Grown Does Not Mean Finished: Our Adult Children Still Need a Safe Place to Land
Before you read any further, think about this for a second: If your grown child had something they were embarrassed by, confused about, or genuinely afraid to tell you, do you believe they would come to you?
Don't answer for the parent you hope you are. Think about the relationship you actually have.
Hold onto your answer. I'm going to ask you again before you leave.
My son is 23. He has graduated from college. He has opinions, bills, plans, a beard, and a whole grown-man voice that sometimes makes me look around like, “Who is this gentleman eating my leftovers?” 😂
But he is still my child.
Not a child as in helpless. Not a child as in I need to manage every decision, track every movement, or stand at the door with a whistle and a clipboard. I am not running a summer camp for adult sons.
But he is my child in the way that matters most. I still want to be one of the places he knows he can bring the hard stuff.
The questions. The mistakes. The fears. The beliefs that are changing. The things he isn't sure he believes anymore. The things he thought college answered, only to discover life had another pop quiz waiting around the corner.
And I'm realizing that if I want a real relationship with my adult son, I have to loosen my grip without disappearing. I have to nurture him without shrinking him. I have to let him come home, but still expect him to go live.
Grown Is Not the Same as Finished
There is a strange little switch that flips in people's minds when a child graduates from college or hits a certain age.
They're grown now.
He is not 13 with a backpack full of permission slips and crushed crackers. He has lived away from home. He has had experiences I wasn't there to interpret for him. He's been around people, ideas, temptations, disappointments, and conversations that have shaped him in ways I'm still discovering.
But grown doesn't mean he woke up one morning with adulthood downloaded into his brain. If anything, the transition from college into adulthood can be confusing because everybody starts treating you like you should know what you're doing. You're old enough to be responsible, but young enough to still be figuring out what kind of person you want to be while pretending the answer is obvious.
That's why I keep coming back to this idea: grown does not mean finished. Not helpless. Not incapable. Not a place to hide forever or avoid responsibility. Still becoming. There's a difference.
In my house, if you're living here, you have to participate in this life. I say that with love, but I mean it. Participate in the household. Participate in the rhythm of the family. Participate in the business when help is needed. Don't float through here like a visiting celebrity who only appears for food and Wi-Fi.
I am your mother, not your concierge. 😂
At the same time, I don't want home to become a trap. I want Dorian to go out with his friends. Build his own life. Try things. Make moves. Get uncomfortable. Learn independence by actually practicing independence, not by giving speeches about it from the couch.
Just recently, he told me he'd been going out with his friends almost every weekend and said he didn't want to keep leaving me home by myself.
Oh, absolutely not. 😂
I told him to go. Have fun. Spend time with your friends. Build your life. I am fine.
As much as I love having my son home, I don't want him making himself smaller because he feels responsible for keeping his mother company. I don't want guilt tying him to this house any more than I want comfort doing it. If I'm telling him to become an independent adult, then I also have to give him the freedom to build a life that doesn't revolve around me.
So that's the tension I'm learning to live inside.
I can make room for him and still expect movement. I can support him and still require him to show up. I can tell him to come home and still mean it when I tell him to go live.
I Had to Stop Acting Like I Had Adulthood Figured Out at 23
One of the biggest changes in our relationship has been my own honesty.
When he was younger, I think I wore the parent uniform a little too tightly sometimes. You know the one. The invisible blazer of authority. The “because I said so” pumps. The face that says, “I have never made a questionable decision in my life.”
Please. 😂 Grown didn't mean I was finished either!
At 23, I was making decisions with the confidence of a game show contestant who had not heard the question. I got things wrong. I trusted the wrong people. I spoke too quickly. I stayed too long in situations I should have left. Sometimes I thought I was being independent when really I was just being stubborn with better shoes.
Now, instead of pretending I floated through young adulthood wrapped in wisdom and good credit, I tell him more of the truth.
Not every detail. Some stories are between me, God, and the version of me who thought she knew everything. But I share enough for him to know that I understand confusion. I understand pressure. I understand wanting freedom while still needing guidance. I understand making a choice that looks one way in the moment and feels very different later.
And I think that honesty has shifted something between us.
He doesn't need me to be perfect. Honestly, perfection might make me harder to talk to. Who wants to bring their messy life questions to somebody who acts like she was born holding a day planner and a moral compass?
He still needs me to be his mother. But maybe he also needs to know me as a person.
That's been humbling. Because once you let your adult child see more of your humanity, you can't easily climb back onto the pedestal. Not that the pedestal was all that comfortable anyway. Mine had bad lighting and no snacks. 😂
The TV Repair That Humbled Both of Us
One of my favorite memories with Dorian is also proof that neither one of us needs to be left unsupervised with electronics.
We had a broken TV. In our minds, we were about to become a mother-son repair crew. Very HGTV, but with more confidence than qualifications.
We opened it up and started trying to figure out what was wrong. I don't know exactly what I thought I was doing, but I was doing it with purpose. That counts for something, right?
Then I accidentally touched the wrong spot and shocked myself.
Now, a normal person watching someone get shocked would think, “Let me avoid that area.”
My son, for reasons only known to him and possibly the ancestors, touched the same spot.
And shocked himself too. 😂
We looked at each other and started laughing. Then he actually said, “What is it in me that makes me want to do it again?”
Sir. I don't know. But don't. 😂
Then, because apparently we hadn't done enough damage, we ended up cracking the screen. So no, we did not fix the TV. You could argue we made it considerably worse.
But I treasure that memory.
