July 18, 2025
When To Speak Up, When To Bite Your Tongue: Dr. Lawrence Steinberg on Parent-Adult Child Dynamics
Send us a text Dr. Lawrence Steinberg sheds light on the evolving relationship between parents and their adult children in today's challenging economic landscape, offering practical advice on when to speak up and when to bite your tongue. He explains how the elongation of adolescence and unprecedented financial pressures have transformed traditional parent-child dynamics. • Housing costs have risen five times faster than salaries, creating barriers to independence for young adults • Living w...
Dr. Lawrence Steinberg sheds light on the evolving relationship between parents and their adult children in today's challenging economic landscape, offering practical advice on when to speak up and when to bite your tongue. He explains how the elongation of adolescence and unprecedented financial pressures have transformed traditional parent-child dynamics.
• Housing costs have risen five times faster than salaries, creating barriers to independence for young adults
• Living with parents is now the most common arrangement for Americans in their 20s
• Financial support creates complex dynamics about expectations and boundaries
• Follow the "40-70 rule": discuss finances before parents turn 70 or children turn 40
• Only offer unsolicited advice when your child faces potentially irreparable harmful consequences
• Frame concerns as questions rather than directives to preserve your child's autonomy
• Adult children experience a "third autonomy crisis" around age 30
• When grandparenting, recognize that parenting advice changes generationally
• Focus on making your adult children feel confident and competent as parents
• Stop judging your child's progress by the timetable you followed at their age
Huge thank you to Connie Gorant Fisher, our audio engineer.
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00:00 - Misunderstandings About Young Adults Today
00:37 - Introduction to Bite Your Tongue Podcast
02:29 - Dr. Steinberg on Writing His Book
09:44 - Challenges of Modern Adult Children
16:07 - When to Bite Your Tongue
22:33 - Financial Dependence vs Emotional Independence
34:32 - Navigating Relationships With Children's Partners
42:51 - Becoming Supportive Grandparents
48:32 - Key Takeaways and Closing Thoughts
WEBVTT
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I think that a lot of young people feel misunderstood and I think they feel unfairly labeled as lazy or self-absorbed or selfish or whatever, and I don't think that that's true.
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I think it's really hard to be that age today, because of the economy, because of the labor force, because of everything that's going on in the world.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Bite your Tongue, the podcast.
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Join me, your host, denise Gorin, as we explore the ins and outs of building healthy relationships with our adult children.
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Together, we'll speak with experts, share heartfelt stories and get timely advice addressing topics that matter most to you.
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Get ready to dive deep and learn to build and nurture deep connections with our adult children and, of course, when to bite our tongues.
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So let's get started.
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Hello everyone, we're back.
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Welcome to season three of Bite your Tongue, the podcast.
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I hope while we were on hiatus, each of you were able to listen to some past episodes, even for a second time.
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I find I actually get much more from certain episodes if I listen again.
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In any event, as many of you know, ellen is busy promoting her book and I'm actively looking for another co host.
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I just find the podcast works so much better when there's two of us.
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We can bounce ideas off each other and it just flows so much better.
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Give me some time.
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I'll find the perfect person, but please email me at biteyourtonguepodcast at gmailcom if you think you may be the one.
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Now on to the show.
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We're opening season three with a guest.
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Many of you may already have heard of Early.
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In the summer he released a book called you and your Adult Child how to Grow Together During Challenging Times.
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Because we were on hiatus, I scheduled him for our first interview of the new season.
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You may have even seen glimpses of him on many popular shows, but today you're going to get a deeper insight into his book, his ideas and why this whole topic of you and your adult child is suddenly so trendy.
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Drum roll, please.
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Today we're so excited to speak with Dr Lawrence Steinberg.
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His new book, you and your Adult Child how to Grow Together During Challenging Times, is a godsend.
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Truly, when I read the book, I realized that he's covering so many topics that we've been covering on our podcast, from finance and sexuality to weddings, partner choices, disrespect and so much more.
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But this is not just his thoughts and ideas.
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He's unpacking decades of research and interviews.
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But what I liked best is he doesn't really give us a specific right or wrong.
