How to Parent Adult Children Without Pushing Them Away
with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Catherine Hickem, LCSW
Blindsided: Why Adult Children Pull Away
Estrangement rarely arrives as one blowup. It builds over years of small moments where an adult child slowly stops feeling safe — until the parent wakes up to a relationship that already feels broken.
There’s a particular kind of quiet that can settle into a relationship with a grown child, and you feel it long before you can name it. The texts get shorter. The visits get rarer. You are not fighting, exactly, but you are not close either, and somewhere along the way you started bracing a little every time the phone lights up.
My guest is Catherine Hickem, LCSW — a licensed clinical social worker, executive and family coach, and the founder of Parenting Adult Children Today. After more than twenty years in practice, she noticed a pattern almost no one was naming out loud: parents and their grown children drifting apart, not over one dramatic rupture, but through years of small misunderstandings nobody knew how to repair. She is the author of Regret-Free Parenting, and she’s a mother of two adult children herself.
We sat down to talk through “the drift” — the slow erosion that ends in distance — why your child carries the whole history into every conversation, the four pillars that keep a parent–adult-child relationship intact, Catherine’s PARENT Method for repairing what’s frayed, and the one line that may reframe the whole thing: the relationship is always more important than the issue.
“No one’s to blame and everyone’s responsible.” — Catherine Hickem, LCSW, Love, Happiness and Success Podcast
Moments from this episode
Episode transcript
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: As a small child, we get what we get in the parent department. But as an adult, you get to make decisions about what kind of relationships you want to have in your life. And if your relationship with your parent is stressful, hard, even toxic — you might be wondering if there’s any hope to change it, or if it would be a better choice to step away altogether.
Catherine Hickem: This is what you’ll hear from adult children: “They undermine me. They don’t believe in me. They doubt me. They tell me what to do, so they don’t trust my judgment. That means they don’t respect me, and they don’t listen to my boundaries.”
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: On the other side, if you’re a parent of adult children who you are feeling getting further away — or maybe they have made a break — that can be frustrating, heartbreaking, and just agonizing, especially if you don’t know what to do to repair it.
Catherine Hickem: A lot of times parents of adult children do not understand that how they parented the first 18 years has to be almost totally thrown out the window for that next season of parenting. By the end of today’s show, you’re going to have new insight into why these relationships rupture — and more importantly, what you can do now to repair and strengthen yours.
Catherine Hickem: Quit giving advice and start asking great questions without an agenda. It creates a deeper level of trust and respect.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: My guest today is Catherine Hickem, LCSW — a longtime therapist and the founder of Parenting Adult Children Today, where she helps parents build strong and respectful relationships with their adult children. She is also the author of Regret-Free Parenting: Raise Good Kids and Know You’re Doing It Right. Catherine, thank you so much for spending this time with me today.
Catherine Hickem: Thank you so much, Lisa, for understanding why this is such an important topic.
Catherine Hickem: Most of them are blindsided. They do not see it coming. And that’s been one of the most interesting observations I’ve made — they’ll say, “I had no idea.” If you have not been picking up all the signs and signals that have been given to you over time, you didn’t read them. They didn’t just wake up one morning and say, “I’m done with my mom and dad.” This has been building for a long time.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: They’ve been talking to me about it for three years.
Catherine Hickem: Exactly. It’s never a surprise to the adult child. It has been building over time until there’s a final straw. There’s a saying I like: “No one’s to blame and everyone’s responsible.” Sometimes the responsibility might be 90% parents and 10% children. Sometimes 50/50. But the challenge is a breakdown in communication — and most parents don’t understand that how they parented the first 18 years has to be almost totally thrown out the window for the next season.
Catherine Hickem: On some level they understand it, but they don’t have the skills to appreciate the shift in their role. What ends up happening is what you’ll hear from adult children: “They undermine me. They don’t believe in me. They doubt me. They tell me what to do, so they don’t trust my judgment. They don’t respect me, and they don’t listen to my boundaries.” How can you blame them for not wanting to walk away if the definition of normal is feeling controlled, dismissed, disrespected, and not seen? Then throw in expectations parents have placed on them, plus the fear factor — which looks like control — and now we have a hot mess.
