Each week I receive a number of calls from parents who are concerned about their adult children. Most want to know what they can do to help. Often the parent asks, "Well, I do that, but what else can I do?" "Nothing," I respond. The following silence is deafening. Most parents don’t want to believe there is nothing they can do to straighten out their adult children. One mother asked me how she could motivate her 23-year-old son to finish school. He lived at home, was sullen and uncommunicative, didn’t work, didn’t help around the house, slept all day and was on the computer or out most of the night. His parents were doing their best trying to "motivate" him. They had just bought him a car because he had convinced them he needed one so he could job hunt. His mother was cutting out job ads and strategically placing them in his room. If you want to motivate him, I suggested, give him a month to find another place to live and mean it. At some level this mother knew it was the right thing but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. What's the problem here? This young man has never learned how to take care of himself. He’s never had to because his parents treat him like a child – and so he remains one. If parents want their children to become mature adults they need to let them embrace life, make decisions and face the consequences of those decisions. Even when it seems guaranteed the child is heading for disaster, parents have to step back, watch and pray. Parents who treat their adult children like younger children are, in effect, saying "I don’t believe you can look after yourself, so I’ll do it." The message is "we don’t trust you to run your own life." Parents were once the centre of their child’s life. How quickly that changes! But it’s so important that parents adjust to this change. Parents must embrace a long-term vision that guides them in their decisions that will help, not hinder, their child’s development into a mature person. Part of that vision is letting the child make their own age-appropriate decisions and allowing them to face the consequences. At some point, parents must let go of their children entirely. Then, how could they let go? Mothers seem to struggle with this more than fathers. Fathers often are more willing to take a "tough love" approach sooner than mothers. But tough love is necessary if we want to give our adult children the best chance of making a go of life. I suggest that parents tell their adult children how much they love them, believe in them and know they are capable of handling life with all its inherent risks, failures and successes. Let the adult kids know you’re making some changes. No more suggestions, advice or lectures. Just listen to them, let them know you understand and that you believe they will eventually sort it out. One mother asked, "What if something terrible happens?" Something terrible might happen, or it might not. There are no guarantees. Christ tells us we will have trouble in this world. We cannot prevent our children from suffering, but we can teach them how to deal with it in a proper way.

Passage 4 A U.S. male brought up on the East Coast of America stands eight to twenty inches away from another male when in conversation. In talking to a woman he will increase the distance by about four inches. To stand at a distance of about thirteen inches usually has a sexual or aggressive connotation. However, in most parts of Latin America thirteen inches is just the right distance when talking with a person. When a man brought up in a Latin American environment tries to talk to a man brought up on the East Coast of the United States an interesting thing happens. The Latin will try to maintain what he considers the right talking distance. The American will step back. Both will feel uncomfortable without quite understanding why. All they know is that there is something wrong with the other one. Most culture-blind Latins feel that the Americans are withdrawn and uncommunicative. Most culture-blind Americans think that Latins are pushy. In most American urban areas, to be two minutes late for an appointment is all right. Three minutes is significant, but an apology is not expected. After five minutes the latercomer mutters an apology. In most Latin countries a five-minute unit is not important, an apology is expected only for a time unit longer than twenty minutes. Latins, influenced by their own cultural conditioning, feel that Americans are not polite and are obsessed with time because they expect persons with whom they have appointments to be at a certain place at precisely a given time. A person unfamiliar with North American cultural conditioning has difficulty realizing that Americans handle time much like some tangible material – spending it, taking it, using it up or wasting it. Different people live almost literally in different worlds, not just the same world with different names attached. The barriers between cultures would perhaps be relatively unimportant if only a few people were crossing international borders. But people the world over are on the move today as never before, traveling for business and more for seeing and experiencing other ways of life. All this has its obvious benefits. At the same time, however, there are some dangers, particularly for a person who plans to spend any appreciable amount of time in another culture. One of these dangers is the sense of confusion and misunderstanding that social psychologists call culture shock. A person who enters a foreign culture ordinarily passes through three phases of adjustment. First, he is a spectator; he observes what is going on around him but does not participate. Second, he become personally involved in the ways of the foreign culture and tries to come to terms with them. Finally, either he will have mastered the new situation and will get along smoothly in the new culture or he will realize that his own culture is the only workable one for him. In the first phase, that of spectator, the initial reaction to a new country is likely to be one of curiosity and delight. Everything looks interesting. However, a few weeks’ time change one’s perception of the environment. Living in a country is quite different from just visiting it. As the person begins to move into the second and most difficult phase, that of participation and personal involvement in the unfamiliar culture, he becomes aware of the differences that exist between himself and the people with whom he is living. The situations which, in his first phase as spectator, were interesting are now incomprehensible and perhaps even unpleasant. He feels that he can’t get through to them and he becomes uneasy and insecure because he doesn’t know the right way of doing things. Culture shock is precipitated by the distressing feelings of uncertainty and anxiety that result from not finding all the familiar symbols, signs, and cues that guide a person through her own culture. She finds herself having to use a different design for living. She doesn’t know what people expect of her and what she should expect. She is not sure when to shake hands, how much to tip, where to buy things she needs, or what to say to waiters, and she finds that the social etiquette she has learned is no longer useful. Culture shock is often accompanied by a linguistic shock that makes it even more difficult to cross the cultural barriers. When I was suffering linguistic shock, English sentence would sound to me like a long, unpronounceable string of harsh noises. At that time I deeply regretted that I had chosen to learn English instead of some sensible language. I couldn’t see why the English people had to use these odd, barbaric utterances instead of speaking with normal human words like everyone else. I sometimes had the feeling that Americans spoke English in order to confuse unsuspecting foreigners. 96. The statement “the Latin will try to maintain what he considers the right talking distance” implies that the Latin will _____.