Emily Parker spoke with authors Gwyn and Jill Harding-Jones, who have been in-law children for over 30 years, and parents in-law for 10 years. They share their thoughts on how to make those potentially tricky relationships work.

Gwyn: I would encourage parents who are struggling with letting go, to try and understand that their child will never get a truly fulfilled relationship if they just stay as a child. They're meant to get married. They're meant to have that close relationship. It's important for them to understand, that for that reason, through an act of love towards their child, they need to release them.

Then to help them understand and appreciate that as their child gets married, or is in a long term relationship with a partner, the child's identity actually changes. Their primary identity changes. What I mean by that is that for the majority of their lives until the point at which they get married or whatever, they have been their child and that's their primary identity. But they need to recognise at that point as parents, we are no longer the main person, or the main relationship in their lives. So their primary identity then becomes a husband, or a wife, or a partner, or whatever. That helped me greatly to let go of our two kids.

Emily: What about the other way around? Say for example a child is seeing that their parent may be struggling and finding it hard to let go. Do you have any advice on what the child can do to still acknowledge the fact that they're still there, but to encourage them to let go in the nicest possible way?

Jill: I don't think we've been asked that before. From the child's perspective it's a good thing to let the parents know that they are still important and that they're still loved; that you do want to spend time with the parents. However, there are only so many hours in the day and as newly married, or if you're in a new relationship, then you can't necessarily spend that amount of time. I think just to reassure the parents that they're still loved and they're still wanted, but that the dynamics of the relationship has changed.

Gwyn: As parents, if your children get married, you don't cease being parents. You're still parents. So it might be an idea for the child just to reassure her or his parents that you're still my parents, and I still love you; it's just that this is a new season for everybody, so let's make this work. It's the dynamics within the relationship that changes, that's all.

Emily: Communication is a key part of any relationship, whether it's mother, daughter, parent, sibling, or friendship. Picking out one area of your book, you talk about something called the 'Auntie Margaret syndrome'. Tell me more about that and where you came up with the concept?

Jill: We didn't come up with it. It is actually something that has been experienced and it's a way of a parent veiling what they want to say. So they would say, "Auntie Margaret has said she hasn't seen you visiting for a while," and, "Auntie Margaret's children always take her out to lunch on a Sunday."

Gwyn: So what the parent is trying to say is, "I'm trying to tell you that you're not visiting enough. But I'm veiling it behind telling you that it's Auntie Margaret who's telling me this." So, "Auntie Margaret has noticed that you haven't been visiting," whereas actually that's what she said and Auntie Margaret hasn't said anything at all. But that's a relationship killer, because you soon cotton on to what's happening and you lose credibility.

Emily: So within situations like that, what are your key communicating tips? And also with that, being able to set up specific boundaries both for parents, but also for children as well?

Jill: That's one of the things that we mention in the book, boundaries. As a newly married couple, or as a couple living together, obviously they've got ideas about the way they want to spend their time and how they want to do things. That will differ from how the parents see it, especially if it's a parent who's having trouble letting go. As a young couple you need to be quite strong and set boundaries. One of the stories in the book, and it's actually something that happened to us, is that when we were expecting our first child, neither Gwyn nor I smoke, but both sets of parents smoked, so when we were expecting our daughter we said, "No more smoking in the house." One side was ok about it and accepted that that was a boundary, but the other side didn't and it caused quite a lot of problems.

Gwyn: For us personally, we stuck with it, not to be awkward or anything, but we felt it was a really important thing. It was our house and that's what we decided. It did affect the relationship unfortunately.

Jill: Yes, so even though we felt we'd communicated our wish in a loving way...

Gwyn: As well as we could have done 30 years ago, put it that way.

Jill: Sort of explained the reasoning, it wasn't well received because it was seen as unreasonable.