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He balances both sides of the relationship.
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That's why I think this is a great book, both for young adults to read and for us, the parents.
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The publisher touts the book as the first comprehensive guide for parents whose children are in the two most crucial decades of their life, and we've said that over and over again on this podcast these years are the longest relationship we'll have with our adult children.
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Let's make it a good one.
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I'm so honored to have Dr Steinberg with us today.
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Such a thrill to chat with him.
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So let's get started.
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Well, naturally, the first question I want to ask you is tell me why why you wrote this book.
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You know, when we started this podcast a year or so ago, no one was really talking about relationships with their adult children, and suddenly it's become an important topic and you've gotten great notoriety.
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So what was the catalyst?
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How did you decide to go ahead with this and really dig deep into this subject?
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Well, I hadn't thought about writing this book until I got a call from my editor at Simon Schuster, who had been contacted by AARP, the organization that advocates for and supports adults who are 50 and older.
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Right Saying that a lot of its members and AARP has 137 million members, so it's a big organization A lot of its members were having trouble raising adult children, living with adult children, taking care of their adult children whatever verb we want to use there, right right but they were puzzled by it and had a lot of questions and couldn't find resources out there to turn to.
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I then was invited to write this book.
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It actually fit nicely with where my own thinking had evolved over time in two different ways.
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The first is that I'm the parent of an adult child and during the time I was writing this book, I was living this book and we get along just fine.
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But what I realized is that you don't have to be going through a crisis in order to need help with this stage of life, in the same way that you know books and they buy books on cobblers and they buy books on teenagers, and not a lot of them who buy those books are going through a crisis.
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They're going through a transition and they don't understand what the transition is or how they should act.
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Also, in terms of my own academic interests, I was moving more and more toward an older age group than I had specialized in, so I've been specializing in adolescence and been working on that age group for 50 years.
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One thing that I wrote about in my previous book, age of Opportunity, was that adolescence has been lengthening.
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It's been elongated because the end of it really comes at the point when people make the transition into adulthood, and that's socially defined.
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It's not a biological transition for the most part, and what we know is that more and more people are taking longer and longer to move into their careers, to become married, to become parents, to become economically dependent, to set up their own home.
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And I had already been thinking about that and had been writing about that.
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But what I hadn't written about or thought about was how these changes are affecting parents, because when we scholars of development write about people in their 20s, let's say, or people in their 30s, we write about them as students or workers or spouses.
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We don't write about them as children.
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In fact, one of the difficult things in writing this book was coming up with a phrase to describe who these people are, because we don't have one in our language.
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A lot of people don't like calling them adult children, but that's about the best we can do.
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I mean we could say adult sons and daughters.
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That's a little cumbersome to have in the title of a book and adult children has some weird connotations, as I like to say.
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It makes you think either of Donald Trump, who's an adult child.
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It makes you think either of Donald Trump, who's an adult child, or young Sheldon, who's one of those precocious, obnoxious sitcom stars.
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And I don't mean that I'm not making a judgment or passing a judgment on people's maturity when I say that somebody's an adult child.
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I'm simply saying that there are adults who are still actively involved with their parents.
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I think that's great, because I do think that whatever age you are, people say to you how many children do you have?
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They don't say how many adult sons or daughters do you have.
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So whatever age you are, I don't care if you're 80, if, for some reason, your parents alive, you're still a child to that adult parent.
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And think about it when you read an obituary.
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They say they leave behind blah, blah, blah and four children.
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But what I really liked what you said was and I loved your no one can see this because it's a podcast your expression when you said I have one adult child and everyone does this.
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We get along fine.
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You know, it's like this sort of I didn't write this because I had problems, but that's what I love that you said.
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This isn't about people that are just have deep problems and their kids.
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This is us learning a new transition in parenting, one that hasn't been approached before, and so I really love that.
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You said that.
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But you wouldn't know that.
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So one of the first things I did, once I agreed to do the book.
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As most authors do, I wanted to see what else was out there.
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I went to bookstores, online and in person, and what's out?
