Dealing with adult kids

. If we continue to hold on to the expectation that our family will be the perfect image of what we want them to be or that they will forget a lifetime of pain and argument just because we are interacting with them, we are setting ourselves up for continued conflict. If your adult kid only spends an hour at Thanksgiving instead of the eight hours you were hoping for: accept it. Recognize that it is a step and something positive, rather than devaluing it because it doesn’t fit your ideal image of what you wanted the day to look like.