe at that they have forgotten, but other things that may have happened you thought it was pretty good, and it turns out it was traumatic for them. It doesn't mean you're right in there wrong or vice versa correct.
It just means that you know, keeping in mind, you were the adult at the time and they were the child, so they obviously have a very different perspective of the same situation than you do. But also it's easy to wonder how they got to where they are and to want to be curious about that and to ask questions about how they ended up getting that perspective or that thinking or that feeling from that situation that felt very different to you.
All right, So if you're a parent, let's start with us. How can you distinguish between validating their emotional experience what they see and accepting responsibility for harm that they don't believe they cause.
Well, so validating and accepting responsibility are not anywhere near the same thing. So validating is saying, yeah, if it went down the way you say it did, I can see why that was hard for you. Or I'm really sorry that that experience that I saw very differently was so difficult for you. A really great example is a vacation that parents think is terrific and kids feel they'd
rather be home with their friends. They feel like their schedule was disrupted, They've got anxiety about what's coming next. They're processing a lot of novelty in their little brains. Parents think it's fabulous, they know what's going on. The kids are kind of along for the ride, and so the parents may think it was a wonderful trip and the kids may feel it was very destabilizing. That doesn't
mean it was a bad trip. That just means that they were different people at different life stages and had different experiences of it. So to be able to say, I'm so sorry that what we thought was going to be a really great thing for you turned out not to be a really great thing for you. It's not saying you were wrong as a parent, it's just recognizing that your best intentions fell short for that child at that moment in time.
Isn't that why Christmas Vacation still hits? Because that's ultimately what that movie is, right, Chevy Chase wants to have everything perfect for the hell for their kids are these great experiences and it always is a complete nightmare. That's every parent.
Yeah, it really can be. I had a client call me from Disney World. This was years and years ago. He was there with his wife and his children, and he said, okay, Julie, Disney is not the happiest place on earth. She said, the kids are miserable. He said, the kids are miserable. They don't want to be here. It's too loud, it's too hot, to crowded. We're coming home. Disney is not the happiest place on earth. So they planned this wonderful trip for their children, and the kids
were just not happy, and they came home early. That's an indication of a parent understanding a kid's experience in real time. But I could easily see later on those kids coming back and saying, you know that trip to Disney that she took us on, Man, that was a nightmare. That was really hard for me, and the parent being really ascended by that or hurt by that.
Yeah, because you spent all it's the time effort of money, because you have this great family vacation in mind, or whatever it is the event. It could be the holidays, as I mentioned to that, and it never lives up to you, so you're upset and mad about it from a different reason.
They are exactly exactly. And so it's important as a parent, if your child is coming to you with this kind of conversation, to try really hard not to be defensive, to try really hard not to explain your perspective or to explain the situation or to justify your choices, but just to listen to what they're telling you and get really curious about it and say, tell me more, I want to understand what that was like for you, And try to be as non defensive as possible, and stop
if you find yourself getting really worked up and wanting to argue back with them, because then you're in an argument versus understanding conversation. And that's really what we want as parents, is to be able to understand where our kids are and at some point offer them our perspective. Okay, I hear you. Now. I want you to understand what it was like for me. Are you open to hearing that and offer them that perspective at some point, but not right away, not while they're talking.
Okay, Julie hantersh you here a licensed mental health therapist in Cincinnati. That's mental health Monday in the Scott Sloan Show on seven hundred WLW. We're talking about adult children when you get to this point, because everything you do as a young parent, you think, Okay, I'm trying to do the best I can, and I think kids know that.
But when your adult child spits back to you, things about their childhood and their version of events are different than yours, and things that you thought were inocuous seem to be harmful to them, and vice versa. You can have that conversation. If I really want to screw that conversation up with my adult kids, what would I do?
You'd get really defensive, You'd argue back and you would compare their experience to their siblings experience, or your brother and your sister thought it was great, so what's wrong
with you? You would invalidate what they're saying. If you really want to screw it up, you would invalidate what they're saying, and you would make them out to be the villain or the scapegoat, that they were the problem, that they caused all the difficulty, that it was because of them that it went that way, and everybody else was faultless and blameless. So if you really wanted to screw it up, that's what you'd.
Do, gotcha? Yeah? Right, It's like, no, what I feel matters, and I'm going to in I was like, wow, it's interesting you would say that because I didn't see that from my perspective, but I hear what you're saying exactly.
