Your adult child makes a choice you disagree with.
Take this situation apart. Each piece goes in one box: yours, or not yours. There is no third box, and almost nothing falls in one piece.
Yours
- Saying honestly what you think, once, and then staying available.Whoever keeps pushing wins at most the argument and loses the conversation. Whoever stays silent for fear of a row leaves something behind that was his. So the measure is: say it once, then stay.
- The question whether this indicts your parenting.His choice feels like a grade for twenty years of parenthood, but grown children do not choose in order to review you; they choose in order to live. Raising was sowing, not programming. That he chooses for himself is the proof that it worked.
Not yours
- His choice, and how it turns out.The choice is his, final and complete, even if you think you can see the ending coming. Adult children have a right to their own mistakes; you once claimed that right too.
The reasoning. You get your say once; your presence every day after. Do not confuse the two.
- How cruel it is not to allow men to strive after what appears to them fitting.Marcus Aurelius
Nearby situations
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