Wondering how to set limits with your difficult adult child who has a mental illness? It is difficult to have adult children who make bad decisions that cause problems in their lives and in the lives of their parents; it’s even harder to have adult children who have mental illnesses that contribute to those choices. When our children have eating disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD, OCD, or any other mental illness, it poses additional complications and we may be inclined to “help” too much. Here are four questions to answer that will allow you to determine if you are helping too much. Answering them will give you a guide to setting limits.

Is your help needed? There are times when “helping” prevents your child from taking responsibility and becoming what they “should” be doing. There are also times when “helping” is really necessary. You have to weigh the positives against the negatives of intervening. You also need to consider what your child can’t really do for himself due to mental illness. This is an important determination and must take all aspects into account and may require you to accept less than perfect behavior and/or do more than you would if your child were mentally sound.

Is your help encouraging? All of your “help” should encourage your adult child to improve and become more independent. You shouldn’t be so controlling that you remove the incentive for your adult child to try or send the message that he is incapable of managing his own life. Helping someone to help themselves is the goal. We all learn best when we are in control of our choices and directly experience the consequences of them.

Is your help healthy? You care about your child and feel responsible for him/her especially since he/she is “sick”; but do you care about yourself too? It is essential that you do so. What do you need? What do you want? What do you feel? What is good for you? Is it good for you to talk to or see your child? Is it good for you to help? Is it good for you that your child lives at home? Is it good for you to let go? Due to your legitimate concerns, you have focused too much on your son and what he needs. This is natural, but it needs to change. You may have worn yourself out to save your child. You have given emotionally, mentally, spiritually, financially, physically, and relationally. Now is the time to consider yourself too, because you can’t lose yourself to save your son and end up losing both of them.

Is your help working? The definition of “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Think of all the things you’ve done over and over again that haven’t worked. It’s good to have hope, but it must be based on reality. If certain things have never worked, try something different. You have to analyze the effects of the things you are doing by looking at how they affect your child. Do a cost versus benefit analysis and decide if each thing is working and if something else could work better. Your expectations may also need to be more reasonable to be in line with what is possible.

Mental illness makes your situation more complicated and obviously has to be taken into account. When setting limits with your difficult adult child with mental illness, answer these four questions so your limits are good for both of you.