And it's also important to really take a moment to reflect on you're looking at this from a distance as they are. You are now in the present and you're looking back. But if you can put yourself back in that place, were you really as focused and present and
mindful and careful and thoughtful as you think you were? Like, So an example right out of grad school, I worked with cancer patients and their families, and I had young kids at home, and I was working with life threatening illness and death at work, and I was really struggling to, like, you know, leave work and come home and be a
fully present, engaged, happy, bubbly, fun mom. And so when one of my boys later in life said, you know, that was a really tough time for me because you weren't around, and you weren't like you were there, but you weren't there, I had to reflect and say, honestly, you know, you're right, I probably wasn't. I was brand new doing this kind of work. I was working with really hard stuff, and when I came home, I probably wasn't there to the degree that I wanted to be
or thought I was. I can totally see that. That took some reflection on my part to realize that how.
Much of this is kicking yourself as a parent, Julian, and that it's like, wow, you think of the times you could have done more, been there, or done things, and you think, hey, there's a reason why my kids. And it could be social, it could be relationship, it could be job, could be substance. If you could be all these things, we tend to blame ourselves. It's like, man, I was terrible as a parent because my kid isn't successful at this, this or this.
Well. I think that sometimes we parents take too much of the blame and not enough of the credit for how our kids turn out. That's not true for everybody. I know parents who take all the credit for how their kids turned out. But I think so many of us say our kids' successes are theirs and their failures are shortcomings or challenges are hours. And I think they're partly ours, and they're partly theirs. And I think their
successes are partly ours and partly theirs. And I think it's important to realize that that's true for our parents as well. Like we are who we are because of how we were raised, positively and negative our kids are who they are because of how they were raised. And your best intentions as a parent can still be the wrong thing for one or more of your children. You can't foresee every possible follow on consequence of any decision you make. That's not to let you off the hook
for making bad decisions. That's just to say, no matter how well you think you've figured it all, out and thought it all through. Things can happen that you didn't plan on that turn out to be not as good as you'd hoped. So it's about taking the right amount of responsibility for how your children turn out positively or negatively, and giving them responsibility for how they turn out as well.
And part of this is you taking kind of them taking come out of those ol So if you're an adult child and you're having this conversation or why to have this conversation, I guess the question would be is
it too late? I mean, if you know your parents are in their nineties and you're in your sixties, it said too late to talk about this kind of stuff, or you probably won't, I'm guessing because the long or it goes more uncomfortable, it's not only going to feel but nobody's going to remember anything.
Well. That may be true, and is it necessary or is it useful? That depends. So if what you're talking about is something that has impacted who you are now and you'd like your parent to understand you better like I am this way in part because of these things that happened in my childhood when you were bringing me up, and you'd like them to understand you better. That's a valid reason if you feel like you just need to
say these things. Whether your parent remembers or believes it or understands it, or whether they're going to be able to make any changes going forward or not, it's important just for you to say it to them. Hey, I am this way because of these positive things, but these challenges I have, I think they're because of this. If that's something that you need to do for yourself, that makes sense if you find that what happened is getting in the way of your relationship with them, and you'd
like to have a better relationship. Clearing the air, getting some understanding, helping them know you better, and understanding maybe more about how they saw things at that period of time can really improve your relationship with at any age, whether it's ninety or whether it's sixty five. It can really help improve the relationship with your parents at any age. One of my boys and I had just such a conversation a few years ago, and things have been much better between us since.
Do you say, hey, got to do some homework and think of the ways I've screwed you up, or you just have like an organic conversation make a list, but on not more than three.
No more than three, of all the ways I screwed you. Yeah, right, Well, I think if we parents are honest, we can look back and see things that we wish we'd done differently, wish we had done that we didn't, or wish we
hadn't done that we did. And I think that if we can take our own inventory of how we succeeded in where we sell short as a parent, than when our kid and for many of us, this will happen when our adult kid comes to us and says, hey, I want to talk to you about something, and I'll tell you often it happens when they themselves have children and become parents. Then we've already done sort of an inventory of that, and we have some sense of our own of where we feel we exceeded expectations and where
we feel we fell short. So it shouldn't be a huge shock to the system.
What else am I missing about this generational conversation?
Really well, I think that the important things to remember are that children do this most of the time because they want the relationship to be better, and they feel misunderstood or not known by their parent, or they feel like they don't understand why mom or dad showed up the way they did at that point in time, and
they want the relationship to be better. And I think when as parents people come to us, our kids come to us and seemingly criticize our parenting, we feel like it's because they want they don't want things to be better. We feel it's negative, when in fact it's trying usually trying to reach a level of understanding to improve the relationship, to clear the air, to declutter things, and to get
some understanding between parent and child about what happened. And so if we go into it with that mindset of openness and curiosity and lack of judgment, I think that can be really helpful.