Catherine Hickem: I’m not looking to blame. I don’t think blame helps anybody. But awareness, and ownership of what’s my part in something, is really important. I talk to adult children, and I also deal mostly with parents — but a lot of times I’m helping adult children know how to have the hard conversations with their parents so their parents will really listen.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: People feel trapped, they feel helpless, they feel like they’ve tried. There isn’t really a map. Parents sometimes don’t understand that they need to keep evolving — they have one set of old expectations that might have been true for a 13-year-old, but when they’re trying to apply that to a 33-year-old, it doesn’t work.
Catherine Hickem: When someone doesn’t listen — and you and I are in the listening business — how many people walk into your office and you’re the first person who’s really, really heard them? I underestimate the power of being curious. I think we underestimate the power of just being present.
Catherine Hickem: We underestimate the power of listening. We underestimate the power of being curious. If we, as parents, would just be curious — ask great questions without an agenda — it would create a deeper level of trust and respect. The kid would think, “Oh, they’re really interested in me, not the issue we’re talking about. They care about what’s happening inside me.”
Catherine Hickem: What I tell parents all the time is: your kids were hostage to you for 18 years. They know exactly what your buttons are. They can recall moments when you may have made comments about other people’s kids — that they made bad choices — and don’t kid yourself that it didn’t register: “I better not do that, because this is how Mom and Dad feel about it.”
Catherine Hickem: Then where does the kid go? They don’t feel safe to make mistakes without there being a consequence or judgment. Parents are parenting in the moment they’re in, but our adult children have a lifetime trove of memories and conversations. They know your values, your morals, your sense of right or wrong. They know whether you’re judgmental or critical. They know how you “treat people” who disappoint you. All of that history comes into every conversation.
Catherine Hickem: Parents have no clue what’s going through their child’s head, because they don’t feel safe to tell them. This is why they start to back off. Why they keep them at a distance. Why they give them information only on a need-to-know basis. There’s all this fear: if they know this, will they change how they feel about me? Will they throw it back in my face?
Catherine Hickem: This is what I call the drift. To the point where they drift away. Parents don’t even know until they’re in crisis, and they wake up one morning and the relationship is broken — because the parents have been scared to look at themselves and what they’re doing, and scared to confront, so now they’re walking on eggshells. No one feels safe.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: It’s so systemic. There’s a dance happening. There’s a lifetime of experiences where a child learned who this parent is and what to expect — what’s going to happen if I defy you or say something you don’t like. That in itself can be extremely inhibiting in a now-adult child’s psyche, that they cannot even broach a hard conversation with their parent.
Catherine Hickem: A really good friend called her 23-year-old daughter and said, “Hey, can you come here for a minute?” The daughter said, “Am I in trouble?” Mom said, “No, I just want you to hear something.” The daughter walked in looking sheepish: “Is there a problem?” Mom said, “No, I just think Catherine has something to say that I think is really important.”
Catherine Hickem: Later I asked her, “What was that about?” She said, “When I was a teenager, if mom asked me to come in, that usually meant I was in trouble or I had done something I needed to explain.” That was the perfect example of what happens between parents and adult children all the time. Parents are asking simple, current questions that have nothing to do with the past — and history is coming to the present for the adult child, which interferes with their ability to have a true and honest relationship.
Catherine Hickem: The good news in that particular case: they have a pretty good relationship. But it highlighted how easily this happens. Parents don’t recognize that tone of voice, how they present something, is very impactful on how adult children will hear them.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: We’re sitting in a group of interested observers — and maybe one is a young adult whose relationship with their parent is feeling very hard. There’s another person here whose adult child has gone off the rails and they’re heartbroken trying to figure out how to fix it. But there are also people who still have kids at home, thinking about what to do while their children are still children to build the foundation for a beautiful relationship at 40.
