The Fine Line Between Supporting and Smothering Your Adult Child’s Love Life

AS A YOUNG ADULT, EMILY STAGER found that her parents’ comments about her romantic relationship left her feeling pressured to define the partnership and unsettled on where it stood. This relational uncertainty — the feeling that one’s relationship is unsteady and chaotic — sparked a line of research for her master’s in communication studies at TCU.

A recently published paper in this research, led by Paul Schrodt, the Philip J. & Cheryl C. Burguières Professor in Communication Studies at TCU, investigates how a parent’s attempts to influence their child’s romantic relationship can affect the parent-child bond. Schrodt, who has a college-age son, also had a personal interest in learning more.

Published in Communication Research in June 2025, the study reveals how those effects vary, depending on the family’s openness and frequency in sharing feelings with each other. The team also researched how adult children perceive parental involvement.

“Different kids value their parents’ opinions differently,” Schrodt said, “as you can imagine.”

MEASURING RELATIONSHIPS

As both a researcher and a parent of a college-age son, Paul Schrodt brings personal perspective to his work.

Schrodt and Stager explored the impact of a parent’s facilitation or interference in a child’s relationship. Facilitating a relationship can include inviting the romantic partner to family gatherings, offering advice on navigating the relationship and showing other support. Interfering can mean leaving the romantic partner out of family gatherings, making negative comments about the person and otherwise thwarting the child’s ability to maintain the relationship.

The researchers used the relational turbulence theory, which suggests that people in a relationship become emotionally, cognitively and communicatively reactive during a transition, due to experiencing both relational uncertainty and partner influence.

“The authors of relational turbulence theory have used the metaphors of turbulence in an airplane or a rough patch of rapids in a whitewater river boat ride as examples,” Schrodt said, “to illustrate the instability and chaos that partners feel when experiencing a state of turbulence.”

Schrodt and Stager distributed an online survey to TCU students and received 264 qualified responses from participants between ages 18 and 24 who had a living parent and were involved in a romantic relationship.

The survey included questions about the participant’s romantic relationship and about the relationship with a parent, with the survey randomly assigning questions about either the mother or father. If the participant had only one living parent, survey questions referenced only that parent.

Participants were asked to reflect on a recent discussion with the parent about the romantic relationship and rate how positive or negative that discussion felt. Participants also reported their perceptions of their relationship with that parent by rating, on a scale, its stability vs. chaos, calmness vs. turbulence, peacefulness vs. stress and whether it was smooth vs. tumultuous.

The survey measured parent interference using statements such as, “My parent makes it harder for me to schedule time with my partner,” while parent facilitation was assessed with statements including, “My parent helps me resolve conflict with my partner.”

Schrodt and Stager used validated psychological scales and statistical modeling to analyze data from the surveys.

WHEN SUPPORT HELPS OR HURTS

The researchers found that the more a parent attempts to interfere in a relationship, the more turbulence typically occurs between the child and the parent, Schrodt said.

But is it best for the parent-child relationship for the parent to facilitate a child’s romantic relationship? Not always, the research showed.

For low- to moderate-conversation families — a measure of how openly the family members express themselves and value each other’s opinions — parental facilitation of the adult child’s romantic relationship has positive effects on their relationship with their child. Support or encouragement, because it is less expected, Stager said, might feel especially meaningful and even strengthen the parent-child relationship.

“The more the parent supports the relationship, facilitates it, helps their child through that first big conflict, talks through how to negotiate plans with a partner, calls and checks in on that relationship,” Schrodt said, “that, in general, reduces turbulence in the parent-child relationship.”

Schrodt and Stager found one interesting exception: If the child and parent have a very high-conversation relationship — one in which they are very open with each other and the child values the parent’s opinion — turbulence increases the more the parent facilitates the relationship.

“When these parents push too hard to help a child’s romantic life, it can actually backfire, coming across as smothering at a point in life when young adults desire autonomy and may want to handle relationships on their own.”
Emily Stager

It might feel like high-conversation parents are meddling, Stager said. “When these parents push too hard to help a child’s romantic life, it can actually backfire, coming across as smothering at a point in life when young adults desire autonomy and may want to handle relationships on their own.”

The unwanted facilitation might feel to some adult children like “helicopter parenting,” Schrodt said. “In families with a high-conversation style, and where the child really values their parents’ opinion, a parent continuing to pour more facilitation onto the relationship almost becomes a deterrent in the child-parent relationship.”

LESSONS FOR PARENTS

Stager employed the findings in her own life: When she began dating her now-husband, Michael, she did not disclose the relationship to her parents for about six months.

“I was aware of how their interference or facilitation would affect my relationship, because I do really care about what my parents think. I didn’t want their view to influence or skew my perspective; I wanted to give myself the chance to discover how I feel,” she said. “My husband and I were able to get to a good place together, and I felt more comfortable in talking about and introducing him to the parents. Thankfully, it worked out really well. They love him.”

As the parent of a young adult, Schrodt said that the research confirms what he is trying to do: be supportive and give his children room to grow into adults.

“You put a lot of time, effort and energy into raising your kids, and now you’re at that time of your life where you have to trust the fruit of your labor,” he said. “You have to show that you trust them to make increasingly wiser decisions, especially in the area of romantic relationships and who they’re going to pursue. Standing in the way of your child pursuing the person they really are falling for is not really going to increase the closeness you want to have.”