Reading: When You Don’t Get to Look Forward to an Empty Nest 

Interviews included in this essay are excerpted with permission from Difficult: Mothering Challenging Adult Children through Conflict and Change.

When does mothering end? If ever…

The relationship a mother has with her adult child is the longest phase in the parenting career, lasting 50 or even 70 years. Yet, no one has come up with a model to describe how this relationship changes over time. Most parenting books end with adolescence, perhaps with a little attention to the “launching stage” when children are in their early 20s and assumed to be on their way to living independently.

When I began my research on the life stage of mothering adult children, I was shocked to discover the dearth of attention that mothering of adult children has received. In fact, I wrote one of the only books that explores the inner experience of older mothers whose adult children have serious mental health problems or substance use disorders, are unable to support themselves, and turn back to their families for financial, residential, or emotional support. 

Very little is known about the stress that older women, and mothers in particular, experience when their adult children’s lives are detoured by mental health or substance use challenges. How do mothers cope when their adult children are unable to “launch” or maintain their self-sufficiency? I named this aspect of mothering adult children “difficult mothering” based on what I learned from interviewing dozens of women who self-identified as being affected by their adult children’s problems.

Through this research, I discovered that when adult children get into a situation where they can no longer support themselves and/or have no place to live, “difficult mothering” begins. It is “difficult” because it is not what most mothers hoped for or expected for their adult children. Nor was being responsible for another what they imagined for themselves in later life. As both mother and adult child adapt to a new and unexpected dependency of the adult child, both live with the uncertainty as to when this will come to an end. 

When adult children can no longer support themselves or have no place to live “difficult mothering” begins.

What Does Difficult Mothering Look Like?
During my three years of research, I interviewed 50 older mothers, all of whom self-identified as having an adult child whose problems were worrisome to them. There were many distinctions between these mothers: Some were widowed. Some were married. Some were wealthy, while others were low-income. The type and severity of the children’s problems also varied greatly. They came from different races and ethnic backgrounds. Some were providing housing for their dependent adult children, some were not. Yet, among these distinctions, the women collectively shared a view of mothering that assumed that women, as mothers, would and should become their child’s safety net. Each explained their situation with this simple sentence: “I’m their mother.” Yet, each of them also reported feeling conflicted, stressed, alone, and often depressed, as they attempted to respond to their internal sense of maternal obligation well into their children’s adulting years. 

Jillian*, at age 76, described her situation as being like a mule held back by a harness. The harness was her commitment to providing shelter and safety to her daughter, Celia, who had her first psychiatric break at 22. The next 20 years in Jillian’s life were framed by finding and re-finding new apartments for her daughter. She moved Celia 21 times in 20 years, setting up each place with new curtains, new dishes, and a hope that this time it would work out. And every time, Celia’s mental illness reemerged in the form of paranoia, which triggered her anxiety, fights with neighbors, and recklessness. Some thought that Jillian’s efforts were pointless; others  said she was only being a good mother. Jillian explained to her friends that she had to keep doing what she was doing over and over again because Celia “needed to eat … she needed a place to live.” She believed her efforts were necessary to protect her child. 

Most of us know a friend or family member who is in a similar situation to Jillian, living with or financially supporting an adult child who is unable to be self-sufficient. Most mothers of difficult adult children do not have the resources that Jillian and her husband did. Often, the only option a family has is to allow their now-dependent adult child to move back home. Nevertheless, each woman I spoke to, regardless of her economic resources, took steps to protect her adult child in crisis, no matter how old her son or daughter. The types of protection and mothering work they provided included: sharing food, advocating for a child during psychiatric hospitalizations, giving advice (often unwanted), taking care of grandkids, and so much more.

Being a “Good Mother”
There’s no shortage of opinions on what it means to be a good mother. No shortage of saccharine quotes as to how a woman’s fulfillment is based on her child’s happiness. 

Every mother measures herself against the particular images, or myths, of motherhood within her culture. “Intensive mothering” has become the norm today and mothers spend much more time in the childcare stage, whether or not they work outside of the home, than their mothers and grandmothers did, often sacrificing time with friends or for hobbies. 