Catherine Hickem: In my first 20 years of practice, working with parents of under-18s, I’d talk about this: when you get upset or angry over a child’s mistake, the child’s immediate focus isn’t on the mistake. It’s on how to manage your behavior. They’re not going to learn the lesson because they’re too busy figuring out, “How do I do a workaround? How do I get them to calm down?” Now we’ve lost the opportunity for them to learn an important lesson.
Catherine Hickem: Parents seem to lose their crap when their kids do some stupid things. That’s what childhood is about. Our job is to help them learn from it. But parents think it’s about perfection, about the GPA, which college they get into. You’ve missed the point. Your job is to raise them from the inside out. GPA, school — that’s outside. The inside is their character. Do they like themselves? Do they have internal confidence? Good critical thinking? Can they communicate their needs? Can they identify their feelings? That’s a healthy person. If we raise healthy people, we don’t have to worry about the GPA.
Catherine Hickem: As parents, we want to stay in their lives — but we need to stay in their lives as an ally, as a support, as a resource. We don’t get to stay in their lives because we’re in control, because we have power, because we’re going to manipulate with money, or because we’re going to rescue them from every problem. We need to recognize our job is to be the healthiest version of ourselves so we can model what healthy adulthood looks like. And we can be that safe refuge when their life does fall apart, so they have a place to go.
Catherine Hickem: If a child can’t talk to their parents about the hard stuff, where do they go? That’s the part that breaks my heart. They’re not turning to the people who have spent their lives with them. I have a 41-year-old and a 40-year-old, and if I thought my children wouldn’t tell me the painful places of their lives, I would be heartbroken. I would have to look at myself and ask: What did I do that would prohibit them from trusting me with hard things?
Catherine Hickem: A friend of my daughter came to visit her in her junior year. We were having lunch and my daughter left the room. He said, “Mrs. Hickem, did you know that Tiffany is the only friend that I have who’s the same in front of her parents as she is behind their back?” I said, “What about you?” He said, “Oh, no, I’m not the same at all. I learned a long time ago what my parents expected of me. If I don’t live up to it, my mom cries and my dad gets mad. So when I go home, I become who they want me to be, and when I walk out the door, I go back to being myself. That’s how all my friends are. Tiffany’s the only one who’s not.” It broke my heart.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: What you’re saying is, you set the foundation of having a positive relationship with adult children far in the past — through your ability to regulate yourself and be an emotionally safe person who helps your child feel secure, supported, and loved, while also engaging in constructive, teachable moments in a way that prioritizes the quality of the relationship and helps your child develop from the inside out.
Catherine Hickem: Think about your own circle of people you really trust. I don’t have people in my circle who come back in my face and say, “I told you so.” We probably wouldn’t go to them very often with our vulnerabilities and weaknesses, because nobody wants it rubbed in your face. It’s not kind, it’s not respectful. Parents seem to think they have liberties to be able to say and do anything because they share DNA — and that’s a false belief that will only hurt the relationship.
Catherine Hickem: What happened to being respectful? I always wanted my children to know I respected them. In respecting them, they would develop self-respect — so they would know not to be in relationships where they weren’t respected. So much of what we do — this is why parents panic in young adulthood and adulthood with their kids. They realize there are things they didn’t spend the time developing, and now they panic: “Oh my gosh, I gotta shove it all in there now.” And their kids aren’t ready to hear it.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: We have a friend here tuning in because they feel very distant from their parents and are considering a cutoff. In this imaginary scenario, their parents become dysregulated, fall apart, get controlling, intrusive — sometimes hostile or critical. It feels unsafe. Do you have any suggestions for what someone staring down this barrel might try, to broach a courageous conversation?
Catherine Hickem: My hunch is you have about three options. One is to write a letter saying, “I love you. I want a relationship with you.” The very first thing is to let them know it’s not your heart’s desire to cut them off. Then: “Here’s what I need. History has said this is a struggle for our relationship. For us to move forward, what guardrails do we need so we can both walk away feeling safe?” You’re not blaming, but you’re acknowledging there’s a problem, and that it can no longer go on the way it’s going on.
