To Moms and Dads, Childhood Never Ends

When Avi Miron’s parents sold their house, he suggested they create a tax shelter before the sale to avoid paying a hefty capital gains tax. A respected real estate tax attorney who works for National Title Insurance Co. in Irvine, Miron knew what he was talking about. Unfortunately, his parents didn’t heed his advice and wound up paying thousands of dollars in taxes they would have avoided if they’d listened to their son.

But like many parents, the elder Mirons found it difficult to take advice from someone they used to have all the answers for. “We raise our kids to think and to be independent,” reasons Miron, himself the father of two, “yet it’s hard to believe they’ve surpassed us in any way.”

Even when people outside the family pay big money for a relative’s professional opinions, parents and other family members often can’t muster the same regard.

Why the distrust for those we should trust most? “People get locked into family roles very early,” says Venice-based psychotherapist Thomas Paris. “These roles create a sort of homeostasis. Families put a lot of energy into keeping roles as they are because changing them can be psychologically and emotionally scary. When the child takes on the role of parent, the parent doesn’t readily submit.”

Nor do siblings.

Paris understands this dynamic firsthand. A parenting expert who teaches workshops and who co-wrote a parenting book called “I’ll Never Do to My Kids What My Parents Did to Me” (Lowell House, 1992), Paris was shocked when his sister, who was having trouble with her son in school, didn’t seek his counsel. “She called my older brother to ask what she should do. It was striking that it didn’t occur to her to call me. She viewed me as just her brother, not a PhD with a parenting book.”

Eventually, at the other brother’s urging, she did call. “I helped her out. It was pretty basic stuff,” Paris says. “But she still hasn’t read my book.”

According to Cedars-Sinai psychologist Marc Schoen, professionals get stripped of their honor at home for several reasons. First, he says, “Old associations die hard.” In other words, family members have a difficult time shedding associations of someone they remember whining and in diapers.

Furthermore, Paris adds, “Parents and siblings know your strengths and weaknesses. In a professional role, most people don’t know you in all your facets, so your weaknesses can’t discredit you.”

Schoen calls his second theory the “don’t eat the local fish syndrome.” If the fish comes from too close by, there must be something wrong with it; conversely, fish from far away must be better. “As if the water in San Francisco is less polluted,” he jests. The feeling is that something at a distance has more cachet than something with which we’re familiar.

Schoen also mentions the tendency to believe that the more something costs, the better it must be. “We tend to devalue that which is free, including advice. If we pay for it, we’ll take the advice more seriously.”

So rigid are these notions that adult children might be best off learning to live without the recognition they crave at home. “To parents, children will always be children,” Paris says. “Even when the parents are 80 and the kid’s 60, they see you as their child, no matter what your credentials.”

Dr. Keith Klein, a Beverly Hills internist and nephrologist, has learned not to fight the tendency. “Every time I get a cold, my mother gives me all sorts of advice, ‘put that guggle muggle on your chest and wrap a warm cloth around your neck,’ she’ll tell me. I am used to the fact that no matter how old I get, my parents will always know more about my subject than I do. If you understand that they’re coming from a good place, you can have fun with it.”

For those who aren’t having fun, Schoen advises really examining your motives for giving advice. “Is there something more than being virtuous at work? In other words, besides acting out of love and concern, are you, as the adult child, really seeking acceptance, control or respect to remedy an old hurt?”

Becoming aware of your motives, he says, takes some of the edge off the rejection you feel when your parents don’t take advice. “The awareness will also help you give advice freely, and not as a way to compensate for unresolved feelings with your family.”

Miron’s awareness of the problem has taught him to use the experience constructively. “I don’t expect my parents to change, but I am trying to stay in tune with my own kids so I don’t repeat the pattern. One sure sign of aging is to stop listening to youth.”