Is it almost all the cases unless there's some major event or major trauma when the parents dies or something massive happens. In most cases, is it more like things that you have forgotten about? Are they forgotten about or they had a different prayer it was bigger for them than wes U and vice versa.
Well, I think it's often bigger for them than it is for us because they're children, and everything is bigger for children than it is for adults, right, because they don't have the experience or their perspective or the level of un understanding of the world. Their world is what we created it to be as parents when they're very young, and so small things seemingly small things to us can be really big to them. But also the same thing
can read differently to different children. So one of my sons, if I would say to him, I'm really disappointed in that choice you made, it would devastate him. The other one would be like, thank you for offering your opinion, Julie, I appreciate, and it wouldn't matter to him at all, right, right, But for the one, it would devastate. If I said I'm really disappointed, that was like a knife to the heart. So different kids in the same situation can have different
reactions and perspectives to things. Also just depending on the kind of person that they are and that they are becoming. So yes, it's that their kids and worthy adults, but also they're their own people. They're becoming their own people, and so things are going to hit them differently.
Oh yeah, that makes total sense. Should you prepare for them conversation ahead of time and say, hey, we're going to sit down and talk about all these there you just simply say, hey, you know what, how do you how do you even open the subject?
Well, I think, uh.
The subject mom and dad or are kids?
Well, I think it could go either way. So I think if you know, as a parent that there's some distance or disconnect between you and your adult child, you can say something like, I would really like to understand why we feel so disconnected. I'd really like to understand from your perspective, why there's so much distance here, because I don't think it's coming from me. Maybe it is, but I don't think so, So I'd really like to
understand that. But as if you're the kid, you can say, hey, listen, there are a few things about my childhood that I'm coming to understand differently or realizing or getting a different perspective on, and i'd really like to talk to you
about them. Can we sit down and do that. It is best not to just blindside people and hijack them and start lobbing things at them when they're not expecting it, but setting up a time to sit down and talk, and then taking some time, if you're the one being invited to the conversation, to really reflect on what my role was, what may be coming up and how much responsibility does it make sense for me to take?
Yeah, I don't know how. And as a parent too, so we always try to do it's best for our kids. It's hard not to internalize this and take each one of these things is like a major I guess in affront to how we raise them, because I'm sure they understand it was difficult and there's no roles for this, especially they have kids of.
Their own, sure, and when they have kids of their own, as I said, that's often a time when these conversations come up because they're understanding things differently. They're seeing a similar situation happen with their children that happened with them, and they're recognizing how they handle it and how they may have handled it similarly or differently to the way their parents handled it. And so they're seeing the juxtaposition of being a parent versus being a kid, and it
adds new perspectives to their childhood. And Yeah, it can be a very difficult thing to hear from your kid that things that you did didn't work well for them. And the hardest ones, frankly, I think are the ones that you thought you nailed and they're like no, no, no, that was really bad. I mean I think right, all right, so we can all look back and say, wow, I really screwed that one up. I did not do that well.
And your kid says you did not do that well, and you can say, no, I know, I really didn't do that well. But the things you think you crushed and they're like, nope, that was an epic fail. Those are the hard ones because your perspectives really diverged there in a very big way.
Well, instead of looking at this like an exit interview, you probably should look at this as like, hey, you know what, you're an adult, like, we're moving to a different phase of our relationship, and the way to move forward with it is having this conversation exactly.
And to understand how and why things happened the way they happened. Usually when kids have these conversations with their parents, they want to tell them their perspective, but then they also really want to hear what was going on for mom or dad at that point in time, why did
you choose this? Instead of that, I want to understand you better too, not just I want to load all unload all of this junk on you and then walk away they're looking for some reconciliation, some understanding, some greater connection. That's usually why they're doing it, and so keeping that in mind can keep us as parents in the right headspace. All right.
She's Julie hattersh here, a licensed metal health expert. Here on the Scotsland Show every Monday morning it's Mental Health Monday with Julie. It is really informative. I think a lot of people listen and go, wow, Okay, I probably should have this conversation, or maybe if you're an not all kid, It's like, it's never too late to do this. So yeah, meck you can always you can't fix or you can't I guess change what happened, but you can fix the way things are moving in the future. And
some closure as well. All the best, have a great week, Appreciate you, Thank you, Bob. How about some news We do that in three minutes here on seven hundred WWD, Cincinnati,