The Elephant in the Living Room — Counseling the Multigenerational Family

Sooner or later, a family lands in your office that has quietly become three or four households in one. A grown son moved back after a layoff, and brought his kids. A widowed mother moved into the spare room and can no longer manage the stairs. In the middle of it sits one exhausted couple parenting in every direction at once, and the thing that brought them to you is not the crowded house. It is that they have stopped talking to each other.

This course sits in on a candid Called to Flourish conversation with Dr. Kathie Erwin, a counselor and Divine Mercy University faculty member who has spent years working with families like this one. She names the person she calls the “de facto mom and dad,” explains why their marriage is the first thing to strain, and shows why most of the damage is done by the questions nobody will ask out loud. Then she gets practical: how to renegotiate roles with an adult child who moves home, how to protect the couple at the center, a disarmingly simple kitchen-counter journal that rebuilt one family’s ability to talk, and a set of ways to honor older adults instead of managing them. You will come away steadier the next time a multigenerational family arrives strained and silent, and clearer about the conviction that holds the lesson together: the older adult is still on a journey and still has a gift to give, and the surest help is to show them they are valued.