Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children Quotes

“...it's our own lives we must make healthy, not our adult children's lives, no matter how much we want to help them.

How they live their lives, the choices they make or don't make, and what they inevitably choose to do or not do with their future is up to them, not us. It's amazingly empowering when we begin to define and clarify our own issues as parents.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“And it’s our own lives we must make healthy, not our adult children’s lives, no matter how much we want to help them.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“I was so open-minded, my brain slipped out.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“Some of our kids are no longer hanging around with a bad crowd; they are the bad crowd.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“We do not parent as those who have no hope. We have a God who watches over our children - if we'll just get out of the way and let Him do the restoring.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“Restoring ruined dreams and reclaiming wasted years is what God does best.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“What will we do when we stop living our adult children's lives for them?

We will start living our own.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“We must stop trying to change their behaviors by making choices for them and by shielding them from the painful consequences of their actions or inaction. We cannot change them.

...

Setting our adult children free to live the lives God intended them to live is not abandonment - even if it means setting them free during a time of severe trial and tribulation in their lives.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“We must love our adult children enough to let them go. This is what tough love is.

We must hope that their future, as well as ours, can be filled with positive changes and abundant love.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“...for many parents in pain, if you want to move forward, you'll have to first look backward.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“God knows when to discontinue a trial because its purpose has been fulfilled.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“...many adult children have no idea what they're truly capable of accomplishing. They've never really tried to move ahead with confidence and be all they can be.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“What must stop are the ongoing (and often useless) discussions we continue to have with our adult children, who clearly know how to push our buttons, how to control us and thus control the outcome, be it consciously or subconsciously.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“Only when our adult children are forced to face the consequences of their own actions - their own choices - will it finally begin to sink in how deep their patterns of dependence and avoidance have become. And only then will we as parents be able to take the next step to real healing, forever ending our enabling habits and behaviors.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“Helping is doing something for someone that he is not capable of doing himself.

Enabling is doing for someone what he could and should be doing for himself.

...Simply, enabling creates an atmosphere in which our adult children can comfortably continue their unacceptable behavior.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“almost all parents of dysfunctional adult children have to some extent become enablers.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“We cannot change another person. We can only change ourselves and how we will respond to the good and bad behavior of our loved ones, who continue to cause us to live in daily pain.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“They know what to expect from us. They know that eventually we will “help” them yet again. The bitter truth for many of us is that we haven’t been helping; we’ve been enabling. So instead of praying to God to stop the pain, remove the difficulty, or change the lives of our adult children, we must rise up and pray for something entirely different. We must pray for the courage to look deep in our own hearts and souls. We must pray for the strength to”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“Yet we’re so weary of living with the ongoing crisis that we return to the same behaviors and habits—and our adult children have us pegged.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“This show is over. But a new production is on the horizon! We must replace our enabling behavior with something else. Ending Enabling Behavior From experience I’ve learned four life-saving truths about changing enabling behavior:   We can pray for the power to change ourselves. We can help (not enable) adult children of any age develop wings to fly on their own. We can find comfort in knowing we are not alone”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“For years some of us have focused our attention (and worries) on our adult children. We’ve not only taken on the role of director in the drama of their lives, but the roles of producer, stage manager, dresser, caterer, financier, and scriptwriter as well. We’ve done countless things for them that they are more than capable of doing for themselves.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“To every parent or grandparent with an aching heart. “With God all things are possible.” MATTHEW 19:26”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“Stop the Flow of Money It doesn’t matter whether we are on a fixed income or are blessed with abundant financial resources, a common denominator among enablers is the flow of money to our adult children. It doesn’t matter whether it’s $20 or $20,000, we must stop coming to the rescue with our checkbooks. Our money must cease being the life preservers that buoy up our adult children, keeping them afloat through yet another storm. We might be amazed at just how well our adult children can swim when given the opportunity to do so. More important, they just might be surprised at their own ability to survive without life support, a powerful lesson that no amount of money can purchase.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“This ancient story is good and exemplary for boys. But what about girls? What is the modern story of a Prodigal Daughter? I picture her as an honor-roll high-school graduate turned wild party-girl expelled from college. Abandoned by her first love after an abortion, she sedated herself in a downward spiral of alcohol, drugs, and promiscuity. She bounced from one job to another, had an affair with a married man, and then left the country to escape disappointment and loss. Years later, lonely, weak from an eating disorder, and painfully aware of her emotional, physical, and spiritual bankruptcy, she returned to her father’s home to ask for forgiveness.6”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents