Stopping Entitlement: Are You Helping or Enabling Your Adult Child?

“I wish my twenty-t wo-year-old would schedule her own dentist appointments.” In my office sits a handsome young man named Sean, along with his mother and father. Sean has a half smile on his face as if he is almost enjoying the conversation, but his crossed arms also convey some defensiveness. Sean’s mom and dad are clearly not happy. His mom is nervous and worried, and I can’t tell whether Sean’s dad is angrier with his wife or with Sean, but he is obviously frustrated. Sean’s mom does most of the talking but constantly looks to her husband for support, which he refuses to give. Sean’s mom describes him as a bright young man who is just out of college. She tells me that he was involved with his fraternity and partying in his college years, that he coasted through school, and that he stretched out a four-year-degree program into six years while his parents covered all of his expenses. After graduation and an extended surfing trip (paid for by his parents), he has been back home for eight months. The presenting problem is that Sean doesn’t have much of a job, spends his nights partying with friends, and then sleeps in. His mom and dad are still paying for everything, including his cell phone and Wi-Fi, so Sean has little motivation to get a job. His mom still does his laundry and makes him dinner, often at a different hour than she does for the rest of the family. She even continues to make his bed. “Sean has a problem!” his mom blurts. This time when she looks to her husband for support, he nods in agreement. “I don’t think Sean has a problem,” I say. Everyone, including Sean, stares at me dumbfounded. “I think it’s the two of you who have the problem,” I say to the parents. “Sean is getting a pretty sweet deal. If you want him to become a responsible adult, give him some boundaries and expectations. Set a timeline starting right now to get him off your family payroll.”

The question Sean’s parents needed to ask themselves is, “Are we helping Sean to become a responsible adult, or are we enabling him to remain an irresponsible adolescent?” Our behavior is enabling when we do for others what they can and need to do for themselves. Here is how the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation distinguishes enabling from helping: “Enabling behavior, simply put, shields people from experiencing the full impact and consequences of their behavior. Enabling is different from helping and supporting in that it allows the enabled person to be irresponsible.”[^15] It’s not hard to recognize this dynamic in the relationship between Sean and his parents. Enabling creates an environment in which an adult child can comfortably continue with unacceptable behavior. If you are always trying to ease your adult children’s pain or protect them from hardship, you only make them more dependent on you. In her book Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children, author Allison Bottke writes, “Self-awareness of the part we play in the enabling dynamic is a major success step.”[^16] If we aren’t aware of our part in the enabling process, our children may not reach the goal of responsible adulthood. If Sean’s parents couldn’t recognize their part in enabling in his poor decisions, then Sean would keep on living just like he had been. This doesn’t mean we don’t ever help our kids. That’s an important part of parenting. We just can’t always be bailing them out. My friends Bob and Cheryl are a perfect example of helping and empowering rather than enabling adult kids. They raised their three children in a loving Christian home and instilled strong values and a biblical mindset into their family. When their college-age daughter Amanda was pulled over by a police officer and arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol, Bob and Cheryl were crushed. They couldn’t believe their daughter would make such a poor choice. But they also believed Amanda was fundamentally a good person who had made a serious error in judgment. They took into consideration that her blood alcohol level was barely above the limit and decided to support her, but not to shield her. Bob and Cheryl easily could have afforded the best DUI attorney to get their daughter off with a slap on the wrist, but they chose not to do that. After considerable conversation and prayer, they decided it was best for their daughter to experience the full weight of the consequences of her behavior. This meant having her driver’s license revoked for one year, attending DUI school (which was humiliating for the young adult), paying increased insurance rates for ten years, and keeping a DUI on her record for ten years. That was nearly ten years ago, and so Amanda’s consequences will soon be ending. When I asked Bob and Cheryl if they had any regrets about their decision, they said, “Absolutely not. Letting her learn the ‘you reap what you sow’ principle was more important than bailing her out.” Amanda never repeated her mistake, and she now has a much healthier appreciation for the consequences of her choices, in large part because her parents didn’t shield her from the outcome of her actions.

Although it’s natural to want to protect our children, we must break the enabling habit. Enabling produces only entitlement and dependence, and our goal is always to help our children move toward full maturity and independence. In John Townsend’s wonderful book The Entitlement Cure, he writes, “There is a right way to live, and it is the Hard Way. It is work, but it works, and it will save you countless detours in life.”[^17] The hard way Townsend refers to means not taking shortcuts or the easy way out. It’s choosing instead to make the often difficult choice to work on what’s most important and what will bring the greatest results. Enabling produces entitlement, but setting clear boundaries and expectations produces healthy responsibility.

Being a good parent of a young adult requires establishing healthy boundaries for our kids and then holding them accountable. The goal in moving toward responsible adulthood is to take the monkey of responsibility off your back and place it squarely on the back of your adult child. This goes right along with the saying “They will never know how far the town is if you carry them on your back.”