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There are books written by and for parents who are estranged from their adult children, and so if you were to judge the situation only by looking at what's been written already, you would think that everybody was having a tough time raising their adult children, and some of them weren't on speaking terms with them, and we can talk about that if you want.
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I mean, I think that that whole issue estrangement which is a serious one, has been really overstated in terms of its magnitude.
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My guess is that, like me, most adults with adult children get along with them fine, but have issues that they need help with and they have questions that they haven't confronted before.
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Right, a big part of the book is discussing how times have changed in ways that transformed the parent-child relationship.
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And that's exactly my next question.
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You talk about challenging times.
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What does that mean?
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You say in the book towards the end.
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If there's one crucial takeaway from the book, it's that parenting an adult child today is very different than it was a generation ago.
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This has left many parents perplexed about their relationship with their adult children.
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Can you explain this and the factors that contribute to it, because I think we'd all be interested to know that for sure.
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Sure.
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Well, we used the term we meaning my editor and I used the term challenging times to mean two different things.
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One is that it's a challenging time for the relationship period.
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The second is that it's a challenging time in history that affects that relationship in ways that were not present previously, and so by that I'm talking about a couple of things.
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The first is that, because it's taking longer for young people to make the transition into these adult roles, so they're staying in school longer, for example, into these adult roles, so they're staying in school longer, for example, each of these transitions, when it gets slowed or delayed, has cascading effects.
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If you stay in school longer, then you're putting off earning money.
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If you're putting off earning money, then you have to get money from somewhere, and it's probably your parents.
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And so many parents now find that they're helping to support their kids for a far longer period of time than they expected.
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And, by the same token, many kids are finding that they're having to depend on their parents for a far longer period of time than they expected, and that's one way in which it's changed.
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And, as we'll discuss, this combination of economic dependence but emotional independence is a very challenging one for families to navigate.
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So that's one way.
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A second is the incredible increase in the cost of housing.
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Housing, whether you're talking about rent or purchase housing, has gone up five times faster than salaries have, and so more and more young people are having to either depend on their parents to pay for or subsidize their housing, or to move back home with their parents.
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So, as I note, we have the highest proportion of people in their 20s living at home as we've ever had in modern times.
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Right now, it is the most common living arrangement in America for people in their 20s is to live with one or both of their parents.
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That was never the case at any point in time in the 20th century, even during the height of the Great Depression.
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It wasn't even the case toward the end of the 19th century.
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So, in America at least, it's very unusual and because it's unusual and because it's new for lots of families nobody knows what the rules are, nobody knows what the guidelines are, nobody knows how to navigate this, and it's not the same, as I explained, as when your college student returns home for summer vacation or for Christmas break.
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So what are the expectations that you have and that the adult child has for living together Everything from the mundane like are they expected to do household chores, are they expected to be at dinner every night To the kinds of things that we don't talk about.
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Like what, if they want to have an active sex life?
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They're having a sex life down the hall from their parents, their parents.
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You know, as parents, we don't like to think of our children as sexual beings.
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I should say that our children don't like to think of us as sexual beings.
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I was going to say I think that goes both ways.
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It does go both ways.
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I was going to say, I think that goes both ways, but it's a little too close for comfort, you know, to know that your son or daughter has just come home with somebody they maybe met that night and that they're planning on sleeping together.
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You know, two doors down the hallway, as somebody said when I was doing a talk show and somebody said I don't want to come down to breakfast and find some dude sitting in his boxer shorts at my kitchen table, and so I think that probably doesn't happen all that often, but you get the point.
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Yeah, but what do?
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parents do.
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I mean, we can talk about it, but what are the steps they take?
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I mean, you know, internationally, kids have been living with their families.
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In Italy, it's a normal thing.
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In China it's a normal thing.
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The grandparents raise the kids and no one seems to have a problem.
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I wonder.
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I just want to ask something.
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Go back to you know, kids are in school longer and that sort of thing.
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Do you mean getting further degrees?
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Or also, some kids aren't able to finish school in five or six years, and is that part of our parenting error?
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You know, have we been too indulgent, as they've been growing up and paying for college and, okay, well, they don't make it through in four years, we'll make it through in five.
