2024-09-28 update:
- I still remember how stressed my dad was the morning he drove me to college 37 years ago. He must have been experiencing the same insane mix of pride, joy, loneliness, and sadness I described in this post.
- The day I posted this, an interesting article – titled “Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids: Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all” – appeared in The Atlantic by Russell Shaw. It covers similar material to Dr. Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Timeless Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children. Shaw wrote, “I’ve spent the past 30 years working in schools… Too often, I watch parents overfunctioning – depriving their kids of the confidence that comes from struggling and persevering… We’re biologically wired to prevent our children’s suffering, and it can be excruciating to watch them struggle. A parent’s first instinct is often to remove obstacles from their child’s path, obstacles that feel overwhelming to them but are easily navigable by us. …When parents seek to control outcomes for their kids, they are trading short-term wins for long-term thriving – they’re trading the promise of a college bumper sticker for a happy, well-adjusted 35-year-old.”
I barely slept last night. Instead, I stressed over a parenting situation I won’t describe here. While not sleeping, my brain reminded me of two events that helped me solve the mystery of why I felt so terrible.
First was me saying over a decade ago to a parent of adult children, “When you were a parent…” As the words were leaving my lips, I already realized how foolish they sounded. But to younger me, unconsciously, “parenting” was something that happened only till about age 18.
The second experience happened more than two decades ago. I was sitting in a car outside a Borders bookstore arguing with my dad. I had graduated college a decade earlier, earned my PhD, and just published a book on “Management Secrets of the New England Patriots”. My dad – bursting with pride in his son and wanting to help make my book a success – was eager to “help” me get bookstores to carry my books. I was mortified he planned to march into the store to try to talk the manager into putting my book on the chain’s shelves. I didn’t want to, and I certainly didn’t want my dad dragging me into the store and browbeating a poor store manager on my behalf!
Parents love their kids so intensely and always want to help. But it’s seldom obvious how to be a good parent. What works well with one child at one moment may work terribly for a different kid or the same child at another time.
Even more confusingly. as your kids grow up, the all-consuming active parenting role begins a slow dissolve into passivity. All along the confusing journey from parenting an infant through parenting an adult, every time you feel an urge to help your child, before deciding what to do, you must first ask, “Is this something I should involve myself in or something my part-child/part-adult must do without my involvement?”
(In life’s twilight years, many parents must – willingly or otherwise – relinquish decisionmaking over their own lives to their children. I’m not there yet and won’t likely be capable of reporting on that phase of life once I arrive.)
If kids don’t start making significant choices young enough, they can’t develop the skills to start making all their decisions once they leave home. Learning responsibility requires experiencing the consequences of one’s choices, behaviors, and actions. So my wife and I were always clear that we wanted our kids to be “self-propelled.” We didn’t want to nag them to do their homework, etc. Learning early the consequences of poor decisions and habits is essential to growing into a mature, responsible adult. They learned to take responsibility early and both do so wonderfully.
But the parental urge to want the best for your children never wanes, no matter how mature and accomplished they become. Letting go is painful after nearly two decades of caring for a highly dependent young human.
My son started college in August, and I’m struggling as a parent because I miss him, and I miss the beautiful trombone music he filled our house with daily before deafening silence moved in the day he left. I want to remain involved in his life, but he’s exceedingly busy making new friends, taking challenging courses, and building a new life for himself. And that’s exactly what he should be doing.
Everything is working out beautifully… which is why I feel terrible. The best-case scenario for a successful parent is losing visibility into 98% of your adult child’s happy life.
It’s rather suddenly no longer my place to smooth the path ahead of him or even suggest which path to pursue. I can hardly even offer advice since I barely know what he’s doing any more. (I rather pathetically enjoy wearing his college sweatshirt around our house because I miss him.) I’m thrilled and excited for him yet simultaneously sad thinking back fondly on the many years “when I was a parent.”
For the first eighteen-ish years of life, parents’ lives revolve around our kids. We coordinate driving schedules to ensure each kid gets to their art class, soccer game, music lesson, playdate, haircut, Chinese school class, dentist appointment, etc.. We meet their teachers and track their progress. We make their meals, buy their clothes, and clean up their messes. We enroll them in activities and enforce their bedtimes. We advise, encourage, warn, and sometimes scold them. We trade gossip and war stories with their friends’ parents, make important decisions on their behalf, visit colleges with them, and assist with the exhausting (and expensive) college application process.
And then they’re suddenly out in “the real world” on their own, and it’s now fully their life to shape, no longer a joint venture between child and parents.
Our kids are our primary responsibility and the axle around which our lives revolve… until suddenly they’re not.
That realization hit me hard tonight, costing me hours of sleep. I’m suddenly NOT responsible (except to pay their tuition bill). Not only am I no longer required to worry about my son’s life but I’m now not SUPPOSED to worry about it. He’s rather suddenly “an adult,” and he needs to make his own decisions. And I suddenly need to convince myself that I’m okay with not being involved much in his life, not knowing much about what he’s doing, and not gently nudging him any more.
(By “nudging,” I’m thinking of times like when he was first learning to skate and angrily asked, “Why do I need to learn how to skate?!?!?” I explained that perhaps he would see his friends playing hockey some day and want to play too. He insisted, “I’ll NEVER want to play hockey!!!” In the years since, hockey has become one of his favorite things in the whole world. Good parenting involves thoughtful nudging, but the line between helpful and unhelpful nudging is blurry and hard to see without hindsight. If he had suffered a traumatic brain injury playing hockey, for example, I would probably feel very, very differently about having nudged him to learn to skate.)
My adult son won’t always make the decisions I would have recommended, but it’s now his life. Except when he asks me for my thoughts, I need to dial my parental instincts WAY back because my involvement is now largely counterproductive. He’s at the wheel, and I’m suddenly the little kid in the back seat not tall enough to see out the windshield. Heck, society basically opened my door and tossed me from the car as it swerved on high school graduation day.
Of course, my kids will always be my kids. As long as I’m around, I’ll be thrilled to talk with them about anything and offer my advice or assistance whenever they want to talk. But it’s suddenly not my place to worry about my kids… or even expect them to call/text frequently. They’re allowed to do a vanishing act.
The meaning of “parenting” changes radically during high school – as your kids hopefully mature and take greater ownership over their lives and decisions. And it changes again when they leave home and spread their wings.
The painful reality is that the “reward” for 18 years of great parenting is that your kids will largely vanish from your life. Your work is suddenly mostly done, even if you’re unprepared for your kids no longer needing you and instead wanting to make their own decisions, just as you did at their age.
The same behaviors that a few years earlier counted as great parenting are suddenly inappropriate meddling.
That realization hit me hard tonight.
My dad embarrassed me because he loved me so much, wanted the best for me, and couldn’t let go of his “paternal instincts” when he believed he could help me. Letting go is painful because parental love and the desire to help your kids never wanes. Yet we must let go and let our adult children become whomever they choose to become.
The hardest thing about parenting isn’t the sleepless nights of infancy or the terrible twos or the crazy teen years. It’s the lonely, helpless angst of the immediate post-high school parent.
I’ll never lose or suppress my intense concern for my kids’ welfare and happiness, but I must relinquish my (suddenly inappropriate) sense of responsibility and agency over them. And if my adult kids ever do seek my advice, I will be thrilled to share with them my perspectives.
With appreciation to one of my kids – I’m not even sure which one – for this lovely family portrait they drew 12 to 15 years ago!