When Your Disabled Children Reach Adulthood

Thanks to Responsival for our partnership on this post about supportung our disabled children in adulthood.

Hello! It’s been quite a while since I’ve regularly blogged herebut life changes when your disabled children reach adulthood. It’s truly a time when more security is necessary, which is crazy as I approach 60. We still need to have things in place like owning our own home, affordable life insurance for seniors (augh! that word!), and rebuilding our emergency fund. Yes…rebuilding it. 2024 was rough.

As for our daughters, Amelia is nearly 22 and Zoe is 19. Wow! Even now, we are in a difficult position in terms of doing protocols or nontoxic living. And while I did write a book on raising an autistic child, living with adults is a whole different thing, especially trying to get them to be healthy.

Emotional Support for Your Adult Children with Disabilities

When your kids are adults, their cognitive age matters less than the respect you need to give them for knowing their own minds. Honestly, it’s a wee bit easier for my husband and I now. We have more flexibility to do things. So while they still have many needs, we can still focus on ourselves.

How can you creatively get your disabled adult offspring to do what you’d like? Honestly, you can’t. Your job now is to convince them what’s best for them really is best for them and accept the rest. In the meanwhile, things you can do include:

• Affirm your adult children every day. They probably need that as adults more than ever.
• Make life better in little ways. Exude peace and calm as much as you can.
• Detox where you can. Not much detox we can do here except turning off the WiFi nightly.
• Choose the best you can. For example, food pantries sometimes carry produce and organics.
• Make a plan for the future. Expect life to get better and prepare accordingly.

I know that last one may tweak you, so let me share this. Last year, I prayed really hard – and regularly – for the Lord to provide us financial security. And after that, everything fell apart. We literally broke bad. I can’t even tell the depths that we went through.

But…but…

Every time things got close to looking skitchy, God pulled us through. We have taken some drastic measures but I have seen the hand of God more times than I can explain. Because of this, I have hope, joy, and peace – the kind that comes from knowing Jesus. But, we also have plans for our future, because I know that someday soon, things are going to look amazingly up for us.

Financial Support for Your Adult Disabled Kids and You

We are a family of four adults, only two of whom can work. (Personally, I love working. Retirement is not something I’ve ever dreamed of but my husband wants to.) We took our excessive down time this year to make sure our daughters had waivers, SSI, healthcare, and all the state and federal funding they are eligible for. Even if we relocate, we know exactly what to do going forward.

What is our long term plan once we’re back on our feet? It’s simple:

• Pay down our debt and re-build emergency fund.
• Once done, save up to build a new home.
• Relocate to an affordable area but make the connections now.
• Repair our credit, so we haave in place all the critical financials we need.

Now that we can focus better, I can do more work from home. We invest in term life insurance, which tends to be better for seni- I mean, us older adults in terms of ease and affordability. We will be able to pursue our dreams, too. My husband wants a boat (I had no idea til a few months ago!). In light of this, we are moving south. Right now, we’re saving up for the move and our business dreams.

Relocation, I believe, will be great for the kids who have now basically wrapped up their education. My adult kids have fully transitioned to adulthood. The plan is to be at the beach as much as humanly possible for lots of grounding activities.

I will say that while these last few years didn’t look the way we thought, I have hope today that our family’s future will be bright.