Struggling to help your adult child become independent? “Failure to launch” affects more than just young adults—it can persist into midlife, leaving parents torn between support and enabling. Our Houston therapists can help families understand the root causes of this challenge and offer practical strategies to encourage growth, responsibility, and long-term success. Call 713-565-0922 today to schedule.
Parenting Adult Children: Why Boundaries Still Matter
When your kids become adults, it’s easy to think your job as a parent is done—but that’s rarely the case. Whether they’re living at home or navigating life on their own, adult children often still need emotional support, structure, and even guidance during life’s ups and downs. At Wilson Counseling in Houston, we understand how challenging it can be to shift from hands-on parenting to setting respectful, healthy boundaries with grown children. If you’re unsure how to balance love and limits, this guide will help you redefine your role while maintaining a strong, respectful connection.
Should You Financially Support Your Adult Children?
Deciding whether to support your adult children financially is a deeply personal and often emotional choice. At Wilson Counseling in Texas, we help parents navigate the fine line between offering support and encouraging independence—without compromising their own financial or emotional well-being. Call 713-565-0922 to get parent coaching today.
Parenting doesn’t stop when your children become adults; the challenges just change. As you navigate the complexities of adult-child relationships, managing difficult dynamics requires patience and strong boundaries. In this post, we’ll explore how to address these challenges effectively while maintaining your well-being. If you need help with parenting adult children, our Houston therapists can help guide you. Call 713-565-0922.
Parenting isn’t always equal, and sometimes we connect more easily with one child over another. But unintentional favoritism can impact family dynamics and emotional well-being. In this post, we’ll explore why favoritism happens, how it affects kids, and practical ways to create a nurturing environment where all children feel equally valued and loved. Parenting coaching in Houston can help you avoid favoritism and feel more confident in your parenting. Call 713-565-0922 today.
Most diets will fail you. It is hard to get clear statistics, but it is generally believed that around 95% of people on diets will not be able to sustain the diets for very long and many will gain back even more weight than when they begin dieting. A 95% failure rate is a depressing statistic, especially after all of the effort, denial, and thought you put into dieting in the first place. Dieting can sometimes read like a tragedy, beginning with deprivation and ending with weight gain.
How much time do you spend daily thinking about how dissatisfied you are with your body? Now multiply that by 365 to see how much time you spend annually feeling dissatisfied with your body. Then think about all of the people you know, and add up how much time, energy, emotion and money they spend disliking their bodies. Can you even count that high?
With my Houston clients who are coming in to deal with disordered eating, I always do a body image and weight history. This helps us get to the root of what may have caused their disorder. When I asked one of my anorexic clients, Claire, about her earliest memories of her body, she recalls being 10 years old when her mom took her to a weight loss clinic. Claire's mom wanted to lose weight, and felt that Claire could stand to lose a few pounds as well. So, they both went on diets.
Claire commented that this is the first time she realized something was wrong with her body, and that her mom would be happier if she was thin. For her, being thin meant being beautiful, and being accepted. Claire became hyper health conscious. Nine years later, she is at a point in her life where she feels guilty if she even eats something like fruit, because "it has too much sugar." She thinks about food, exercise, and weight obsessively. People who know her would probably describe her as healthy and fit, but the truth is, she is struggling with a debilitating eating disorder.
The really sad thing about Claire's story is that I am sure her mom meant well. She probably felt she was helping her daughter be healthy. But there was something in Claire's perfectionistic personality that made her gravitate towards being extreme about health.
This may sound like a cautionary tale about mistakes parents make, but I really want to focus less on blaming and more on how you can be proactive with your kids to help them develop a healthy relationship with food.
One of the foremost experts on eating and feeding children is Ellyn Satter. Satter is a registered dietitian and family therapist. Her
guidelines for feeding children
are a great place to start. When it comes to feeding your kids, Satter feels that children should choose how much and whether they eat, whereas parents should choose what, when and where they eat. Kids are very intuitive eaters if we allow them to be.
The other thing to remember is that kids are still growing. It may seem like your child is eating so little they might starve or so much they might become obese, but their bodies are changing all the time, and it is important to let them grow into the bodies they are meant to have. Making a big issue about your child's weight, or letting others make a big issue of it, can sometimes lead to kids who don't feel worthy both physically and intellectually. If you are genuinely concerned about their weight, you may want to talk to their pediatrician privately about it. For more specific tips on how to help your kids with food, check out
Parenting is incredibly hard work. It is normal for good parents to ruminate or even feel guilty about their parenting choices. Am I doing the right thing? Am I going to screw up my kid? Please, God, help me not mess this poor child up. No parent can make perfect choices all the time. Instead of dwelling on parenting guilt, reminder yourself that the guilt shows you care deeply about your child. Hopefully this will help you give yourself some grace about your choices, and start focusing on your goals for how you want to parent your child going forward.
Happy Parenting!
If you would like some direction with parenting, or to discuss the stresses that come with parenting, counseling can help.
Contact our Houston counselors today to find out how counseling can help you. If you are struggling and would like help, we have Houston, Texas Counselors who can meet with you. You can contact us 713 - 565 - 0922 or by email at contact@wilsoncounseling.org
This blog is not intended to substitute for professional counseling.
Learn how to stop obsessively weighting yourself on the scale. You may be scared that if you don’t keep weighing multiple times a day or every day you will gain weight. That is not the case. Our Houston body image and disordered eating therapists can help you manage your anxious thoughts and gain more control of your life without compulsively weighing. Call us today at 713-565-0922 to get help.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak at a local high school with a panel of specialists on eating disorders. I was impressed with the large crowd of students who voluntarily showed up on their lunch break to hear about eating disorders. This was clearly a topic that these high school students cared about. I guess it is not surprising considering that some estimates show nearly 11% of high school students have been diagnosed with an eating disorder (www.anad.org).
What foods do you crave when you are sad, or angry, or bored? Many of us will reach for some ice cream or potato chips when we are moody. It feels like that bowl of Blue Bell will make everything better, but sadly, you still feel pretty rotten when you get to the bottom of the bowl. You may have tried to feed your emotions with food but have completely ignored the fact that you feel sad about a disagreement you had with a friend or your spouse.
