How Do You Parent Millennials?

Editor's Note:
The following is an excerpt from an article posted today on Inside Pages, the new corporate blog of Moody Publishers. If you would like to read the article in it's entirety, please click the READ MORE link below the excerpt. While visiting the site, you might want to register to win one of 5 FREE copies of The 5 Love Language® Gift Edition (winner will be chosen today) and also for a FREE iPod Touch (winner will be chosen Jan 30th).

How Do You Parent Millennials?
Fifty years ago, everyone knew the script.Young people finished high school and either went to college or got a job. For some, their first job was in the military. With or without college, readily available full-time employment meant that independence was just around the corner. They would find their own apartment and start to save for the day when they married (most married young) and began a family.

Everyone knew their role and played it quite well. If life was not always happy, at least it was stable.

Fifty years ago, this book could not have been written. But things have changed during the past five decades, and the predictable is no more.

Nowhere have these changes been more poignantly felt than by parents of those amazing and puzzling young people we call Generation Y (or the Millennials or the Mosaics), as well as some of the younger Gen-Xers. Among the changes affecting the contour of the family circle are:

1. Adult children may live more than one hundred miles away, often out of state.
2. Or, adult children, increasingly, may be moving back to the nest - sometimes with their own children.
3. Many adult children don't marry until their late twenties or thirties.
4. Some adult children have live-in partners of the opposite sex, sharing their lives and sometimes their checking accounts, but not marrying.
5. Adult children may seem less driven than their parents.

It is easy enough to try to lay blame for the changing, unsettled times solely on uncontrollable factors. Yet many of today's boomer parents have to look no further than their own experiences when they were young. Many young people decided that sex was too beautiful to be kept for marriage, that multiple partners were the wave of the future. The pleasures of recreational drug use and sexual experimentation drew many, and social stigmas waned. Divorce became the norm in some circles.

Today 40 percent of our young adults grew up as children of divorce. The Gen Xers, in particular, were labeled latchkey children, because they had keys to their homes after school, as their parents were away, working. Many of these children were more often shuffled and managed than parented. The Millennial generation were the "baby on board," pampered generation, but their coming of age and seeming delaying of adulthood has also baffled parents.

With all these changes, many parents wonder now how to relate to their adult children. There are roles that parents can and should play in the lives of their adult children, as we plan to show in this book; but to play those roles we need to better understand our grown sons and daughters.

. . . click here to READ MORE.


Share your questions, thoughts insights, or comments by joining the conversation on Facebook at facebook.com/5lovelanguages