Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Adult Children and Parents [Hardcover]

Jane Isay (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 27, 2007

On giving advice:
They Don’t Want It.
They Don’t Hear It.
They Resent It.
Don’t Give It.


We raise our children to be independent and lead fulfilling lives, but when they finally do, staying close becomes more complicated than ever. And for every bewildered mother who wonders why her children don’t call, there is a frustrated son or daughter who just wants to be treated like a grownup. Now, renowned editor Jane Isay delivers the perfect gift to both parents and their adult children—real-life wisdom and advice on how to stay together without falling apart.

Using extensive interviews with people from ages twenty-five to seventy, Isay shows that we’re far from alone in our struggles to make this new, adult relationship work. She offers up groundbreaking insights and deeply moving stories that will inspire those in even the toughest situations. Isay’s warmth and wit shine through on every page as she charts an invaluable course through the confusing, and often painful, interactions parents and children can face. Walking on Eggshells is the much-needed road map that will keep you connected to the people you love most.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Jane Isay, the editor who discovered Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia and commissioned Rachel Simmons' Odd Girl Out, has written an insightful, compelling book about "the delicate lifelong bond between grown kids and their parents." Isay traveled across the country and interviewed nearly 75 people (including dozens of parents and grown children), and Walking on Eggshells shares moving stories that will help parents and grown children build strong new adult relationships with one another. We asked Po Bronson, author of Why Do I Love These People?, to read Isay's book and give us his take. Read his review below. --Daphne Durham

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Guest Reviewer: Po Bronson

Po Bronson is the author of the brilliant bestseller What Should I Do with My Life?, the powerful and poignant Why Do I Love These People?, a hilarious novel called The Bombadiers, and The Nudist on the Late Shift, a collection of "true stories" about Silicon Valley.

When we tell family stories, we so often focus on the beginning and the end. The beginning is the two decades of our childhood and adolescence, and it's been the favorite narrative arc ever since Freud. What happens in your childhood does not stay in your childhood--it haunts the rest of your life. In the last decade, we've suddenly heard more stories of the end--narratives constructed around a parent's death, and often the year spent caring for that parent on their deathbed.

Because these are the conventional narratives, they often distract our attention from the many decades in between. We barely even have a terminology for these years--and the terms we employ sound like oxymorons: "Adult Children," "Parents of Adults." There's an old saying: you can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family. In the beginning this is true--we're in the care of our parents, like it or not. And in the ending this is also true--they're in our care, like it or not. But in the long middle, this isn't so true. The middle is a period where both child and parent can keep their distance, if they prefer. And often do, harboring resentment. We too often accept that this is just the way it is. "She's never going to change" is a common, fatalist refrain.

In Walking on Eggshells, Jane Isay shines a much-needed light on these years. With a graceful respect for the families she investigates, she tells their stories--how they lost their love, and how they regained it. Isay covers the many ways families develop resentment, and the many techniques they employed to make peace. She shows that small changes in routine can go a long way to restoring goodwill. But it's not a self-help book; it's more of a literary contemplation, and we learn more by inspiration than by emulation.

Though this book addresses the parents directly, I suspect it will be passed back and forth, between generations, in many a family. --Po Bronson

