Parenting Adult Children: ThePassenger Seat

After my stepson Marc's graduation earlier this year, a group of us parents were having drinks and talking about what our kids were doing next. One by one, people went round the table. University. Further studies. The next qualification. The next logical step.

A few eyebrows went up when we said Marc was taking a gap year.

"A gap year?"

We explained: instead of going straight into further education, he was taking a year to explore. To work. To travel. To try things. To figure out what might actually interest him before committing to the next stage.

Someone asked a question that stuck with me: "What have you decided he'll do?"

I remember being caught slightly off guard. Because we hadn't decided. Marc had. Or, more accurately, Marc was going to.

It was one of those small moments where you realise something you've always taken for granted in your own family isn't taken for granted everywhere else.

Marc made a similar observation recently. A few of his friends have got curious about the gap year, and one or two are wondering whether they might do something similar themselves. He said to me: "I never realised just how open-minded you guys are compared to other parents."

That stopped me too. I'd never really thought of it as open-mindedness. I'd thought of it as recognising whose life we're actually talking about.

Whose decision is it?

He's eighteen. Of course he doesn't know exactly what he wants to do with his life. That's rather the point — he's eighteen. Perhaps not knowing is entirely appropriate at that age. And perhaps our job isn't to remove that uncertainty by deciding for him, but to give him enough support, security, and room to start making those decisions himself.

I fundamentally believe that when we keep making decisions for other people, we take away their agency. And when we do that to our children in the name of helping them, it's worth asking whether we're actually helping at all.

Agency is a muscle. It only develops through use.

You learn to make decisions by making decisions. You learn judgement partly by getting things wrong. Recovering from a bad decision is how you learn to trust yourself. Living with the consequences of your own choices is how you learn responsibility.

That's largely how we've raised our children. We weren't particularly strict, and as they got older we tried not to impose rules just for the sake of having them. Curfews are a good example — rather than telling them when to be home, we increasingly let them decide. Whether you stay out until three isn't really the question. The responsibility you have the next morning hasn't gone anywhere just because you did.

The choice is yours. The consequence is yours to live with. If someone else is constantly choosing for you, organising for you, anticipating every difficulty and clearing every obstacle out of your path, when, exactly, are you meant to learn how to run your own life?

I wish I could say I'd always understood this. I hadn't.

When I grabbed the steering wheel

Whenever my daughter mentioned taking a gap year, the opinions arrived thick and fast. Apply for this. Try that. Get a job. Look at this programme. Use the time wisely.

And somewhere in all that noise, I grabbed the wheel too.

I didn't mean to. That's the uncomfortable part. Every one of those suggestions felt, at the time, like support. It took me a while to notice they'd quietly turned into expectations - and that she was the one carrying the weight of them.

She'd just come back from a few days at her dad's. I asked how it had gone, and within about thirty seconds I was onto: "Have you applied for that job yet?" "Did you hear back about the other thing?"

She burst into tears.

"I've just spent a few days with Dad," she said, "and he was just happy to see me."

That one sentence stopped me completely. Not a raised voice, not an argument, just that. And it was true: my hands had been on the wheel the whole time. I'd just told myself otherwise. I'd said this was her year, her choice, her chance to work things out, while quietly making sure she worked it out in a way that made sense to me.

So I did the harder thing. Not offering more advice, but backing off, and sitting with how uncomfortable that was.

You have to accept that someone might use their agency in ways you don't like. Whether she spent the entire year doing very little was her decision. I could dislike it. I could worry about it. I could think she was wasting an opportunity. But I couldn't say "this is your life" and then quietly add "provided you live it the way I think you should." I found that extremely difficult. I also found it extremely freeing.

My relationship with her changed once I stopped trying to steer it.

A few months later, she invited her stepdad and me to an open day at a university she was considering, one she'd researched herself, decided she wanted, and invited us to be part of. In a few weeks she starts her studies there. Not because we finally persuaded her to do something, but because we finally gave her room to decide for herself.

There's a difference between support and control

My approach with Marc has changed since that experience.

Cooking is one of his interests, and he wanted to see what working in a professional kitchen might actually be like. Through my coaching, and through my volunteer mentoring with Duo for a Job — where I accompany young people who aren't in employment, education or training — I'd already come to know the Cité des Métiers and the resources it offers young people finding their way.

So when Marc mentioned cooking, it felt natural to go there together. I knew where we could go. I didn't know where he should go. That part was his to work out.

Before we walked in, I told him: "The car's yours. The wheel's in your hands. I'm the passenger — I'm here to support you, not to speak for you. Let me know if you need help. But this is yours."

He came out with a list of short courses to build on his cooking knowledge, and in November he starts work experience at a restaurant. I have no idea where it leads. That's rather the point. It doesn't have to lead anywhere I'd choose.

He might discover he wants to be a chef. He might love cooking and hate restaurant kitchens. In six months he might be doing something else entirely. It's his journey, the destination was never mine to set.

That's the distinction I'm still learning to make.

Support says: I'm here for you. Let's think this through. Control says: I've already thought this through for you.

The passenger seat still matters, though. We can help read the map. Ask questions. Point out a road they hadn't noticed. Remind them of a consequence worth thinking about. Help them find their way back when things go sideways. What we can't keep doing is grabbing the wheel.

We spend eighteen years telling our children we're preparing them for adult life — values, responsibility, independence, how to think for themselves. Then adulthood arrives, and they start making decisions we wouldn't necessarily make. That's when it gets difficult.

Are we raising children who make good decisions? Or children who know how to make decisions?

There's a real difference. The first instinct is to make sure they choose wisely. The second means standing by them while they choose — even when they get it wrong.

I think that's a part of empty nesting we don't talk about enough. The nest doesn't only go quiet when they leave. Something else happens first: they're learning to live without us directing them, and we're learning to love them without directing them.

Knowing when to change seats might be one of the last real acts of active parenting.

They're driving now.

We're still in the car.

The wheel just isn't in our hands anymore.