My emails aim to show how Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) can apply to different problems. In this piece, I will address how adult children with advanced education sometimes face interpersonal and emotional struggles with less well-educated parents. I will also show how they can feel healthy negative emotions like disappointment and sadness when they are in the company of their parents and infer that they have grown apart in their values and interests.
Fallible Humans in a State of Flux
Education, particularly post-graduate education, profoundly impacts the individual who pursues it. Time, money, and opportunity costs abound as an individual spends years pursuing an advanced degree. Individuals who pursue such education may or may not receive assistance from their parents. However, even when parents support their child in pursuing an advanced education, the relationship between the adult child and the parent can experience strain. Education leaves its mark, and an adult child with years of education may adopt values and interests that are divergent from those of their parents. This divide, of course, can happen under other conditions between an adult child and their parent. Still, in this piece, I focus on the situation where the parent has encouraged the child to pursue education while lacking it. As a result of this difference in education, the adult child and the parent may grow apart due to the impact education has had on the values, lifestyle, and choices the adult child makes.
Intolerance is the Problem
Conversations between the adult child and their parents can become unrewarding or even conflictual due to disagreements around interests, political views, and values between the adult child and the parent. Adult children may have delayed starting a family due to the importance of their careers and, as a result, be temporarily or sometimes permanently child-free. Although the parent may be happy that their child has pursued their career and learned to think independently, this may come at the cost of not having grandchildren or having an adult child who now challenges the parents’ authority. Conversations at family gatherings sometimes are associated with unhealthy emotions on the part of the adult child and the parent.
Unconditional Acceptance of Oneself and the Other Person is the Solution
REBT encourages people to adopt unconditional self-acceptance and other acceptance to live in harmony and respect. To cultivate these two forms of acceptance, adult children must also remain flexible in their attitudes toward their parents. According to REBT’s theory of emotional disturbance, rigid and extreme attitudes toward one’s less-educated parents will undermine unconditional acceptance and set the stage for unhealthy negative emotions like hurt, anger, and depression, leading to intolerance and arguments. There is nothing to prevent the less-educated parent from adopting these very same tolerant views. Nevertheless, I will base my REBT teaching on the position of the better-educated individual in the conflicted relationship.
Below is a sample of rigid and extreme attitudes, along with their healthy alternatives, which exemplify the challenge faced by a well-educated adult child relating to their less well-educated parent. REBT theory states that humans make inferences about what others think, their motives, etc., and these inferences alone will not result in emotional disturbance. They are merely hunches of dispreferred conditions, and then humans hold rigid and extreme attitudes about what they believe is operating to produce disturbed emotional reactions. REBT targets to change the rigid and extreme attitudes held by the individual with the hope of cultivating a flexible and non-extreme alternative to replace it, which would allow for healthy negative emotions to result:
Inference: My parents show more interest in my siblings’ children and my siblings’ lives but barely show interest in what happens in my professional life.
Self-defeating, Rigid attitude: My parents must show as much interest in my professional life as they do in my siblings’ children and their lives.
Healthy, tolerant attitude: I wish my parents would show as much interest in my professional life as they do in my siblings’s children and their lives, but sadly, they do not. Although such interest would be gratifying, it does not have to exist. Their relative lack of interest is understandable because what I do at work is highly complex and far removed from the life experience of my parents’s lives. It is easier and more natural for them to relate to child rearing and the experiences of their grandchildren. Education has costs beyond the financial cost, and I will accept that my folks do not appreciate what I do at work.
Inference: My parents treat me differently because I do not have children. It is like I am still an adolescent compared to my siblings, who have children.
Self-defeating, extreme attitude: I am a second-class citizen because I do not have kids. They must treat me with more respect than they do.
Healthy Tolerant Attitude: This is an extreme attitude that is definitional and will lead to unhealthy feelings of depression and thoughts of inadequacy as a person. My parents may treat me differently and with less respect because I do not have children, but that does not make me a second-class citizen, a lesser person. They do not have to respect me and my life choices. I will choose to accept myself unconditionally and tolerate whatever bias I infer exists because I do not have children and have taken the path I have chosen to take. My parents are fallible humans and will act fallibly. I will not make my self-acceptance and emotional well-being predicated on how my parents relate to me.
Inference: I am not seen as an adult because I don’t have children, and the fact that I close deals worth millions of dollars doesn’t get appreciated.
