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Relationships
When Adult Children and Parents Have Awkward Conversations
As you get older, talking to your parents can be difficult.
Posted October 7, 2022 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Key points
- Relationships with one's parents naturally evolve over time. As an adult, conversations can often become awkward as one's needs change.
- Old wounds and a lack of contact with each other are common sources of awkwardness between parents and adult children.
- Letting their parents know what is needed from them now can help an adult child repair old wounds.
Nora has always been close to her mom—she talks to her a least a few times a week, her mom knows what’s going on in her everyday life, and she is her go-to when she is having a hard time. Her dad? A different story. When she was growing up, they were close; she idolized him; they did a lot of things together, one-on-one.
But now, her conversations with him have fallen into a weird, awkward place. They catch up but don’t really talk. He doesn’t ask much about her everyday life but instead winds up talking about politics, sports, or work but not much else. She doesn’t feel connected the way she did when she was younger and isn’t sure how to bridge the gap.
Nora’s situation and feelings are not unusual. Relationships and conversations with parents when you are an adult are obviously not the same as when you were a child or teen: You’ve changed while they don't seem to have changed, or you’ve both changed. But what you feel most is awkwardness as you try to connect adult to adult. Maybe you feel resentment at times that they don’t reach out more, see you for who you are, or feel the same concern about your relationship that you feel.
Here are some of the common sources for these changes:
You’re both caught in your own worlds. This is about logistics. You don’t live under the same roof; you both are busy. You’ve moved away, and you simply don’t see each other enough. And when you do, it's often built around a holiday or occasion that carries its own momentum.
Connections are maintained with details: What did you finally decide to do about X? So, what did your boss say after you confronted her? But if you don't know about these nuances of their lives, the phone calls, texts, or emails are merely check-ins.
Your parent isn’t good at conversation. If Nora asks her mom about her day, she can get a blow-by-blow-minute-by-minute rundown from what she eats for breakfast to what she wore. With her father, she gets one-liners: How’s work? Fine. What’d you do last weekend? Not much. There are no details with which to track their lives and connect around. You lose intimacy.
Stuck in roles/loss of roles. This is one of the bigger problems. Like most adult children, Nora's relationships with her parents are built on different foundations. With her dad, it was about doing stuff together, and these experiences created bonding memories that created they could share; when they weren't doing that, her dad was giving advice.
But now they're no longer doing things together. She doesn’t want or need his advice, and when he tries to give it anyway, she feels that she is being treated like a child or micromanaged. She has different needs, but he doesn't know what to do differently, leading to awkwardness.
Old wounds come to the surface. Although Nora idolized her dad when she growing up, she now is more aware of his human failings or sees past events through the lenses of an adult. All this can ignite childhood wounds that can get in the way of feeling connected to or reaching out to him.
This is common. After plowing through those late teen/early adult challenges of getting through education, finding partners, and living independently as an adult, you often reach a place in your life when you are finally more stable, and with that stability comes the opportunity to look back at your childhood. For some, this brings appreciation, but for many, it stirs resentment as they struggle to reconcile their past relationship with their current feelings. Some become angry and literally cut their parents off, while others pull back.
What to do: Closing the gap
This is a time of developmental transitions on both sides. Rather than settling and taking what you get, going on autopilot, or pulling away, instead, imagine the ideal relationship you would like to have with your parents now. Don’t expect your relationships with each of your parents to be equal: You share different histories and experiences and have different personalities.
Change the conversation. The conversations are the carriers of the relationship. If Nora’s father never asks about the details of her life or never goes beyond his one-sentence grunt, she can reshape the conversations: Give him details about her everyday life, or ask more detailed questions of him and not just settle. Likely he will, for the first several times, fall back into his old ways, but if she persists, she can change what and how they talk.
Or she can be bolder and tackle this head-on: Send him an email or plan a conversation where she talks about what she wants differently when they do talk. This can give him a heads-up and help him understand what to move towards.
Let them know what you need now. Nora doesn’t need advice or small talk, but her father, in his mind, is simply being the parent he has always been. She needs to give him a new job, a new role—that important person she feels safe talking to who will just listen or give her positive feedback about what she is doing well rather than what she needs to change or be careful of.
Repair old wounds. If old wounds are getting in the way, talk about them. This does not mean doing a rant about the past, but instead, in a calm way, helping your parents know what has lingered. It’s usually more about them listening and understanding how you felt rather than making them feel guilty and you dumping your anger. Let them understand this from the start.
Build new memories. Because Nora and her father have connected in the past around doing things, they may need to find new things to do. No more science projects to work on together, but maybe getting away together for a weekend and creating shared new experiences and memories. Will it be a bit awkward? Probably, but do it anyway.
Increase contact. Do all or some of the above but increase the contact so they both can move out of that catch-up mode and the details to track that increases intimacy.
The challenge here is moving from parent-child relationships to more adult-adult relationships. These are difficult transitions that often can take years but always take perseverance.
If not now, when?
