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Overexplaining fuels escalation, but feeling heard lowers it.

Avoiding conflict creates more long-term tension and resentment.

Jumping in too fast can keep your adult child stuck instead of helping them grow.

When your adult child is angry—and I mean really angry—it can feel like walking into an intense storm. Most distressing, this can feel like a storm that you didn't create, but somehow your adult child continues to blame you for their rage. And the maddening part is you just want to help. You want things calmer, and you just want to get to a peaceful relationship with your adult child.

Welcome to the world of parents who share these stressful stories with me. Now, please hang tight with me here because I have an uncomfortable truth to share that I have seen after 35 years of working with families. That hard truth is that some of the most natural (and totally understandable) reactions that parents have actually fuel the fire. I get how that may feel very unfair to hear.

So, let's look more closely at three common mistakes parents make with angry adult children—and what you can do instead.

Mistake 1:........

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