Self-defeating, Rigid Attitude: My parents must see me as an adult doing responsible work even though I do not have children. They (absolutely) should appreciate the million-dollar deals I close, which make me as much as an adult as if I had had children.
Healthy Tolerant Attitude: I wish my parents would see me as an adult doing responsible work even though I do not have children. I hope they would appreciate the million-dollar deals I close, but they do not have to do this. They are entitled to value parenting children more than my career achievements. They do not have to share my values and interests and appreciate my achievements, although that would be gratifying if they did. Too bad. I can accept myself, them, and life as it is instead of demanding that we share values and interests and that I get the recognition I desire.
Inference: I am bored listening to the same discussion every holiday about the trials and tribulations of middle and high school kids and where nieces and nephews are hoping to go to college. You might think nothing else is happening in the world these days.
Self-defeating Extreme Attitude: I cannot bear such boring conversations about the trials and tribulations of middle and high school kids and where they hope to go to college.
Healthy Tolerant Attitude: Conversations about the trials and tribulations of middle and high school kids and where they hope to go to college can get quite dull after a while but are not unbearable. I can tolerate listening to the same old matters at the family dinner table on holidays. It is worth doing because even if they are not such great conversationalists, they still are my family, and I would like to maintain some relationship with them in the future. Some day, when my folks are gone, I may miss those boring holiday conversations. It is only a few times a year that I get to be with my entire family, and I can bear it. I will take the good with the bad and make the most of the experience. At least it is good to taste Mom’s home cooking again!
Inference: My parents encouraged me to get educated, and now they want me to ignore critical thinking about politics and world events and agree with them.
Self-defeating, Rigid Attitude: Because my parents encouraged me to get educated, they (absolutely) must not want me to ignore critical thinking about politics and world events and agree with them.
Healthy Tolerant Attitude: Even though my parents encouraged me to get educated, it does not mean they must not wish me to ignore critical thinking about politics and world events and agree with them. Hypocrisy is the human condition, and it is not unfathomable that an adult might want a child to think critically, except when it comes to challenging the parent’s views. My parents are fallible humans and have difficulty tolerating challenges to their opinion. I do not have to persuade them or enlighten them. It’s too bad we cannot have more tolerant conversations about interesting topics. I can change my attitude and accept them rather than embark on a fool’s errand and attempt to change them!
Inference: My parents don’t get me.
Self-defeating, Rigid, and Extreme Attitude: Because they are my parents, they (absolutely) should get me, understand me deeply, and appreciate who I am and what I stand for. It is awful that they do not understand me!
Healthy Tolerant Attitude: Even though they are my parents, it does not mean they (absolutely) should get me, understand me deeply, and appreciate who I am and what I stand for. They are much less well-educated than I am and are from another generation with vastly different life experiences. I do not need them to get me, and I can, without hostility, accept them unconditionally with their lack of deep understanding and appreciation. Most importantly, I will unconditionally accept myself with or without their approval and understanding. I am an adult and no longer need to get their approval.
Inference: My advanced education and their relative lack of education have caused us to grow apart. We cannot go back to relating to each other as we did when I was a child.
Self-defeating, Rigid, and Extreme Attitude: I have to have a close relationship with my parents. It is awful that we have grown apart.
Healthy Tolerant Attitude: In a perfect world, adult children and parents would have ideal relationships, but sadly, we do not live in a utopia. Humans are evolving beings, relationships change, and sometimes people within the same family with shared family history grow very much apart. Growing apart is unfortunate but not awful. Worse things could occur. I can display tolerance and strive to relate to them as best I can, talking about those things they find interesting and can handle and not upsetting myself about how they are intolerant towards me, my politics, my values, and my interests. I do not profit from insisting reality be different than it is and do not benefit from arguments with them. I will cultivate unconditional life acceptance that relationships, even with one’s parents, do not have to be as I would ideally want them to be. I will unconditionally accept them as well. It is too bad that we have vastly different world views, but that is life.
The Bottom Line: It is challenging to get along with people, and often, it is even more difficult to get along with family members. Relationships can get deeply strained when there is a significant difference between the education levels and life experiences of an adult child and their parents. Rather than avoid your parents and family gatherings, you can use REBT to help you cultivate both unconditional other-acceptance of your parents and unconditional self-acceptance. You do not need their approval; you do not have to argue with them, fix them, or make them appreciate you or your politics, values, and interests. It is easier to change how you react to them than make them see the world through your educated eyes. Work hard at tolerance because someday you may miss all those things about them that you find so annoying now.