Catherine Hickem: You can say, “Maybe we could see a counselor together. Maybe a third party could help hold us accountable for how we speak to each other. I’m open to your suggestions.” You’re not telling them what to do — you’re inviting them to give options. You’re demonstrating effort and energy. But you’re also not saying, “I’m giving you a blank check for it to be any way you want, because that doesn’t work with me anymore.”
Catherine Hickem: The reason I like a letter over a text: a text is dangerous because they can turn around in a reactive moment and shoot something off. A letter is one way. They can sit with it, read it over and over, and then maybe when they’ve calmed down, they’ve had a chance to respond instead of react. We’re too trigger-happy to react. Sometimes we need the wisdom to say, “I need to really think this through before I make a response.”
Catherine Hickem: If there’s an opportunity to meet, ask the question: “What do you want the focus to be?” You don’t want to be blindsided. You may want other people there. You can text and say, “Mom, I’m in a really vulnerable place. I need us to not be in conflict, so I’m not at a place where I’m willing to engage with all the issues that surface with us. I still want to see you, but I need there to be limitations on what we can address.” You don’t stay all day. You don’t stay in their house. You have clear boundaries.
Catherine Hickem: Some parents have their own mental-health issues that aren’t going to get fixed. You have to have very severe boundaries, and you better be willing to die on the hill to back them up, because that’s when you get the best of them — when they understand you mean business. The adult child has to be safe. They have to know what makes them safe, and they have to know what their limits are in the moment.
Catherine Hickem: I tell parents you have a responsibility to four pillars in your relationship with adult children. One: unconditional acceptance. That doesn’t mean you agree with all their decisions, but love is bigger than issues. Two: know them. That doesn’t mean you know the kid you raised — stay curious about who the person is now. Three: unconditional love (different from acceptance). Four: respect. When a parent practices those four things, they have a much, much better chance of having a great relationship with their children. If any one is missing, there’s probably going to be a problem.
Catherine Hickem: Before parents do anything else, I want them to start with the issue of expectations — because expectations are the dirty word in parenting adult children. We have them from the moment we find out we’re going to be a parent. The older the child gets, the more we formulate very defined expectations that may have a lot to do with the parents’ unmet needs or unfulfilled expectations. The kids didn’t sign up for them but feel the weight and burden of having to fulfill them.
Catherine Hickem: I tell parents: “Sit down and make a list of every expectation you’ve ever had of this kid. Then go back and circle which of these you would get triggered over if the expectation isn’t met. Whichever expectations those are, you need to grieve them, because they’re not your kids’ expectations. They’re yours, and they’re not responsible for fulfilling them. You need to release them of that weight.” Otherwise you’ve put your child in a position of having to either make Mom and Dad happy, or make themselves happy.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Some parents would have a very hard time with that — it’s a lifetime of investment in these ideas, and the narrative is, “Well, shouldn’t they X, Y, Z?”
Catherine Hickem: Especially if they understand the cost to the adult child. They pull away. Their confidence is impacted. They feel disrespected, like they’re not enough. If all of my expectations create children who don’t believe in themselves, who can’t function, who don’t have resiliency — because they don’t think I believe in them to have their own lives versus the life I wanted for them — what was the point?
Catherine Hickem: I was at a wedding — my son’s best friend — and the mother-son dance came on. They picked the song I would have picked for me and my son, Taylor. I began to cry. I realized: that would never be me and Taylor. He dated women internationally, and he would probably marry somebody with different traditions than what I had imagined. In that moment, I gave myself permission to grieve that dream, that expectation — to release him from any thought that he had to do that to make me happy.
Catherine Hickem: Fast-forward four years. I got a call. He was living in Singapore: “Mom, I’m getting married in 60 days. Would you come?” I got on the plane. There was no American tradition in that wedding in any way, shape, or form — but I had an amazing week. I got to be with his bride, her family, the traditions, all the new experiences. I didn’t bring any of the baggage of what didn’t happen into the moment, so I could be fully present for all the good that did. Expectations damage possibilities of joy and connection.
