Want a Better Relationship With Your Adult Kids? Start With Yourself—and Your Friends

If you've listened to Bite Your Tongue for a while, you may remember this conversation with friendship expert Shasta Nelson. I'm bringing it back because when I listened to it again, I realized just how much is packed into this episode.

Yes, we talk about friendship—but we also talk about something at the very heart of this podcast: How do we build a healthier, more adult relationship with our grown children?

Shasta introduces us to what she calls the Friendship Triangle: positivity, consistency and vulnerability. And while she developed it around friendship, those same three things can tell us a lot about our relationships with our adult kids.

One part really stayed with me.

Shasta says vulnerability with our adult children isn't telling them what we think they should do differently. It's having the courage to ask what we might have done differently.

Can we ask: How did I impact you in ways I may not even realize? What was hard for you growing up? What do you wish I had done more of—or less of?

And then comes the really hard part: Can we listen to the answer without defending ourselves?

But there's another piece of this conversation I think is equally important.

We need lives and relationships outside our children.

I said during this interview that the fuller my own life is, the less I feel I have to depend on my kids. Shasta takes that idea even further. Our adult children can be incredibly important relationships in our lives—but they don't have to be our best friends. We need people our own age who can listen to us, challenge us and help us process our own feelings.

Maybe those two ideas are more connected than I realized the first time we recorded this episode.

The stronger and fuller we are outside the relationship, the better able we may be to show up inside it—with less need, less judgment, more curiosity and more vulnerability.

So whether you heard this episode the first time around or you're discovering it today, I hope you'll listen again. I certainly heard some things differently this time.

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And remember…
sometimes you just have to bite your tongue.

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