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From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. As baby boomer parents age, they're discovering the empty-nest syndrome is nothing compared to what happens when their kids graduate from college and start leading lives of their own. To a generation famous for being involved in every aspect of their children's lives, it can be upsetting to find that those children no longer need or welcome your advice. How does one parent children who no longer need parenting? Publishing veteran Isay, an editor and mother of two grown sons, interviews scores of parents and adult children of all ages to see how they are doing it. The stories are heartwarming, and Isay recounts them with intelligence and compassion. What does she find? Nothing Ann Landers hasn't already told us. Mainly: don't give advice; make friends with your children's significant others; and remember that love heals. The most compelling story is Isay's own. One wishes it were the centerpiece of the book rather than tacked on as an epilogue. Her experience is an example of her most interesting discovery: children are quick to forgive and often the ones who take the initiative in forging a new brand of closeness between themselves and their parents—a closeness that is best described as adult. (Mar. 27)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Flying Dolphin Press (March 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767920848
• ISBN-13: 978-0767920841
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #375,270 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Amazon autobiography
I was a book editor long before I started writing books. I was especially interested in psychology, since I was raised by a psychiatrist and a psychologist, and so I worked with some of the most interesting and important experts in the world. We used to pay an annual visit to Anna Freud, for instance, in her London home--she had a yappy little dog that once tried to bite my husband's pants leg. She once let us explore her father's study, which was left exactly as it had been when Sigmund Freud was alive. I enjoyed working with experts and helping them write books for a general audience.
Imagine my surprise when, nearly six years ago I found myself writing my own book, Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Parents and Adult Children. I loved interviewing people and drawing out their stories, and I found the process of writing a delight because it was easy for me to shift back and forth from writer to editor. Once I got something reasonably interesting down on paper, I could edit, rewrite, and rework it until it made sense. Being a former editor also help me to be grateful for the comments of my kind readers. Criticism always improves a book. The most amazing lesson I learned--and this I shared with all my authors--is what courage it takes to put yourself on the page, knowing that strangers will be reading your words. Not your friends, not your family, but people who have no reason in the world to take what you have to say seriously, much less agree with it.
It came as a happy surprise to read the kind words reviewers had for the book, and to receive lots of mail at my website, janeisay.com, from readers. Many readers felt relieved to know that they weren't the only parents whose kids didn't return their phone calls, who bristled at their advice, and who blew up on holiday weekends. The grown children were happy to know that they weren't alone in walking a fine line with their parents-in-law or suffering from differences in child rearing practices across the decades.
During the course of my research for Walking on Eggshells, the subject of siblings kept coming up. "Do I have a story for you," people would often say, and then I would steer them back to the subject at hand. But brothers and sisters seemed to raise strong feelings in both generations, and so I decided to see if I could understand the dynamic that makes so many people uneasy around their brothers and sisters. I discovered that, while there are many siblings who are as close as can be, the rest of us struggle with mixed feelings, some coming from our childhoods together, others arising from the different ways our parents treated us, and yet others stemming from the different choices we have made in life.
My new book, Mom Still Likes You Best: The Unfinished Business Between Siblings, describes a range of relationships, from best friends to Wedding and Wake siblings. I think it will relieve people to learn that almost every sibling relationship has had its rough times, and that unconditional love and acceptance between siblings is rare--and often the product of hard work and determination.
The lesson I have learned from these two books and the hundreds of interviews I have conducted is that life can be hard, but (if we're lucky) it's also long. What hurt yesterday can heal tomorrow, and if we want it, we can find a way to rediscover the good in our siblings and come to laugh at, or even love their annoying behavior--and hope they will do the same for us.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Stepford Parents, April 11, 2007

By 

Ruth Teal (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Adult Children and Parents (Hardcover)

This book is reassuring of how common are the conflicts between parents and their adult children, and provides sensible explanations of the feelings of adult children. Ms. Isay also empathizes with the parents' legitimate feelings of hurt. But the solution suggested by this author is basically for a parent to bite their tongue, control their facial and body language, and pretend, lest their adult child be offended. This advice does not consider the tension and underlying rage that can build up in a parent that is also contending with all the issues of advancing age, to say nothing of the phoniness of the resulting "relationship". The subtitle of this book should be "Stepford Parents". I found it depressing and disappointing.

76 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Terribly disappointing, April 26, 2007

By 

Tough Cookie - See all my reviews

This review is from: Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Adult Children and Parents (Hardcover)

This book has multiple variations on a one-note theme that's summed up in the flap copy: Don't try to give advice to your adult children. Instead, the author advises, if you're endlessly accepting and generous, those children might (or might not) give you the time of day. As one of the earth mothers she interviews puts it, "Keep your door open and your mouth shut."

Good advice? Maybe. But the evidence is all anecdotal, based on a pretty thin sampling of mothers and kids; and Isay never digs deep enough to explore what the resulting relationships are really like. In the final chapter, she reveals her own guilt about certain aspects of her relationship with her sons, and I couldn't help wondering whether that guilt was predisposing her to side with the kids in every conflict. Yes, parents need to recognize the autonomy of their grown children, but is the ultimate goal only to keep the peace at all costs? It seems shallow and empty and sad to me.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, September 9, 2007

By 

Lois Fender (San Francisco Bay Area, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Adult Children and Parents (Hardcover)

This book makes some good points but didn't go deep enough to help me. I found "When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don't Get Along" to be far more helpful because the author, Dr. Joshua Coleman, provides much more guidance for a range of situations and goes into much more depth for this very difficult problem.