Catherine Hickem: Parents who want to reconnect want to jump in — but you need to do some work before you do it. If you’re not ready to hear hard things, if you’re going to be defensive, if you’re not going to own your part of the problem, then you’re not ready to have that conversation. Don’t do it. It’s only going to make it worse.
Catherine Hickem: I’ve developed a framework called the PARENT Method. P is pause — be responsive instead of reactive. A is acceptance. R is release — expectations, control, fears, and dreams. E is engage — how do I learn to engage? N is nurture — really learning what it means to have self-awareness so you can emotionally connect to your child. T is trust. I’d ask parents to look at those and say, “Which of these places do I need to do some hard work? Where have I struggled? What are my fears?”
Catherine Hickem: If a parent can get really honest about their fears, they can then send a letter or email that says, “I know we’ve been in a tough place. I’m working on me. I’m working on what I need to do to be a healthier version of me. Would you mind if I send you some questions I’d like you to be really honest about? I have some blind spots and I want your perspective.” That child may choose to do it, may not — but you’re saying, “I’m not blaming you. I’m open to growing and learning. I’m open to owning my part. I really want to hear how I’ve hurt you or what I’ve missed.”
Catherine Hickem: When people can see you’re sincere — and they’ll know — it starts to melt the wall. It melts the hardest of stones.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Because there’s so much pain there. The dream of every adult child I’ve talked to is to have a parent be like, “How do you experience me? How could I do a better job of making you feel more loved and secure in our relationship?” That is what everybody really wants.
Catherine Hickem: We covered a lot of territory because there is a lot. There’s a lot of issues out there. And I think that’s the problem — we get focused on the issue and not the relationship. If we can get parents to understand: there are the issues, and then there’s the relationship, and the relationship is always more important than the issues. We can’t let the issues get in the way of our ability to really love unconditionally. That means I may not understand. I may not even agree. But nothing’s going to stand in the way of my ability to love you well, even when I don’t understand and even when I don’t agree.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: What a beautiful place to land. Catherine, where would people connect with you?
Catherine Hickem: Check out parentingadultchildrentoday.com. I’m on Instagram and other social media. My new book on parenting adult children is called It’s Never Too Late to Be a Great Parent, coming out in August.
What to take with you
The drift is silent.
Estrangement rarely arrives as one blowup. It builds over years of small moments where an adult child slowly stops feeling safe, until the parent wakes up to a relationship that already feels broken.
Parenting changes after eighteen.
The job of the first eighteen years is to teach and guide. After that, staying in your child’s life means showing up as an ally and a resource — not an authority.
Your child carries the whole history into every conversation.
A simple present-day question can land on decades of memory, which is why tone and timing matter as much as the words.
A letter lands when a text would blow up.
A one-way letter can be reread and absorbed, which gives the other person room to respond instead of react in the heat of the moment.
Expectations are a weight your child never agreed to carry.
Grieving the future you imagined for them frees both of you to have the relationship that is actually possible.
The relationship outranks the issue, every time.
You can disagree, not understand, and still refuse to let the issue cost you the connection.
How to Parent Adult Children Without Pushing Them Away
If you are a parent, there is a particular kind of quiet that can settle into a relationship with your grown child, and you feel it long before you can name it. The texts get shorter. The visits get rarer. You are not fighting, exactly, but you are not close either, and somewhere along the way you started bracing a little every time the phone lights up. If you have been wondering how to parent adult children without slowly pushing them away, here is the short answer, and it is almost too simple. The relationship you have now is not the one you had when they were twelve, and parenting it the same way is the surest way to lose it.
I want to say one thing before we go further, because I think you need to hear it. If things with your adult child feel strained right now, it does not mean you failed, and it does not mean the relationship is over. It usually means something far more workable than that. It is also one of the most common things I see, both in my own practice and across our whole team of clinicians who do parenting coaching and family therapy every single day. This is not a niche problem. It is one of the quiet aches of being a parent, and there is a way through it.
