Telling my adult children

Started 26 July 2025 · 16 replies · 145 hearts · read 3.2k times

OssieWolverhampton, UK · 26 July 2025

12 months ago

Something I have been sitting with: Telling my adult children Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

The logistics of this are defeating me more than the medicine is.

My household has adjusted to about half of this and the other half is causing small daily friction that I have not known how to raise.

I would like practical detail rather than encouragement. What people actually do, in what order, and what goes wrong when they get it wrong.

This is the boring administrative kind of problem, which I gather is the kind that actually gets solved when you ask.

Thank you. This circle has solved four practical problems for me already and I am hoping for a fifth.

NikitaYerevan, AM

I would say pick one person to be honest with completely. Mine was my brother and having one person who knows everything has been enough.

TeganNewport, UK

The friction in our house was almost entirely about the changed evening routine rather than about anything medical.

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK

Facilitator note: this is a logistics thread rather than a clinical one, which is a relief, and I would still rather nobody offered instructions.

ObiLagos, NG

Grateful you posted rather than kept it to yourself.

5me too 8

BessLouth, UK

Somebody here said that you do not owe anybody an explanation, including people who love you, and I have leaned on that repeatedly.

OmarAmman, JO

Bess has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

My experience is that families adjust more slowly than individuals and that the adjustment does eventually happen.

RufusGuildford, UK

Omar, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

I found that other people's questions got much easier once I had one short prepared answer that I used every time.

OzrenZagreb, HR

The hardest conversation was about money, because this costs and we share a budget and I had been quietly not mentioning it.

RuaridhFort William, UK

Quietly agreeing from the other side of the country.

MapleToronto, CA

#10

Building on what Ruaridh wrote rather than answering the original question.

Something I did not expect was how much of our relationship had been organised around food, and how much we had to rebuild.

8me too 5

NolwennRennes, FR

#11

Bookmarking this. Thank you.

10me too 7

OssieWolverhampton, UK

#12

I would gently say that a partner's worry is usually love with nowhere to go, and asking them what they are actually worried about often unlocks it.

NikitaYerevan, AM

#13

We renegotiated who cooks and it has been better for both of us, entirely separately from any of this.

TeganNewport, UK

#14

Something I got wrong was expecting my household to adjust without being told what to adjust to.

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK

#15

Two things, both boring. Nobody here can tell you what to do about your week. And describing your own week is genuinely useful to somebody planning theirs.

ObiLagos, NG

#16

I hid the box for six weeks in a two-bedroom flat, which is ridiculous, and it was about shame rather than about him.