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You know, is it partying going on?
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Where do they have to step to the plate and say you know what?
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You either get through in four years or figure it out, bud.
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I mean, what is that?
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How does this play into it?
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Well, both of what you said turn out to be true.
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So it is taking students longer to complete a bachelor's degree.
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There's no question about that.
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In fact, you know, we insist on calling it a four-year degree, and it's not a four-year degree for the majority of people.
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So more people take more than four years now than four years or fewer, and so we have to stop thinking of it that way.
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Now, why that is?
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There are a number of reasons for it, some of which are out of the control of the students.
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So, for example, at my university, temple University in Philadelphia, big school 30,000 or so undergrads there are requirements for graduation.
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To be a psych major, you have to take a certain number of courses.
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Well, we might be understaffed as a department one year and we may not be able to offer all the courses that students need in order to graduate, and this isn't unique to my university.
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This is across the country.
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And then if students decide into their careers as students to change majors and then they might not be able to complete the requirements for the new major within four years.
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Now the question that you raise and it's a very good one is how long are parents supposed to be paying for this?
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And on top of that, we know that more and more jobs require more education than they did in the past.
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Whether they should is a different matter and maybe not part of our conversation.
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But if you need a master's degree to do a job that you only needed a bachelor's degree to do five years ago, that's two more years of schooling that somebody is going to have to pay for.
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Plus there's all the add-on ancillary training that students need.
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So you graduate from college and then you realize I never took a course in computer coding and I'm going to have to code when I get out there.
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So now you're going to have to pay for and take a semester long coding class someplace, and this happens all the time.
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So I'm not one of those persons who is on.
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The millennials are lazy bandwagon.
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I don't think that that's true.
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I don't think there's any evidence that it's true.
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I do think it's harder to establish your financial footing today for people in their 20s and 30s than it has been in the past, and every family is going to respond differently.
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And I have to say that was a challenge in writing you and your adult child, because you know it's fairly easy to write a book for parents of babies.
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Most babies are pretty similar.
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I mean you don't have to adopt different diapering techniques for different babies.
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But once you get to be in your 20s or even 30s, I mean life just varies so much from person to person, and so it was hard for me to give blanket advice on lots of issues and instead what I thought would be helpful was to say to parents here's what you should be thinking about.
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I can't tell you whether you should pay for a fifth year of college or not.
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A lot of that depends on your own finances.
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A lot of that depends on whether you think your child has a plan and that this makes a lot of sense.
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Without knowing the answers to those questions, I can't tell you what I think you should do, but I can tell you that what you should think about is is this going to be okay with my finances as an adult?
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Is this going to interfere with my retirement plans, for example, and is my child serious about education in a way that I think this is going to be a good investment?
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Or maybe my kid should just take some time off until she figures out what she wants to do with her life?
00:18:30.375 --> 00:18:51.665
So sorry for kind of winding around a little bit here, but it is linked to the earlier question you asked about challenging times, because the other thing that makes these times challenging is the fact that this generation of parents was super involved in their kids' lives from the beginning.
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You know I mean, choosing a preschool was life or death, going to every back-to-school night with notebooks to write down everything the teachers said, standing on the sidelines and screaming at all the soccer games.
00:19:06.967 --> 00:19:39.029
You know, I said I don't think I wrote this in the book, but I gave a talk in which I said wanting to be the cool parent who has relationships with all your kids' high school buddies, being involved in the college application process, writing the college application essay, and so a lot of these parents are used to being really, really involved and they wonder should I remain this involved now that my kid has grown up, has finished college, is in their 20s or even 30s, what is the right level of involvement?
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And so it's a kind of boundary problem that exists.
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Well, and sometimes they're not able to stop being involved.
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That brings me to the next question.
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Early in the book you talk about conflict versus autonomy, and I think a lot of my listeners and myself how to let go when we've been so close to them for so many years because really they are adults and they have to make their own decisions.
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And how do we then back off?
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You can't be so engaged, but some parents are forced to be there sort of face to face.
