Do you want to fight or push them away? Grown-up children don’t always feel like talking to their parents. dpa
The last phone call was months ago. Text messages routinely go ignored. Most parents are very troubled when adult children fail to keep in contact with them.
“Why does my child get in touch so seldom?” they wonder.
Parents often don’t understand – or they misunderstand – their child’s development, says couples counsellor Sascha Schmidt, who has written a guide for parents wanting to reestablish contact with estranged adult children.
One piece of advice he gives them is to think back to the child’s puberty, a period when the first signs of a possible communication breakdown often appear. Some children start to go silent in their teen years while still living at home.