There is a particular kind of parent in their seventies or eighties who, on close observation, has maintained a genuinely loving and substantive relationship with their adult children across decades. The relationship is not, in most cases, conflict-free. The relationship is not, in most cases, structured around the standard cultural framings of either obligation or sentimentality that the wider register has been calibrated to associate with multi-generational family life. The relationship is, more specifically, characterized by a particular kind of ongoing mutual presence that the wider register has not, on the available evidence, given particularly good vocabulary to.
What the parent is doing, on close examination, is considerably more specific than the standard cultural framings allow for. The parent has, across the decades since the child became an adult, developed and maintained a particular small daily practice that the parent’s contemporaries have, in most cases, not maintained. The practice is the small daily refusal to treat the relationship as already understood. The practice is the small daily refusal to assume that the parent knows who the adult child currently is.
The wider cultural register has tended to treat the parent-child relationship as the kind of relationship that, once formed, requires only periodic maintenance to keep operating. The framing is, on close examination, almost exactly wrong. The relationship requires, more accurately, the ongoing active work of treating the other person as a particular adult whose interior is, by structural design, not transparent to the parent and is, by the further structural design of how adults actually develop across decades, considerably different from what the parent’s working model of the child has been calibrated to.
What the assumption of already-knowing actually produces
It is worth being precise about what the alternative practice consists of, because most parents are, on close examination, operating on it without quite registering that they are.
The alternative practice is the slow accumulation, across decades, of an internal working model of who the child is. The model began forming when the child was an infant. The model continued forming through the child’s adolescence. The model reached, in most cases, a relatively stable form by the time the child was in their mid-twenties, at which point the model became, in some real way, the default reference the parent’s apparatus has been consulting whenever the parent encounters the child.
The model is real. The model has been the structural product of considerable parental attention across the formative years. The model also, on close examination, has a structural limitation that the wider register has not adequately registered. The limitation is that the model was calibrated to who the child was during the formative years, and the child has, in the decades since, continued to develop. The continued development has not, in most cases, been incorporated into the model. The model has remained, more accurately, the snapshot of who the child was at the moment the model finished forming, and the parent has been operating on the snapshot rather than on the current version of the child for the entirety of the intervening decades.
This is, on close examination, what most adult children have been experiencing without quite knowing how to articulate. The adult child is, in their forties or fifties, a considerably different person from who they were in their mid-twenties. The parent is operating on the mid-twenties version. The interactions between the parent and the adult child are, accordingly, calibrated to a person the adult child no longer is. The adult child registers the misalignment. The adult child does not, in most cases, know how to address the misalignment without producing a structural confrontation that neither party particularly wants to have. The misalignment accordingly persists, and the relationship operates at a structurally lower level of substantive engagement than it could otherwise produce.
What the refusal of the assumption actually looks like
The practice that the parents who have maintained substantive relationships with their adult children have developed is, on close examination, the small daily refusal to operate on the snapshot. The refusal is not, in most cases, dramatic. The refusal involves, in selected moments throughout the various interactions with the adult child, the small implicit decision to actually attend to the adult child as they currently are rather than to consult the internal model of who the adult child used to be.
The attending is small. The attending involves the willingness to be surprised by the adult child’s preferences, opinions, reactions, and the various other features of who they currently are. The willingness is structurally important. The parent who is operating on the snapshot is, by structural design, not available to be surprised by the adult child, because the snapshot has already determined what the parent expects the adult child to be. The parent who has refused the snapshot is, more accurately, available to discover, in real time, what the adult child currently is, regardless of what the snapshot would have predicted.
The discovering is the practice. The practice produces, in the parent who has been maintaining it, the structural condition of treating the adult child as a particular person whose interior is, in some real way, ongoingly available to be encountered rather than already determined. The adult child, on close examination, notices the difference. The adult child has, in most cases, been operating in a wider environment that has been treating them on the basis of the various snapshots the wider environment has accumulated about who they used to be. The parent who has been refusing the snapshot is, in some real way, one of the few adults in the adult child’s life who is actually encountering the current version. The encountering is what produces the substantive relationship the wider register has been admiring without quite knowing how to articulate the mechanism.