00:20:10.333 --> 00:20:26.074
In other words, it's easy to be less engaged when you're not living with each other, but now that you're living together with your adult children, you see a lot of things and you're tempted to ask questions or to say something about it.
00:20:26.074 --> 00:20:33.153
And so I love the name of your podcast, because biting your tongue is a big part of being the parent of a young adult.
00:20:33.153 --> 00:20:53.895
When I was first talking about this book with my agent, he said that a friend of his joked that the leading cause of death among parents with adult children were extensive lacerations to the tongue, because you are in that situation so often and you don't know what to do.
00:20:54.260 --> 00:20:57.510
But you give some suggestions that you should ask yourself.
00:20:57.510 --> 00:21:07.229
You have a whole chapter on biting your tongue, and so I have to ask you outline questions to ask yourself before you decide should you bite your tongue or not bite your tongue.
00:21:07.229 --> 00:21:08.605
Can you talk about those?
00:21:09.140 --> 00:21:17.835
Sure, I mean, the most important one is is my child about to do something that's going to have irreparable harmful consequences?
00:21:17.835 --> 00:21:21.309
And so there, I think you should not bite your tongue.
00:21:21.309 --> 00:21:30.275
I mean, you need to speak up if they're going to be making a dangerous decision that's going to affect them, or their partner, or their child.
00:21:30.275 --> 00:21:37.808
So let's say that you've cleared that and you decide this isn't a dangerous decision, it's just one that I'm not happy with.
00:21:37.808 --> 00:21:43.390
Well, is it just a matter of taste and you and your child have different taste, or is it?
00:21:43.390 --> 00:21:45.673
Is it substantial in some way?
00:21:45.673 --> 00:21:52.709
And if it's just a matter of taste, you're just going to have to, you know, hold your nose and look the other way, um, and.
00:21:52.709 --> 00:21:58.107
And then a third one is you know, on the other hand, how is it going to affect your mental health?
00:21:58.107 --> 00:22:02.526
The feeling like you're walking on eggshells which, by the way, is the name of another book?
00:22:02.807 --> 00:22:04.109
I've interviewed her, jane.
00:22:04.109 --> 00:22:06.123
I say, yeah, she's terrific yeah, um.
00:22:06.403 --> 00:22:12.288
so you, that can't be easy, that's not easy, and so you've got to figure out.
00:22:12.288 --> 00:22:17.306
You know, we say to parents of younger people pick your battle right, don't fight about everything.
00:22:17.306 --> 00:22:24.211
And I would say, with respect to biting your tongue, pick carefully the times when you're not going to bite.
00:22:24.211 --> 00:22:33.807
But you know, as I say in the book, generally speaking, if this is not a dangerous, harmful, irreparable decision, don't offer advice unless your child asks for it.
00:22:34.080 --> 00:22:37.223
How can we develop a friendship rather than this?
00:22:37.223 --> 00:22:53.887
You know give and take and I try very hard to say the right things all the time, but I mess up here and there and I think there's just a way to say hey, mom, you know you don't say that anymore or whatever.
00:22:53.907 --> 00:22:57.259
Yeah, yeah, I have those moments with our son when he calls me Archie.
00:22:57.259 --> 00:23:05.928
So I think that you can be friendly without being a friend.
00:23:05.928 --> 00:23:15.692
You are never not going to be their parent and that carries a lot of psychological baggage with it, and that's where we get into autonomy as an issue, and it occurred to me.
00:23:15.692 --> 00:23:25.185
As a psychologist, I know that there are two periods in a child's development when autonomy often comes to the fore as a big problem for families.
00:23:25.185 --> 00:23:31.310
One is when they're toddlers that's why we call it the terrible twos and when they're always saying no One.
00:23:31.310 --> 00:23:34.226
When they're teenagers, we call it the terrible teens.
00:23:34.846 --> 00:23:45.670
And as I was thinking about this stage of life, this stage that we're talking about for being an adult child, I think there's a third autonomy related crisis that's going on.
00:23:45.670 --> 00:23:47.881
Then I don't have a specific age.
00:23:47.881 --> 00:23:51.166
I would say it's in the late 20s, somewhere around 30.
