Coaching with LDS values

Episode 78 These Are the Kids We Were Given Welcome to the podcast, loving On Purpose. I'm your host, Bonnie Lyman. If you're having trouble navigating through your relationships with your adult children, if you are struggling to connect with them or having specific challenges, you're in the right place. This is Bonnie Lyman and you are listening to the podcast, loving On Purpose. This is episode number 78. These are the kids you were given. I am so thankful for all of you that turned in this week, and I hope I give you food for thought anyway. Um, when it comes to wanting our relationships with our children to be different. It can cause us some pain. And so it's accepting that they may never be different, which is often hard to accept, but we are living longer these days, and so I hope you are out there pursuing things that interest you. That fulfill you. And more than any other time in our history, I think we're having to find things outside of association, spending time with our family to fulfill this time in our life. Someone once said, your life is not between birth, your birth and your death, but it's between now and your next breath. And we know that that's true. We don't know how long we're going to live. We don't know what changes are going to come into our lives, whether it's health issues with ourself, with others, we don't know what kind of decisions our kids were going to make. But it is a different time and every decade is a different time. And now we are being introduced to ai, which is is going to be, as I've heard, a bigger change to technology than even the internet was. We grew up thinking we were victims of what happened in our lives. That what happened in our lives either caused us to be satisfied or unsatisfied how we were raised. What's happening in your life right now, how your adult children are treating you? All of those things are circumstances that affect how we view life and what kind of life we're leading right now. Yes, you don't have control over those things. How you were raised, what's maybe happening in your life, how your adult children are treating you, but it's al always. Our choice of how we're going to let it affect us. This means I have control over how I want to view the things happening my life, and how I want to live my life. It's going to be an awfully long wait if I wait for fulfillment. In my life on waiting for my children to be more involved in my life. I'm not seeing things are hard, uh, especially living in the United States with all its con conveniences. But things have changed so drastically from when we were the adult children. Some of these changes are, are some of these things. It's more convenient to ask or to pay someone to help with a project when a generation ago, we may have asked a family member to help us with that. We have lots more connection through social media than we ever had before. And so we are not as dependent on family for social connection. We have more free time on our hands than we ever had before. Because of the ease of all the conveniences we had. We also have more mental health problems than ever before. There's more kids going to therapy. There used to be such a stigma to going to therapy that now I find my grandchildren at a very young age. Are requesting to go to therapy. There are only a few of the changes that cause our relationships to be what we might say, uh, more distance than when we were our kids' age. Our kids don't see our relationships as distant because number one, they weren't around when we were gathering. With our relatives, and number two, they don't see it as the exact amount of time. Parents and adult children are supposed to spend time together. They see it as nothing has gone wrong. They don't even see it as being different, so, So who is right? Relationships change as seen by millennials and Generation Z. Some choose to have contact with their parents, but many are feeling their parents weren't emotionally present for them when they were being raised. And they see their parents as being emotionally immature. Many feel, for whatever reason, their parents weren't present for them when they were young. They may even make this up, but when life goes awry for them, they have a need to blame something as to why they can't figure out why their life isn't the way they want it to be. So they blame their parents and how they were raised. They feel victimized by their circumstances, so then they blame how they were raised. Many feel judgment by their parents for having different religious values that cross over sometimes into different social and political values. Often it's apparent that are upset by this, the the parents care that their children have left their faith, they raised their children in. But the children often don't have any feelings if their parents still stay true to this faith. They don't judge their parents for believing. In this faith in which they were raised, they have chosen just not to believe it, but they don't want, our adult children don't want to be criticized for not having the same values. Love me for who I am, not when I am who you want me to be. Bottom line is this generation is figuring out life in a different way than their parents figured it out before. When children would go to their parents for advice, when they needed help, they now go to social media or Google. The past generation needed the wisdom of experienced parents for counsel. This generation needs the internet and closer in age to what they are for counsel and direction. In some ways, they are right. Many of the past generation are not keeping up with all the technology that affords us expertise on anything we want to know. So, You taking it personally that they don't turn to you for counsel and advice can handle your relationship instead of just accepting that's what they're doing today. Adult children are trying to keep up with taking care of their own needs and they don't have time. To take care of their parents' needs. That may sound cruel and harsh to a lot of you, but the reality is, number one, they have more difficult needs that need to be addressed than we had. And number two, being an adult. That's us means you take care of fulfilling your own needs. It is not your child's responsibilities. So how does the past generation, we, the parents of these adult children today, adapt? To this ever-changing generation, number one, we accept and respect this generation as having a different kind of need for a different kind of relationship with us than we had with our parents. I didn't have a great relationship with my parents. My parents never approved of anything I did, and I felt like I was a pretty straight arrow kid. I can remember feeling guilty for not talking to my mother when she lived in a different state. She had no answering machine. She didn't have a smartphone. There was no way she even knew I was trying to get ahold of her. I don't want my kids feeling guilty about the, the treatment that they give me. I was reminded often that I never quite did enough to please my parents. We need to focus on what we see as strengths in them. Not how they're neglecting us, because remember, they don't see it as neglect. They see it as the perfect amount of time to associate with us. We don't make their misbehavior mean anything about how we raise them. They took how they were raised and either decided to not follow it or to make choices on their own that maybe don't even benefit them, but they have a high need for that autonomy to govern themselves. We need to recognize our worth and identity being separate from the worth and identity of our adult children. We are from the same family. But we are all very unique with unique likes, dislikes, abilities, weaknesses, and strengths. We need to be confident. We need to be confident because we know we are amazing. And yet we have imperfections all at the same time. And we give me humble and loving because we know our children are amazing and have flaws just like me. Free yourself by not putting meaning to too much any human behavior. With your adult children that you disagree with? Life would be pretty boring if everybody thought and acted like me and yet we think we would be happier if our childrens wanted the same things we wanted. I think God knew exactly. What he was doing when he orchestrated the plan of salvation. Let's have a little more faith, a little more belief that things are going exactly as they were supposed to be going, and everything is going to work out. A mixture of all are small. Insignificant experiences that we have in life end up making for a pretty amazing life. Our adult kids are living the life they are supposed to be. How would that feel if you could believe that? Why not just try? To see things from your kids' perspective and that nothing has gone wrong, that you just have some needs that are not being fulfilled by them. It's time that we start looking outside of. Of them, of our adult kids to gain all of our happiness and satisfaction. We have a whole life out there with so many people to serve with so many people that need us. With so many things to do with so many things to learn. It's all out there just for the taking. We live in a country where we can do pretty much anything we want to do. Let's not waste time bemoaning what our adult children or not offering to us, but focus on what we can offer to the relationship. By becoming a better person, by serving others, by being an an example of unconditionally loving everyone. I hope you have a great week. Have a great 4th of July. And I will talk to you next week. If you like this, be this episode and you felt it was of benefit to you, I ask you to share it with somebody that perhaps it could also benefit, but if you're still feeling kind of stuck in that you don't know how to apply what was talked about, Or where to start on, on changing your thoughts, on changing your perspective, on bettering your relationship. Get on a call with me and we can have a discussion and I can tell you. How to apply it and where we start, and then you get to decide what you want to do about this relationship that maybe you're struggling with with your adult children. There's no reason to go on the rest of our lives struggling with our relationships with our adult children. Let's assume the best. Let's assume that we all love each other and we're just trying to figure out how to maintain our own boundaries and respect another ones. But I can help you with everything. So just go to bonnie lyman.com and book a call. I can't wait to hear from you. .