You never stop being a parent, no matter how grown up your children become. Even when your child is an adult with their own life, family, and responsibilities, you still worry. And when you see your adult child struggling with the weight of depression or the stress of anxiety, of course, you worry more.
How can you help, now that your child isn’t little, and their struggles aren’t little anymore either? How can you help your adult child shake off the symptoms of anxiety and depression and build a life worth living for themselves, without treating them like a little kid?
How can parents help their adult child who's struggling with depression and anxiety?
An important starting point for helping your adult child is recognizing that the “adult” part of their identity is crucial to respect. While you have strong, loving memories of them as babies, toddlers, and little kids who depended on you and looked to you as an authority in their lives, as adults, your place in their world now is more as a supportive peer who knows them very well and is on their side.
You need to strike a balance; your adult child does have the responsibility to make changes in their own life, but they also need a voice of empathy, love, and validation. They may need an accountability buddy as they make those changes, but they don’t need someone to do the work for them. They need to feel safe enough to open up, and they need to feel safe enough to hear ideas and make changes on their own terms.
If you’re looking for ways to get started on a healthy balance of parenting and peer support for your adult child, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills can be a great guide. DBT skills for parents are life skills that emphasize mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness.
You can be that voice, you can be that accountability buddy, and you can create that space of safety to help your adult child open up and start to make changes. You can help your adult child celebrate successes and strategize around lessons learned. With DBT skills to support you, you can do all of this while maintaining strong values that show mutual respect, ensuring you don’t take on too much or overstep, and your child can self-actualize and take responsibility for their life.
DBT skills for parents who want to help their adult children cope with depression and anxiety
DBT skills help people with depression and anxiety to shift their attention to the present moment, to seek connection and communicate respectfully, to cope with hard emotions when they show up, and to create space to both have emotions and make choices instead of reacting. They’re skills designed to set people up for success in navigating the impacts mental health challenges have on their lives and the lives of those around them, making them meaningful and practical tools for supporting your adult child.
Mindfulness skills to support your adult child
When your adult child is struggling, you worry. You worry about the past and whether you contributed to this, you worry about their future, you worry about what they’re thinking and doing even when they’re not around.
Mindfulness skills help you pull your attention back to the present moment, away from worry and fear about the past, away from attempts to mind-read. These skills also ask you to approach your thoughts and feelings without judging them.
When you develop a mindfulness practice where you recognize your worry, stop, take a mental step back, and just observe your thoughts, you may be surprised at how quickly those difficult thoughts and fears pass you by.
Share this approach with your adult child. Practice it together. Let them know that you’re not judging yourself for worrying or trying to stop thinking about the worry, you’re allowing your worry to stop by, and then move along. And your adult child with depression doesn’t have to judge themself for negative self-beliefs or feelings of hopelessness; they’re symptoms, they’re common, and they’re thoughts that will pass with time.
Emotional regulation can help with depression and anxiety
Depression and anxiety both have symptoms of mood swings and irritability, and reacting without pausing to think is common. Even if you can’t relate to your adult child’s emotional experiences here, you’ve likely experienced times in your life where you reacted to emotion instead of creating a thoughtful response too; toddler years are tricky for anyone!
Supporting your adult child can look like patience and encouragement, setting an example to help them emotionally regulate as well. When your adult child’s depression symptoms have them biting someone’s head off, ask them to consider a different choice, like taking a moment to count to 10. When they want to shut out the world, encourage them to do just the opposite: go somewhere, and be active, even if it’s just for five minutes. Let them know that by changing their response, they change their relationship to the emotion they’re feeling, and they don’t feed into it when they do the opposite of what it pushes them to do.
Distress tolerance makes depression and anxiety easier to bear
Distress tolerance DBT skills are strategies that can help make having a hard time easier. Life with depression and anxiety will have very hard days, but with the right distress tolerance tools, your adult child will be able to get through these days without fully caving to their depression or anxiety symptoms.
Next time your adult child is having a tough symptom day, try to work together to focus on more constructive things using the ACCEPTS skill:
- Activities – find activities that fill your time and focus your attention
- Contributions – volunteering, personal values, passion projects
- Comparisons – Find some perspective
- Emotions – Books, movies, conversations that stir your emotions
- Pushing Away – Visualize space between you and the situation
- Thoughts – Count to 10, make lists, recite song lyrics
- Sensations – Cold water to drink, fuzzy socks on feet, etc.
Interpersonal effectiveness helps your adult child set strong boundaries and improve communication
Depression and anxiety can derail relationships. Communication failures, lack of respect, and weak boundaries can all snowball into a loss of connection for people with depression and anxiety.
Your own relationship with your adult child can be a great place to use DBT interpersonal effectiveness skills. You can help preserve your relationship and make it easier for your adult child to show up in their other relationships with respect for others, as well as self-respect, even when negative thoughts or intense emotions from depression and anxiety try to interfere.
Supporting your adult child can look like bringing these skills up before you have a serious conversation, and use them to guide how both of you interact with each other. When one of you breaks out of the GIVE or FAST guidelines, pause, rewind, and restart the conversation. Be patient; you’re both learning!
GIVE shows you how to act when discussions get heated:
- Gentle
- Interested
- Validate
- Easy manner
FAST encourages you to advocate for yourself even in arguments:
- be Fair
- no Apologies
- Stick to values
- be Truthful
Suffolk DBT can help parents support their adult children with a comprehensive DBT program
Your adult child with depression and anxiety needs a full, supportive community around them to help them heal. Your presence in their life, and your validation and support, are crucial to their healing, but they can benefit greatly from a supportive therapeutic structure that includes individual therapy, group therapy, and on-call therapist support when life gets tough.
Suffolk DBT offers comprehensive dialectical behavior therapy, empowering people to make different choices and build new habits that ease the impacts of negative emotions and difficult experiences. As your college-age child embarks on their DBT journey with Suffolk DBT, you can remain a part of their support system by learning the DBT skills they develop in therapy, helping them translate these skills from the therapy room to real-life use.
When your adult child is ready, the compassionate, dedicated therapists at Suffolk DBT are ready to help. We are here to offer them a chance to build for themselves a life worth living.
Suffolk DBT proudly provides quality dialectical behavior therapy, a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, at their offices in Manhattan and Long Island, New York and online. Their experienced therapists specialize in serving teens, children, adults, and college students struggling with depression, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, and self-harm. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills and treatment can help you or your kids to manage emotions and work through life’s challenges. Suffolk DBT Manhattan and Long Island offer a free screening call so you can get started right away.