Doing Life with Your Adult Children

Keep Your Mouth Shut and the Welcome Mat Out

By: Jim Burns Ph.D

Narrated by: Wayne Campbell

Are you struggling to connect with your child now that they've left the nest? Are you feeling the tension and heartache as your relationship dynamic begins to change? In Doing Life with Your Adult Children, bestselling author and parenting expert Jim Burns provides practical advice and hopeful encouragement for navigating this tough yet rewarding transition.

If you've raised a child, you know that parenting doesn't stop when they turn eighteen. In many ways, your relationship gets even more complicated--your heart and your head are as involved as ever, but you can feel things shifting, whether your child lives under your roof or rarely stays in contact.

Doing Life with Your Adult Children helps you navigate this rich and challenging season of parenting. Speaking from his own personal and professional experience, Burns offers practical answers to the most common questions he's received over the years, including:

• My child's choices are breaking my heart--where did I go wrong?
• Is it OK to give advice to my grown child?
• What's the difference between enabling and helping?
• What boundaries should I have if my child moves back home?
• What do I do when my child doesn't seem to be maturing into adulthood?
• How do I relate to my grown child's significant other?
• What does it mean to have healthy financial boundaries?
• How can I support my grown children when I don't support their values?

Including positive principles on bringing kids back to faith, ideas on how to leave a legacy as a grandparent, and encouragement for every changing season, Doing Life with Your Adult Children is a unique book on your changing role in a calling that never ends.

Fabulous Advice

I’m a stepparent of our adult children and this helped a ton with the strained relationship I have with one of them in particular. I changed my mindset and became nurturing and supportive through their tough time instead of disapproving of their choices. It’s not my position to approve or disapprove, because the choices are theirs to make as adults. I’m here to be a loving presence and help them figure life out. I recommend this book to anyone who has adult children.

What I Learned.

Everything in this book has proven useful in doing life with our adult children. I had just finished a chapter when a particular situation showed up in working with our daughter’s significant other. Jim’s advice in this book on how we needed to proceed was spot on.

I think I am going to listen again and buy the book.

On time training

I am currently dealing with many of the issues discussed in this book. I know that I or we needed to treat my daughter as an adult and I thought I was until her life choices were uncovered. And I was shocked but I looked inward with the help of the Holy Spirit and found I was doing the “too much”. I or we have enabled her behaviors and I needed help on the how. I goggled the topic “Parenting Adult Children “ and there it was. I am so grateful for the knowledge poured into this book. This book provided the how and why examples . Thank you, I only wish I could sponsor a webinar for parents in High School and college. I feel blessed to have read this book.

Laura
A loving parent

Practical Advice

Narration was well paced. Topic hit on every subject possible in our role as parents to our older kids. We spend more years assisting our adult children than we do their first 18 years. Nowadays there are more critical social issues challenging the hearts of our children regardless of their age. Knowing others have experienced some similar thoughts on how to engage is so very helpful

Good points made, very faith based

While I agree fully with the premise of this book, many of the points were basic and there was a quite preachy tone and more religious content than I expected.