Your New Life with Adult Children: A Practical Guide to What Helps, What Hurts, and What Heals

Family counselor Chapman, best known for his Five Love Languages series, provides a regrettable update to his 1999 book Parenting Your Adult Child, coauthored with the late clinical psychiatrist Campbell, offering dubious guidance on how parents can maintain relationships with their kids after they’ve grown up. The authors’ core message is sound, encouraging parents to accept that staying close with their adult kids might mean respecting choices they don’t agree with. Unfortunately, the advice too often contradicts this stance. For instance, the recommendation that parents “try not to be critical or preachy” when children express interest in religions other than the one they were born into is primarily aimed at keeping communication channels open so that parents might “share what they perceive to be the inconsistencies or detrimental practices of these religions” and dissuade children from converting. Derogatory discussions of gender and sexuality severely undermine the authors’ central promise to help parents connect with their children, as when the authors suggest that young people identify as trans because doing so is “trendy” and that “almost all parents... will feel shock and deep hurt if one of their children announces they are gay.” This is better suited to the dustbin of history than bookstore shelves. (Oct.)