Helping Your Adult Children Feel Safe to Share

This week is a little different. I’m sharing an interview I did with Heather Rackham on the Latter-Day Life Coaches podcast, all about building stronger relationships with our adult children.

While preparing for BYU Women’s Conference, I held focus groups with young adults in their twenties and thirties. I asked them what makes their relationships with their parents hard. What they told me surprised me, and it changed how I listen to my own kids.

In this conversation, we talk about:

• Why our kids stop sharing hard things when we respond with “I guess I was just a terrible mother”
• The “me filter” and how we push ourselves into stories we were never really in
• My conversation with my daughter, and what I learned when she told me I had still missed her point
• The power of simply witnessing your child’s experience
• Giving grace to new daughters and sons in law, and why we’re all waiting for the other person to reach out first
• What happens when we keep score with our married kids
• Supporting kids who are working through questions about faith, and choosing the law of love
• The one thing every age group told me: they want to know you believe in them

Your kids really do want a relationship with you. Sometimes they just don’t know how to get there. I hope this conversation gives you a place to start.

Mentioned in this episode

• Latter-Day Life Coaches podcast with Heather Rackham, Episode 233
• The Law of Love by Steve Young

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• Facebook: Brooke Webb Oniki
• Want to talk through a relationship challenge? I offer one free session. Book through my website.