Why the practice is hard to maintain
The honest acknowledgment is that the practice is, on close examination, considerably harder to maintain than the description above makes it sound. The reasons are worth examining.
The first reason is that the snapshot is, by structural design, considerably easier to operate on than the current version. The snapshot is fixed. The snapshot does not require the parent to do any additional work to maintain. The current version, by contrast, requires ongoing attention, ongoing willingness to be surprised, and the ongoing labor of allowing the parent’s expectations to be updated by the evidence the adult child is providing. The wider parental apparatus, in most cases, has not been calibrated to perform this kind of ongoing maintenance after the formative years of the child have passed.
The second reason is that the snapshot is, in some real way, emotionally satisfying for the parent in a way the current version sometimes is not. The snapshot contains the version of the child the parent remembers with the most affection. The snapshot is, more accurately, the version of the child the parent’s apparatus has been organized around loving. Refusing the snapshot accordingly involves the parent giving up, in some real way, the version of the child the apparatus is most attached to. The giving-up is uncomfortable. The giving-up is, on the available evidence, the structural precondition for the encountering of the current version.
The third reason is that the adult child has, in many cases, become a different person in ways the parent does not particularly approve of. The differences may include the various features of who the adult child has become that the parent’s snapshot would not have predicted and would not, on the parent’s own evaluation, particularly endorse. The refusal of the snapshot accordingly involves the parent in the structural condition of encountering, in real time, the features of the adult child that the parent has been able to avoid encountering by operating on the snapshot instead. The encountering is uncomfortable. The encountering is, on the available evidence, also the structural mechanism through which the substantive relationship is maintained.
What the practice actually produces, in the adult child
What the practice produces, on close examination, is structurally specific. The adult child, in the relationships where the parent has been maintaining the practice, reports a particular kind of small ongoing experience that the wider register has not given good vocabulary to. The experience is the experience of being seen by the parent as the person the adult child currently is, rather than as the person they used to be.
The being-seen is small. The being-seen is, in some real way, considerably rarer in adult life than the wider register has registered. Most adults are being seen by the various people in their lives on the basis of the snapshots those people have accumulated about who they used to be. The wider environment has, by structural design, considerable difficulty updating its snapshots, because the updating requires the same kind of ongoing attention that the parent-child relationship requires. Most relationships, accordingly, end up operating on outdated versions of who the people in them currently are.
The relationship with the parent who has refused the snapshot is, in this configuration, structurally exceptional. The parent is, in some real way, one of the few adults in the adult child’s life who is actually encountering the current version. The encountering produces, in the adult child, the small ongoing experience of being known by an adult who knows them as they currently are. The experience is what the adult child reports, when asked, as the structural feature that makes the relationship with this particular parent feel substantively different from the various other relationships in their life.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The parents who maintain genuinely loving and substantive relationships with their adult children into old age are, on close examination, not the parents who have done more visible parental work than their contemporaries. The visible parental work is, in most cases, structurally similar across parents in the same cultural register. What the substantive-relationship parents have done is, more specifically, the small daily work of refusing to assume that they know who their adult child currently is, and of allowing the adult child to surprise them, repeatedly, across decades of ongoing encounter.
The refusal is small in any single instance. The refusal is, accumulated across the years of the adult child’s adulthood, the structural mechanism through which the substantive relationship is maintained. The wider cultural register has been calibrated to treat the parent-child relationship as the kind of relationship that, once formed, requires only periodic maintenance to keep operating. The available evidence of the relationships that actually remain substantive suggests, more specifically, that the relationship requires the ongoing active work of treating the adult child as a particular adult whose interior is, by structural design, not already understood.
The ongoing active work is what most of what the wider register has been calling adult intimacy is, on close examination, the structural product of. The wider register has been admiring the visible features of the substantive relationships without naming the mechanism. The mechanism is the small daily refusal of the assumption of already-knowing. The refusal is the practice. The practice is, in some real way, what the rest of adult intimacy across generations is structurally built on. The wider register would benefit, on the available evidence, from absorbing this with considerably more seriousness than it has so far. The absorbing, modestly, is what articles like this one are calibrated to begin.