00:23:51.166 --> 00:23:58.188
And it's worth thinking about this in comparison to the other two autonomy-related periods.
00:23:58.188 --> 00:24:06.732
When your two or three-year-old is asserting their autonomy, what they're saying is I realize now that I'm a separate person from you.
00:24:06.732 --> 00:24:13.284
What they're saying is I realize now that I'm a separate person from you and I have an opinion about something.
00:24:13.284 --> 00:24:15.246
When it's a teenager, it's slightly different.
00:24:15.246 --> 00:24:21.134
It's not only do I have my own opinions, I have the right to assert them to you too.
00:24:21.134 --> 00:24:31.859
I can disagree with you and I can argue with you about whether I should have an 11 o'clock curfew or not.
00:24:31.859 --> 00:24:44.532
This autonomy issue during the adult years is about demonstrating to themselves and to you that they can handle the challenges of adulthood without you To answer your question.
00:24:45.481 --> 00:25:16.433
When you point something out to your child that you disagree with or that you think they're doing wrong or that you think is a bad decision, it isn't like saying that to a friend, because they always will be carrying around you in part of their psyche and it might make them feel like, oh, maybe I'm not quite mature enough or as mature as I should be if I need to ask their advice on this or if I need to take their advice on this.
00:25:16.433 --> 00:25:23.963
But I think it is a problem when you start saying, hmm, this doesn't seem like a very good apartment to rent.
00:25:23.963 --> 00:25:27.681
Do you want to rent that Like?
00:25:27.681 --> 00:25:32.361
I noticed that there are lots of clubs on the street and it's going to be noise.
00:25:32.361 --> 00:25:35.250
Did you think about that that it's going to be noisy at night.
00:25:35.780 --> 00:25:41.009
And then so when you say that, and they say to themselves, boy, it was really stupid to not think about that.
00:25:41.009 --> 00:25:43.184
Like I thought about all kinds of other things.
00:25:43.184 --> 00:25:57.549
I love the cool you know oven, the chef's oven that it came with, or I love the view out the you know bedroom window, but I didn't think that it was going to be hard to sleep at night because there are clubs and restaurants right nearby.
00:25:57.549 --> 00:26:02.393
And then I think that makes them feel, makes them question themselves.
00:26:02.393 --> 00:26:15.010
In a way, if their friends said the exact same thing to them, it wouldn't make them question their maturity or their competence as a person, but because mom said it or dad said it, I think it has that effect.
00:26:15.230 --> 00:26:19.770
That's why so I also think sometimes we don't always know what's right or wrong.
00:26:19.770 --> 00:26:24.632
Possibly that rental with all the clubs around is exactly what the kid wants.
00:26:24.632 --> 00:26:29.986
So I hesitate a lot to give those kinds of even work advice.
00:26:29.986 --> 00:26:33.096
I'm not sure we know what the work life is like nowadays.
00:26:33.458 --> 00:26:34.560
It's changed completely.
00:26:34.560 --> 00:26:45.943
So even when we think they're making a mistake, I might say in my day I would think about this, but things are so changed you really need to depend on your own opinion or whatever.
00:26:45.943 --> 00:26:48.522
I might offer it in a sort of a backpedal way.
00:26:49.184 --> 00:26:58.188
So that's why I think that the middle ground in lots of these situations is to ask a question rather than to give advice.
00:26:58.188 --> 00:27:11.888
In other words, you can say you know lots of people think that it's important to see a place both during the daytime and in the evening before you make a decision to buy it, because the environment may be very different.
00:27:11.888 --> 00:27:16.244
Just saying that maybe you should think about doing that.
00:27:16.244 --> 00:27:28.775
Or, you know, I've never worked in the kind of office that you work in, but sometimes this following kind of thing comes up and I wonder is that something like what's going on here for you?
00:27:28.775 --> 00:27:34.491
And I think that asking the question serves two different purposes.
00:27:34.491 --> 00:27:49.943
The first is, in a way, it helps you give advice, in a way that doesn't sound like you're giving advice, and secondly, it may actually help clarify something in their own mind that they hadn't really understood or that they'd been confused about.
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