It was the late psychologist Sara Ruddick who named the work that women do in response to the needs of their young children as “maternal work.” Most mothers understand this maternal work as the need to protect, hold, foster growth, and train their child. Each woman brings her own strengths and anxieties into her role as a mother. The experience of falling in love with a baby can be powerful and life changing.

Right from the start, newborns engage their parents in what psychoanalyst Daniel Stern called a “dance.” An interaction that provides most mothers with a feeling of competency and satisfaction, the mother-baby dance is a back and forth in which the mother follows the baby’s lead. The baby smiles, the mother says “yes,” and the baby smiles back. The baby gurgles, and the mother responds, “I know, you’re still hungry,” and offers the bottle or breast. Our culture celebrates and appreciates this maternal capacity to create the mother-child unity. Yet this beatific exchange, this feeling of oneness, is not static. Mothering also includes giving the child a gentle push, encouragement to explore the outside world and eventually to move away from the nest.

Some fully enjoy the complete dependence of their newborn infants, while others only can relax when their toddlers can communicate their needs with words. Some mothers’ traumatic histories in their own families interfere with their ability to tune into the emotional world of their young child. Yet, due to the enormous plasticity of young children’s brains, most can adapt to their own mother, regardless of her strengths or vulnerabilities. 

A mother’s feelings toward her children can vary from hour to hour, year to year. A typical day may encompass joy, fury, infatuation, boredom, and even simple dislike. Just as mothers must keep their infants and young children safe in a world that itself may not be safe, they must also protect their children from their own mixed feelings and failings. 

Looking after the well-being of a young child is not the same as protecting an adult child. Mothering  young children and fostering their growth can be a fascinating and enriching experience. In contrast, mothers whose adult children may be depressed, anxious, mentally ill, or despondent are immersed in a relationship that offers none of the magic a young child can provide. Instead of witnessing daily changes, parents of a difficult adult child often feel trapped in their child’s despair and bad decisions. The interaction may be additionally strained because the adult child resents her new dependency on her parents and may become sullen, uncommunicative, and angry. This is a hard burden for any mother of any age to bear. 

A  mother who willingly interrupts her life when her adult child is in trouble because “that’s what a mother does” is demonstrating what sociologists refer to as the societal norm of intergenerational solidarity. 

Lifelong Mothering: What Does It Mean?
Parents will protect their children in need, even when those children are adults. Yet, side-by-side with this notion is the belief that it is a parent’s job to usher in a child’s ability to become an independent adult. These two obligations require opposite behaviors and create ambivalence for all parents. No wonder parents struggle with how much financial and emotional support to give their adult child.

In this situation parents will often ask, “Am I hindering my child’s independence by helping him out?” There’s no easy answer to this common question. 

Parents are expected to protect their children in need, even when those children are adults. They are also expected to support and usher in their children’s ability to be independent and autonomous adults.

Family obligations — shared understandings about responsibilities, informal rules that determine how family members should help each other — vary from family to family and within cultures.  

The majority of families provide important, but typically intermittent, support when there are changes in their children’s lives. They may help around the birth of a grandchild, offer assistance when there is a serious illness, and step in with financial help when a security deposit is needed or a job loss has occurred. Yet not all events have a clear ending.

If an adult child develops a serious illness that does not allow him to continue working, who will he turn to? If a daughter gets divorced, or her partner dies suddenly leaving her with young children and no place to live, she probably hopes to “return to the nest” of her family home. When a mother is faced with her adult child’s long-term need for support, she then faces a different kind of conflict — weighing her own needs over her adult child’s. 

Faith met me at an agency that offers services to older people with legal and other family problems. She wanted information on how to deal with her 42-year-old daughter and 19-year-old grandson who had been living with her, once again, for over two years. Faith, now 80, had been a nutritionist at a large urban hospital. She retired at age 62 because her grandson, Lester, was going to be placed in foster care due to her daughter’s drug use. Faith has no regrets about having made the decision to raise her grandson and protect him from what she believed might be harm in the foster care system. Like many women in her position, she was glad she could step in.

