Balancing between helping and enabling adult children can be challenging. Bela Life Coaching and Hypnotherapy offers guidelines to help distinguish between the two:
Helping
- Providing Support and Encouragement: Offer emotional support and encouragement for their goals and efforts.
- Teaching Skills: Help them learn skills that will foster independence, such as budgeting, cooking, or job searching.
- Setting Boundaries: Clearly define what kind of help you are willing to provide and stick to those boundaries.
- Encouraging Responsibility: Support them in taking responsibility for their actions and decisions.
- Offering Guidance: Provide advice and guidance when asked, but let them make their own decisions.
- Providing Temporary Financial Assistance: If necessary, offer short-term financial help with a clear plan for repayment or steps towards self-sufficiency.
Enabling
- Removing Consequences: Constantly bailing them out of difficult situations or protecting them from the consequences of their actions.
- Over-involvement: Taking over their responsibilities or making decisions for them.
- Unconditional Financial Support: Providing ongoing financial support without any expectations or plans for them to become independent.
- Ignoring Problems: Overlooking or denying issues such as substance abuse, lack of motivation, or other harmful behaviors.
- Making Excuses: Justifying their lack of effort or poor decisions instead of encouraging them to improve.
- Sacrificing Your Well-being: Neglecting your own needs and well-being to continually support them.
Key Considerations
- Assess Their Needs vs. Wants: Determine if the support is genuinely necessary for their well-being or if it is a want that they should be managing on their own.
- Encourage Problem-Solving: Instead of solving problems for them, encourage them to think through and find solutions.
- Promote Independence: Aim to help them develop the skills and confidence needed to become independent.
- Set Clear Expectations: Communicate your expectations clearly and consistently regarding their progress towards independence.
- Seek Professional Guidance: If you are unsure, consider seeking advice from a life coach, therapist or counselor to navigate the balance between helping and enabling.
By focusing on empowerment and fostering independence, you can support your adult children effectively without enabling dependency.
If you are having issues with your adult child, or letting go of critical thoughts, please reach out to me. I give free consultations and offer Zoom and in-person life and energy coaching, relationship coaching, group coaching and much more to meet your financial needs. I’m also certified in the Prepare for Surgery, Heal Faster™ developed by Peggy Huddleston. Contact me for a free consultation at 503-939-2269 or bela@belacoaching.com.
