Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Last Show with David Cooper. Where bad therapy meets good radio. You spend 18 years raising independent, ambitious kids. Congratulations, your job paid off. They're thriving, they're successful, and they move halfway across the country and they're too busy to call you.
If you do a great job parenting, what happens when that engineers your loneliness, especially if you feel like you've sacrificed your life for your children? I'm here with therapist Laurel Vander Torn, who runs Laurel Therapy Collective in California and Florida to discuss just this. Laurel, welcome to the show.
Chapter 2: What is the dilemma of raising independent children?
Hi. There's a kind of a paradox in modern parenting where if you do a great job and your children really launch well, that you can then find yourself lonely. And I know this isn't new. This is kind of like empty nest syndrome. But is this more common nowadays?
Yeah. What struck me about the particular article that you're referencing is like, yeah, this parent absolutely did what they set out to do to instill values in their kids of hard work, ambition and self-efficacy, you know, kind of independence. And then here she is really missing her kids. I'm assuming it's a mom. Maybe it isn't. Yeah.
This line, though, I sacrificed everything for you.
Chapter 3: How does successful parenting lead to feelings of loneliness?
That one, that's all too familiar. It's like, I didn't ask to be born. Do you owe your parents a phone call every week, every few days? I now feel like I do because I like them a lot and I want to be in touch with them, but I didn't always feel that way.
Uh, no. It really depends on what kind of adult relationship you have with your parents now, because not all parents have done a bang-up job. And not all parents are, you know, for whatever reasons, maybe their particular trauma history, their emotional maturity and capacity, ability to show up and be consistent.
A lot of people have resentment toward parents or a really complicated relationship there. So I would say, no, you don't owe anything. But if you've established a relationship that feels good, then yeah, you can.
This kind of like secret psychological contract that a kid never gets a chance to agree to or not because that's your parent that you need to like stay in touch and be grateful and all these things. And yes, I think you should do those things. But do you have to do those things?
No.
And can you experiment with not doing those things when you first move out of your house, which is kind of my story. It's like, yeah, in my 20s, I didn't talk to my parents much as a form of maybe rebellion. I don't know. Sounds silly and immature at the time. It sounds silly and immature now. At the time, it felt right for me.
But it's developmentally appropriate. I mean, when you look at the developmental tasks of every age, honestly, most of them are getting farther and farther from your family of origin in a very like Western traditional culture sense. There are some cultures where that's not the case. But, you know, the primary task of adolescence is differentiating yourself.
That's why we do like the blue hair and the kind of little rebellions that aren't actually harmful as a way of exploring who am I separate from my parents and my family. And that continues in a more mature way in your 20s. Who am I in the world as an independent adult? Now, there are plenty of family systems where there's enmeshment or there's a family crisis.
I have a friend whose mom had a major stroke a week after she graduated college, and that sure interrupted that process for her.
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Chapter 4: What is the relationship between independence and emotional distance?
But it's kind of normal stuff.
When parents say, I want my children to be independent, I raised them to be independent. Do some underestimate what independence actually looks like? It can look like emotional distance.
It can if you don't also instill a value of family and community. When I was reading the article for this taping we're doing today, it sounds like that was the only thing the parents set out to instill in her kids. And they sure absorbed it. Independence, success, ambition. But it's not either or here. Like all of us contain multitudes. So if you only instill the value of success, then yeah.
But it might be like, yep, we go hard during the week. And then on the weekend, it's family time. And we do not engage with work on that. That could have been a value that was instilled. And I'm guessing it wasn't.
You know, similarly, perhaps this was between a father and son that I know, like the father was like a businessman kind of entrepreneur sort of thing. And he really raised his son, someone I know to be successful. When the son becomes more successful than the father has a business and sells a business worth more than the father, the father like cannot deal like a competitive childish.
There's something that there's kind of this paradox of raising your kids to be a certain way. And then when they when they become it, that weird stuff starts to happen.
I mean, the healthy, mature perspective of any parent should be, I want my kid to do better than me and have more than me and be happier than me. And if you can't get down with that in reality, I might look at why. What is it that's so threatening there?
Sure. And to a parent that says, I gave up everything for my children, doesn't that kind of create a pressure that a child can not possibly pay back? Like, that seems like an unhealthy... view to have. And if that's the way you're framing your life decisions, maybe you got to go back to your first principles there.
What would you say to someone who came to you distraught saying they gave up everything for their family and now the family doesn't look the way they want it to look?
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Chapter 5: How can parents cope with the empty nest syndrome?
That's not how it works. I think parenting is one of the most challenging jobs because there is no guarantee of dividends. And I think a lot of people go into it expecting that and experience a lot of stress and dissatisfaction because they thought it was going to be something different.
Because most other relationships in our lives, other than parenting, parent-child relationships, are somewhat reciprocal. You go to work and your boss pays you. You know, you go to school and you do your work and your teacher teaches you. So parent-child is really an exceptional relationship that a lot of us are still struggling to understand.
And of course, like I said at the beginning of our chat here, it's nothing new like empty nest syndrome. That identity crisis that comes when your children leave, that can hit people in weird and interesting and creative ways that they never thought could hit them.
Yeah, it's super complex because pride and grief and loneliness and resentment all can coexist at the same time and they don't cancel each other out. For some people, one of those emotions might be louder than the other, but that doesn't mean that the others are not salient.
Is it a hard truth in some cases to someone who thinks that they kind of gave everything to their children that they neglected their own life while they raised kids and that's their own fault? I mean, that's a hard truth, but would you say that to someone?
I would. I mean, it's complicated because particularly for women raising children, there's a whole lot of social conditioning about what it means to be a good mom. And women are just kind of socialized to be self-sacrificing. And I do a lot of work with my clients around like, nope, you have to take care of yourself first.
I also see this self-neglect pattern showing up in other areas besides parenting, people with unhealthy relationships with work or people in really enmeshed, codependent, romantic relationships where they forget themselves. And that's a really tough one to unlearn. But yes, ultimately, you are responsible for meeting your own needs unless you are a child.
Is that the first piece of advice you would give a parent that is feeling the way that we described? Like start to learn to meet your own needs? Okay. Anything else you would want to tell a parent that feels similar to the way we're talking about right now?
I would just challenge any expectation you have of your adult children. I mean, there's unfortunate scripts around like, oh, well, if you have kids, they'll take care of you when you're old. Mm-mm. Yeah, no. They didn't agree to that, again.
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