Here is what I have learned, and it is the thing this whole article is built around. Most of the parents who find their way to us have already read the books. They have listened to the podcasts. They know, in their heads, that they are supposed to listen more and advise less. The problem was never information. The problem is that the moment your adult child says something that scares you, your nervous system reaches for the same move it has used for decades, and you are back in the old pattern before you have finished the thought.
A blog post cannot override that, and I am not going to pretend it can. What I can do here is give you language for what is actually happening between you and your child, and a few concrete things to try. The deeper work — the part where you do it differently the next time it counts — is the work my team does with people every day. So read this as a map, and know there are people who can walk the terrain with you.
Why do adult children pull away from their parents?
Adult children almost always pull away slowly, over years, not in one dramatic break. By the time someone finally decides to step back from a parent, they have usually been quietly deciding it for a long time. The heartbreaking part is that the parent is often the last to know.
For this conversation I sat down with Catherine Hickem, a licensed therapist who has spent more than twenty years working with families on exactly this. She has a name for the slow erosion that ends in distance. She calls it the drift. Parents do not see it coming, she told me, because they have not been reading the small signals along the way. Their adult child did not wake up one morning and decide to be done. It built, quietly, until there was a final straw.
Catherine has a saying she loves, and it reframes the whole thing. No one is to blame, and everyone is responsible. Sometimes the responsibility is mostly the parent’s, sometimes it is shared more evenly, but the way out is never about assigning fault. It is about each person owning their part.
If this is you, it helps to know how common it is. Karl Pillemer’s national survey at Cornell University found that about 27 percent of American adults are estranged from a family member, and roughly one in ten from a parent or child (Cornell Chronicle). You are not strange for being here, and you are not alone in it.
Most of the parents I work with sensed something was wrong long before they understood what to do about it. That gap, between feeling the relationship slip and knowing how to reach for it, is exactly where coaching earns its keep. If your situation is less about a clean break and more about a parent who is genuinely hard to be around, I have written separately about dealing with difficult parents, and it pairs well with what comes next.
Why does my grown child keep me at arm’s length?
Often it is because your child learned, over many years, that being fully honest with you was not safe. So they manage you instead. They share on a need-to-know basis, they keep the hard things to themselves, and slowly the relationship starts running on a thinner and thinner version of the truth.
Catherine put it bluntly. Your kids were, in her words, hostage to you for eighteen years. They know your values, your judgments, exactly what disappoints you. So all of that history walks into every present-day conversation, whether you can see it or not. She told me about a young man, a friend of her daughter’s, who said her daughter was the only friend he had who was the same in front of her parents as she was behind their back. The rest of them, including him, performed a version of themselves at home and exhaled the moment they walked out the door.
This is part of what therapists mean by dysfunctional family roles, where everyone plays a part that keeps the peace at the cost of the truth. If you recognize your own family in that, it is not a life sentence. Naming the pattern out loud, with someone who can see it from the outside, is usually where the change starts.
Why does my parent’s simple question feel like an attack?
Because your nervous system learned, a long time ago, what certain tones and phrases used to mean. An ordinary question in the present can land on a lifetime of memory, and your body reacts before your mind catches up.
Catherine shared a small, perfect example. A mom asked her twenty-three-year-old daughter to come into the room for a minute. The daughter’s first reaction was, am I in trouble? Nothing was wrong. But as a teenager, being called in usually meant exactly that, and her body remembered. This happens constantly between parents and adult children. The parent is asking something simple and current. The child is hearing decades of history.
The takeaway is not that you have to walk on eggshells forever. It is that your tone, your timing, and how you frame things carry far more weight than the words themselves. The same sentence can land as care or as criticism depending entirely on how it arrives.
Raising adult children starts long before they are adults
If your kids are still at home, the most important thing you can do for your future relationship is to become an emotionally safe, self-regulated parent now. The foundation for a good relationship at forty is poured when they are six and sixteen.
