When Your Adult Child Knows a Language You Were Never Taught

There is an interesting type of conversation that many parents of young adults describe finding genuinely difficult. Your son or daughter speaks fluently about their anxiety, their attachment style, their love languages, their triggers, their need for validation, the ways in which their nervous system responds to stress. The therapy language vocabulary is confident and specific and may evoke in you (the parent listening) a complicated mixture of feelings.

Pride, perhaps, that your child has access to a framework for understanding themselves that was never available to your own generation. Something that might be sadness or guilt, about what was not provided to you or not understood by you. Something that might be defensiveness, when the language is used in ways that feel like a subtle verdict on your parenting.

 

Two different inheritances

Your generation, currently parenting adults in their twenties and thirties, often grew up in households where the prevailing ethic was something like, “you push through.” Difficulty may have been expected to be managed privately. Emotional distress perhaps wasn't a reason to stop; it was something you carried while continuing forward. The idea that one’s psychological state was a legitimate subject of sustained attention (let alone professional support) was not necessarily a part of the cultural norm. You got on with it and you built lives of considerable substance and resilience in the process.

Your children grew up in a very different climate, one that you may be proud or confused to have witnessed arriving. Mental health became a public conversation. Therapy became acceptable and in certain contexts almost expected. The vocabulary of psychology (trauma, boundaries, nervous system regulation, attachment) moved from clinical settings into everyday speech, in part due to flooding social media. This generation has genuine access to frameworks for understanding their inner lives that perhaps did not exist as the accessible default for you, their parents.

Both of these inheritances are real. And in certain conversations between you and your adult children, they can bring about a somewhat inevitable, slow motion car crash, or an intense collision.

 

What you are carrying as the parent

For many parents, the experience of being on the receiving end of psychological language from an adult child, is more complicated than it might appear. When a child describes the impact of their upbringing in the vocabulary of attachment theory, or names a parental behaviour as a trigger, or explains that they cannot do something because of the effect it has on their nervous system, you may be being asked to hold something that your own childhood and adulting did not equip you for.

You may not have the language. You may yourself, feel triggered or outraged. You may not have been parented in a way that modelled this now expected emotional attunement. You did what you knew how to do, which was often what had been done to you by your own parents, adapted with the best intentions that you had at the time.

Being asked to receive a psychological account of the impact of that parenting (even a thoughtful and non-blaming one) can feel overwhelming, particularly without a framework of your own for processing it.

The defensiveness, outrage or lack of receptivity that sometimes emerges in these conversations is not always resistance to the truth. It is sometimes the response to being asked to engage with something emotionally complex without feeling that you have the tools to do so.

 

What the adult child is carrying

The psychological literacy of this generation is in many respects valuable. Having language for one’s emotional experience makes it possible for young adults to seek appropriate support, to communicate needs in relationships, and to understand patterns that might otherwise remain unclear.

What the parent is carrying

The parent is carrying a different cultural context and an alternative lexicon of language. Perhaps a toughness or stoicism that may bristle, grow impatient, or feel intolerant of the adult child’s emotional language. There may be a desire to connect, equip and bolster your adult child for the harsh world they are stepping out into. There may also be quieter feeling of bewilderment about the chasm between your adult child’s world and your own.

This is not a failure of love or intention; it is more a challenge of translation.

What therapy can offer

Therapy can offer a space in which parents and their adult children can have their experiences taken seriously. Therapy can also offer both parents and adult children, individually or together, the opportunity to develop a shared psychological language and understanding of themselves and each other. Both parties can expand their emotional 'range', reflect on their own experiences of parenting and being parented, with the intention of entering conversations together which can be about collaboration, rather than a collision between two different contexts.

If you recognise these dynamics (the child who speaks fluently about their psychology, and the parent who is trying to keep up without quite knowing how) and you would like to explore this further, therapy could be a helpful place to do so.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally, and 'Walk and Talk' therapy in Northwest London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.