When Lester was 15, his mother, Ebony, was clean of drugs and in a position to set up her own apartment for herself and her son, close to Faith. One year later, her daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer. Weakened by the treatments for her disease, Ebony could not cook or manage other tasks of daily living. It was at this point that Faith let them both move back in with her. “That’s my daughter,” she had said. The most compelling of all reasons. In addition to Ebony’s weakened physical condition, she also had mental health challenges, as did her son. Both had been diagnosed as bipolar. 

She wanted to help Ebony and Lester, but this entailed “leaving herself out.” The doctor was worried about her high blood pressure, which was exacerbated by her living arrangements. “I have to stand up to them,” she said, meaning she couldn’t continue putting them first. At the same time, she understood that they had real problems and couldn’t manage on their own. If she “stepped back,” she would be faced with guilt and regret if they got hurt, as if she herself was responsible. “I’ll be sorry that I didn’t continue to try to keep working with them.”

Her dilemma was based on the reality of two conflicting situations: her children’s vulnerability and her own physical and emotional needs. 

How To Help a Child Who Hasn’t (or Cannot) “Launch”
Parents’ legal responsibilities end when a child reaches the “age of majority” — either 18 or 21 (depending on the state). In the eyes of the law, once this milestone has been reached, a person is given the right to vote, join the military, and sign a contract. This same law also limits a parent’s right to see her now adult child’s medical records, grades, and bank statements, unless willingly shared. But beyond legal definitions of adulthood are the more subtle discussions of how adult children and their parents measure a young person’s capacity for independence and autonomy.  

Despite adult kids’ classification as “adults,” the majority of parents will continue to spend vast amounts of money (collectively, $500 billion annually) on their adult between the ages of 18 and 34 — helping with anything from house and car payments to groceries or medical bills. 

Ideally, adult children attain a healthy sense of their own autonomy beginning in adolescence. Parents play an important role in supporting their child’s efforts to become less dependent and make decisions for themselves, to live as autonomous, self-directed people. Working, moving out on their own and becoming a parent are all possible motors of autonomous actions for young people. Clearly, having to move back into the parent’s home can be seen and felt as a giving up of independence — not something desired by either the parent or the child. 

“You can become an ex-wife by divorcing, or an ex-schoolteacher by retiring, but, never an ex-mother.” —sociologist Alice Rossi

My interview with Jillian occurred right before her 80th birthday. Her daughter had had her first psychiatric hospitalization 30 years prior. I learned how after decades of finding and refinding new apartments for her daughter, Jillian was becoming “tired” and had found ways to set limits on how much she would do for her daughter, who continued to cycle on and off her psychiatric medications.  Jillian started to set new limits to protect herself and her time. For example, while she had always included her daughter in Sunday family dinners, this open invitation was stopped. Instead, the only way Celia could join them was if she was taking her medications. Eventually, Jillian turned her energy to planning for the future — how would Celia manage emotionally when she and her husband were gone? 

The late Alice Rossi, a University of Massachusetts’s sociologist, wrote that there is “little cultural prescription about when the authority and obligations of a parent end. As a role, being a mother is unique from other roles, because you can’t quit, retire or be fired. You can become an ex-wife by divorcing, or an ex-schoolteacher by retiring, but never an ex-mother.” 

Looking at difficult mothering as an arc that extends into old age offers new insights. Rather than thinking about the mother-child relationship as spanning a limited 20-something years, we, as a society, need to accept the fact that mothering work may last 50 or 70 years. “How are the kids?” is a very familiar question that accompanies so many mature women’s greeting of one another. Yet this question is often asked with the unspoken assumption that the answer will include just a positive breezy report. An acknowledgement of the potential complexities of mothering in later life, this question might shift to, “How are you?”

Whether or not we have difficult adult kids or highly achieving young adults, or children who are no longer talking to us, mothers’ well-being needs to be considered as both affected by, and also separate from, the ups and downs in the next generations’ lives. 

*All names have been changed to protect the subject’s privacy.

Dr. Judith R. Smith is a psychotherapist, researcher, and professor emerita from Fordham University. You can learn more about her research in her book Difficult: Mothering Challenging Adult Children through Conflict and Change. She currently offers support groups for mothers of difficult adult children. You can reach her on Facebook, X, or LinkedIn.