Catherine made a point that stuck with me. When a parent gets reactive over a child’s mistake, the child stops focusing on the mistake and starts focusing on managing the parent’s reaction. The lesson gets lost. Our job, she said, is to raise kids from the inside out — to build character, confidence, and the ability to name what they feel, rather than chasing the GPA and the right college. And the way you treat them now teaches them what to expect, and tolerate, from everyone who comes after you.
If you are in the thick of this with teenagers right now, I go deeper in parenting teens.
And if you are reading this with a pang of regret about years already behind you, let me gently push back on that. It is not too late, and you are not starting from zero. A coach on our team can help you make the shifts that matter most from where you actually are, which tends to work far better than trying to make up for everything at once.
How do I set boundaries with a difficult parent without cutting them off?
You can stay in the relationship and still protect yourself. The tools are simpler than they sound. Lead with what you want, name what you need, keep contact time-limited, set the focus in advance, bring a support person if it helps, and put the hard things in a letter rather than a heated text.
This was the part of our conversation I most wish I could hand to every adult child who has sat in my office. Catherine’s first move is a letter. Not a text, because a text invites a reactive reply fired off in the heat of the moment. A letter is one way. The other person can read it again and again, and eventually respond instead of react. In it, you lead with the relationship. I love you, I want this to work. Then you name, without blame, that the old pattern cannot continue, and you invite them to help figure out the guardrails.
She had more. If you are going to see a parent you find difficult, set the focus ahead of time so you are not blindsided, keep the visit to a few hours rather than a whole weekend, do not stay in their home, and bring someone with you if it helps, because most people behave better with a witness in the room. You can say, plainly, I am in a vulnerable place and I need us to stay off the hard topics today. There is a full guide on setting boundaries with parents if you want the step-by-step.
Catherine also gave parents four pillars to hold onto: unconditional acceptance, truly knowing your child as they are now, unconditional love, and respect. When all four are present, she said, the relationship usually holds. When one goes missing, that is usually where the trouble starts.
Boundaries are not a door slamming shut. They are how you stay close enough to keep the relationship without losing yourself inside it, which is the same skill that makes every other relationship healthier too. If you want to go wider than family, boundaries in relationships covers the rest.
Here is the honest truth about all of this. The version of you reading these tips feels calm and clear. The version of you in the actual conversation, with your actual parent, is a different person. That is not a flaw. It is the whole reason coaching exists. Our team helps people rehearse these conversations, debrief afterward, and recalibrate before the next one, so the strategy survives contact with real life.
Our free communication training walks you through how to say the real thing without it turning into a fight — useful whether you’re the parent or the adult child.
Get the Free Training →How can I rebuild a relationship with my adult child?
Start with your own work before you reach out. If you can get honest about your part and grieve the expectations you have been carrying, a sincere, non-defensive opening can begin to soften even a long silence.
Catherine is direct with parents who want to reconnect. Do the work first. If you are not ready to hear hard things without getting defensive, you are not ready for the conversation. The starting place, she says, is expectations, which she calls the dirty word of parenting adult children. We hand our kids expectations they never signed up for, and the weight of them quietly pushes them away.
She told me a story I have not stopped thinking about. At a wedding, the mother-son dance came on, the very song she had imagined for her own son, and she started to cry, because she realized that dance would never happen the way she had pictured it. So she let the picture go. She grieved it. Four years later, her son called from Singapore to invite her to his wedding, and because she had already released the version in her head, she could be fully present for the one that was actually happening.
To make this practical, Catherine uses a framework she calls the PARENT Method: Pause, Acceptance, Release, Engage, Nurture, and Trust. It is a way for a parent to get honest about their own part before they try to reconnect.
From there, the reach-out itself can be simple and disarming. Not a defense, not a case for why you were right, but something closer to this. I know we have been in a hard place. I am working on myself. And I would really like to understand how you have experienced me. Catherine says sincerity like that melts the hardest of stones, because your child knows you well enough to tell when you mean it.
And if you are afraid it is too late, the research is on your side. Most estrangements are not permanent. Psychologist Joshua Coleman, who studies this, and the wider field reported by the American Psychological Association, point to the same thing. Reconciliation is far more likely when both people acknowledge the rupture and are willing to change, and professional support is often what helps it hold.
