As our children grow into teenagers and adults, they often start making choices we personally disapprove of. One of the common choices an adult child makes, is about relationships. Unfortunately though, our adult children do not always make what we feel are the best relationship choices for themselves, and this can create conflict, tension, or friction within the family.



There are many relationship choices our adult children can make that we will disapprove of. Some of these choices may make us extremely mad, while others will be drastically disappointing to us. There are some choices however, which are often difficult for parents to accept and sometimes these can cause rifts in family relationships which last for a lifetime.

Everyone has different family values though, so the types of relationship choices which may be a problem for one family, may not be an issue for another family. It is your personal thoughts, beliefs, and feelings towards your child's relationship that matters most though, so thinking through how you'll react to various scenarios can be helpful in being prepared.

Common relationship choices that adult children make, which their parents don't like, strongly disapprove of, or cannot accept include:

1. Living together without marriage. It is not uncommon for young adults to live together without getting married these days. Some older parents strongly disapprove of this living arrangement and choice, while others have come to accept it as part of the natural course relationships take these days. If you disapprove, you may consider talking to your adult child about it, but in most cases you simply must accept it.

It may help to remind yourself about the soaring divorce rates in the world today, because this may help you understand that living together before marriage can often help create a lifetime relationship.

2. Non Traditional Roles. Many younger adults are now living together or becoming married, yet doing everything seemingly backwards from the "proper" way. Women for instance, will often have high paying careers instead of staying home with the children. Even older adults are getting used to this concept now of course, but the trend has spawned another which has many people up in arms: Role Reversal.

Instead of Mom staying at home and Dad going to work, many families now have Mom going to work and Dad staying at home with the children. And for mature men particularly, this is a very difficult concept to accept. In fact, many older men feel it is unacceptable for a man to stay home and take care of the house and kids, while his wife makes the money to support them.

Whether we like it or not though, we must start accepting that this is how society is moving. If it was once perfectly acceptable for a woman to stay home and take care of the house and kids without earning a paycheck outside the home, then we must also accept that it is just acceptable for men to do it too. We should in fact, be thrilled that our adult sons are so involved in their children's lives. Too many men these days have little to no relationship with their children, because they're too busy working, or because they've divorced and moved on.

Stay tuned as we continue in part two...