A parent's ability to form the character of their child decreases dramatically at age 18. Prior to this, I think the relationship between child age and parent influence on character is likely an "inverted U" where influence increases steadily from birth and likely peeks sometime before 18. Age 18 initiates a dramatic drop off because that's the age when Society agrees that kids don't have to do what their parents say anymore.
I have met more than one parent who wants to know how to make the young adult living in their home a "good person." Rightly, such parents want their struggling young adult to do good things because they're right to do, and not because they are being forced to do them. The problem is that most strategies for building character depend on having some level of society-supported control over a person. Once the blessing of society is gone, parents have less control, and the options for forming character are severely restricted. The good news is that society isn't done with the child. At age 18, society takes the character-forming wheel in the form of jobs, college, marriage, and having kids. All of these typical situations in which adults find themselves have the power to build character in an adult.
This is not to say that parents are inconsequential to character building when their child turns 18. But the effort to yield ratio is way off. Parents now work very hard for very little result. It turns out that "authority" was proper leverage. Because the effort:yield ratio no longer favors parents what I often see is parents making excessive compromises in their own ethics for the sake of accommodating the adult child (i.e., making or keeping the child happy). Not only is the character of the child unaffected, but parents find themselves increasingly living in unreality, or an upside-down situation where they are now working harder to meet the increasing adult demands of their child. In turn, the child's effort is steadily decreasing. The child may rarely say thank you because they are convinced they deserve what they are being given.
In such cases I often recommend letting go of the character formation piece and instead work on creating a more realistic environment for the adult child to live in. I don't recommend the parents stop caring about their child's character, I just encourage them to stop exerting so much effort on it. Instead, we start correcting some of the unreasonable compromises they made with their out-of-touch child. For instance, stop cooking for them, doing their laundry, paying for phone service, letting them yell at video games at midnight, waking them up for work when they have an alarm, and saying things like "your room" or "your phone". The unreality can even infect the language of the parent.
All parents want their children to be better people, so effort should be made to hand them over to society. Adult children should be working or going to school, forming long-term relationships, volunteering, and otherwise participating in and contributing to society. Parents can become intolerant of their child's isolation, sleeping during the day and being up at night, excessive self-entertainment, and the like. It's fairly simple to remove bedroom doors (against isolation), turning off internet at night and waking children in the morning (against night/day reverse), and denying unlimited access to devices (against self-entertainment).
For parents interested in regaining some of their character-forming ability without the help of society, I recommend my book The Nuclear Option. I will warn you though that the book has that title for a reason. Initiating the Nuclear Option as it's described in the book is a monumental task. The book itself was written with a practical tone, but could be read as a theoretical piece. Most parents who work with me on the Nuclear Option choose a modified version for the sake of motivating their child to engage more in society (e.g., "If you don't like handing your phone over to me at night, get a job and buy your own."). To me this is the best of both worlds where parents create a more peaceful, predictable household where the effort:yeild ratio is reasonable and motivating, and get their stalled kids back on track with effective engagement with society.
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