Part of the own-work, for a lot of parents, is forgiveness — of their child and of themselves. I have written about finding forgiveness for when the hurt feels too big to move past.
And if what you are realizing is that you have your own growing to do before you can show up the way you want to, that is not a detour. That is the work, and personal growth coaching is often where this kind of change actually takes root.
This is the part I want to be honest with you about. Reaching out well, after years of distance, is genuinely hard to do alone, in the exact moment your old fears are loudest. That is what our coaches are for. Not to script you, but to help you stay steady, own your part without collapsing into shame, and keep going when the first attempt does not land perfectly.
Why reading this article probably isn’t enough
I want to be straight with you, because you have read this far and you deserve it. Everything above is real. These approaches work. People rebuild relationships they were sure were gone. But I would be doing you a disservice if I let you close this article believing that reading it was the work.
Here is what usually happens. You read something like this. Something clicks. You feel a little hopeful, and you make a quiet promise to do it differently next time. Then next time arrives, your child says the thing that lands on the old bruise, your nervous system does what it has done for years, and you are right back in the pattern, wondering why nothing changed.
It is not because you are weak or broken. It is because you are trying to override a lifetime of conditioning, by yourself, in the one moment that conditioning is most active. That is the hardest possible time to do something new, and it is nearly impossible to do alone.
What actually works is having someone in your corner who knows your specific patterns, who you can talk to after a hard conversation and before the next one. That is what working with our team looks like. Not lectures, not generic advice — a real relationship with someone paying attention to your life. If you are not sure whether you need therapy or coaching for this, we have a short quiz that helps you figure out where to start, and if you want it in plain terms, here is the difference between coaching and counseling.
When you are ready, the next step is small. We do free first conversations — no pressure and no commitment, just a real talk about what is going on and whether what we do is a fit. We have options across a range of price points, including one-on-one work and a lower-cost coaching program staffed by very experienced clinicians, so cost is rarely the thing that has to stop you.
The relationship is always more important than the issue
If you take one thing from this, let it be the line Catherine landed on. The relationship is always more important than the issue.
We get so focused on the issue — on who was right, what was said, what should have been different — that we let it cost us the relationship. But you can disagree with your child, not understand their choices, even quietly worry about them, and still refuse to let any of that stand in the way of loving them well. That is the whole game.
And you do not have to figure out how to do that alone. Whether you are a parent trying to find your way back, or an adult child deciding what kind of relationship you can actually have, our team does this work every day. You can talk to someone on our team whenever you are ready. The first conversation is free, and it really is just a conversation.
XO,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
About this episode’s experts
Catherine Hickem, LCSW
Catherine Hickem is a licensed clinical social worker, an executive and family coach, and the founder of Parenting Adult Children Today. After more than twenty years in practice, she noticed a pattern that almost no one was naming out loud: parents and their grown children drifting apart, not over one dramatic rupture, but through years of small misunderstandings that no one knew how to repair. She built her work around closing that gap. She is the author of Regret-Free Parenting and has a forthcoming book on parenting adult children, It’s Never Too Late to Be a Great Parent. She is also a mother of two adult children herself, and she talks about her own family with the same honesty she asks of the parents she works with — including the moment at a wedding when she had to grieve a dream she had quietly carried for years.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and Board Certified Coach. Founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. Host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast (15M+ downloads). 25+ years of clinical practice. Creator of the Growing Self Institute, where she trains licensed mental health professionals in evidence-based coaching psychology.
Resources Dr. Lisa talked about in this episode
Sources cited in this episode
- Pillemer, K. (2020). Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. New York: Avery.
- Pillemer, K. (2020). Family estrangement: A problem hiding in plain sight. Cornell Chronicle.
- Coleman, J. (2021). Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. New York: Harmony Books.
- American Psychological Association. (2024, April). Estrangement is never easy or straightforward. Psychologists can help. Monitor on Psychology.