We failed with enthusiasm and mild electrical trauma, but we were together. We were trying something, laughing at ourselves, and making a memory without either one of us needing to be the parent or the child for a minute.
Not every moment with our adult children needs to become a teaching moment. Sometimes it can just become a story.
The Podcast Reminded Me How Much He Is Still Processing
In Episode 1 of our mother-son podcast, Okay… You Just Be Talking with Chan & Dorian, Dorian said something that made me blink a few times.
His claim was that “40% of women are gay.”
Now let me be clear, because the internet likes to run off with one shoe and no context. 😂 The point was not whether that statement was accurate. That was Dorian's claim, based on what he believed he had observed and experienced in college.
Naturally, I asked him how he came up with 40%.
His response?
“I went to college.”
Sir. That is an educational background. That is not a source. 😂
But once I got past the number, something more interesting happened.
I started hearing what was underneath it. He talked about what he had seen and experienced in college, what surprised him, what confused him, and how those experiences shaped the way he sees relationships and sexuality. I was listening to a young man trying to make sense of a world he had experienced without me there to interpret it for him.
And that's when something clicked for me.
Our grown children aren't always going to bring us fully formed thoughts. Sometimes they bring us the rough draft.
The messy version. The opinion they're still working through. The belief that may change later. Something shaped by a friendship, a relationship, a dorm-room conversation, a heartbreak, a class, or an experience we know absolutely nothing about.
As parents, it's easy to hear one bold statement and immediately go into correction mode. And listen, sometimes they absolutely do need correcting. The podcast is called Okay… You Just Be Talking for a reason. Dorian can toss a sentence into the room like a smoke bomb and then sit there calmly while everybody else coughs. 😂
But if I only correct, I miss the doorway.
If I shut him down before I understand where the thought came from, I may win the argument and lose the conversation.
And if we only make room for the final draft, we may miss the person becoming.
I Keep Wondering What Our Grown Children Aren't Telling Us
Here is the question that keeps sitting with me:
Does my son feel safe bringing me the really hard stuff?
Not the easy updates. Not “everything's fine.” I mean the things he isn't sure how I'm going to receive.
The doubt.
The embarrassment.
The mistake he's scared to admit.
The belief that changed.
The relationship that confused him.
The choice he regrets.
The question he thinks might disappoint me.
And I can't honestly say Dorian has always brought those things to me. I know he hasn't.
Maybe sometimes he wasn't ready. Maybe some things simply weren't mine to know. But I also have to be honest enough to ask whether there were times my reaction made telling me the truth feel harder than keeping it to himself.
I've talked too much. I've reacted too quickly. And Lord knows my face has probably delivered an entire closing argument before my mouth ever opened. If you have the kind of face that doesn't know how to mind its business, you understand the struggle.
I'm still going to be his mother. I'm still going to ask questions, have opinions, disagree, and sometimes tell him something he doesn't particularly want to hear.
But I want him to know he can tell me the truth before the truth becomes a crisis.
I don't need to know everything about my adult son's life. He deserves privacy. He deserves boundaries. He deserves experiences and relationships that belong to him.
But when something is heavy and he does want somewhere to put it, I want him to know:
You can still bring this to me.
And I want to be the kind of mother who doesn't crush it with my reaction.
The goal isn't to make him need me forever. The goal is for him to know that needing me sometimes doesn't make him weak. It makes him human.
I Am Still His Mother, But I Am Letting Him Know Me as a Person
This stage of parenting asks me to hold things that sometimes feel completely opposite.
Come home, but go live.
Lean on me, but learn to stand.
I will help you, but you still have responsibilities.
Tell me what you're thinking, even when I may not agree.
And maybe the biggest change for me:
I'm still your mother, but I'm willing to let you know me as a person too.
I don't always get that balance right. Some days I'm calm, patient and wise. Other days I'm one unexpected dish in the sink away from becoming somebody's auntie in a Tyler Perry scene.
But I'm learning.
And maybe that's another thing our grown children need to see: we're still becoming too.
Dorian is learning how to be an adult. I'm learning how to be the mother of one. Neither transition happened because somebody handed us a diploma.
I think that's why I'm enjoying this season with him more than I expected. The ridiculous TV repair. Working together. The conversations in the kitchen. Hearing about his friends. Watching him go out and build his own life. Sitting across from him with microphones between us and hearing something come out of his mouth that makes me think, Boy, you just be talking.
These aren't the same moments we had when he was little.
They're new ones.
And I'm learning not to spend so much time missing the child I raised that I overlook the man I'm getting to know.
So… What Was Your Answer?
Remember the question I asked you before we started?
If your grown child had something they were embarrassed by, confused about, or genuinely afraid to tell you, do you believe they would come to you?
After reading this, I'm curious whether your answer is still the same.
There's no perfect answer here. I'm asking because I'm still asking myself the same question.
If your grown child had something they were embarrassed by, confused about, or genuinely afraid to tell you, do you believe they would come to you?
0%Yes. They know they can come to me.
0%I think so, but I'm honestly not sure.
0%We're working on that relationship now.
0%I'm the grown child — my parents have NO idea. 😂
Want to Hear the Conversation That Started All of This? 🎙️
Episode 1 of Okay… You Just Be Talking with Chan & Dorian is the conversation that got me thinking more deeply about all of this.
Come listen to Dorian explain why he believes “40% of women are gay,” hear me attempt to locate an actual source beyond “I went to college” 😂, and more importantly, hear what happens when a mother stops long enough to listen to how her grown son is making sense of the world.
Watch Episode 1: 40% of Women Are Gay?!
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