If you are lucky enough to be the parent of a child, you know that it is simultaneously one of the hardest and greatest jobs you’ll ever do. In fact, if you think of it in terms of a company and you are the CEO, it’s like owning a company that sells a different product every single day. Stressful, yes, but exciting and rewarding. But, as our children get older, the challenges become more complicated.
As a divorced parent of three children, my parenting journey is a variety of twists and turns; while some paths lead to big open spaces, others lead to dead ends. And sometimes the road is bumpy and hard to see. One of the trickier paths that I’ve encountered is when my role should shift between parent and friend.
You’ve probably heard from your own parents that when a child becomes an adult, that is when they become your friend.
I struggle with this concept but not because I believe it isn’t true. I wholeheartedly believe that a healthy parent-child relationship should exist when a child has reached adulthood. The part I struggle with is that there are legitimate times we must treat our children as friends while they are still children.
Now, I am not advocating taking your 12-year-old to happy hour or answering your toddler’s plea to use a knife with "You’ve got this. I believe in you."
Our children still need our guidance and protection. But when my 9-year-old asked if "Donald Trump is a bad man" or "Does God ever feel sad?" I realized that the standard parent responses to most questions no longer applied. Especially following a year of social distancing where our children have spent more time consuming digital content than playing with peers.
So what do we do when our kids are asking hard questions or for perhaps our preteens and teenagers, dealing with hard social scenarios?
In these moments I’ve learned to take off my mom hat and put on my friend hat.
First, I mentally go through the short list of questions: Is my child physically safe? Is my child emotionally secure at this moment? And, if the answer is no, then those things need to be addressed first. As the first line of defense, their welfare is my first priority. But if the answer is yes, then it’s time for me to do like a good friend would do and listen.
Because if you think about your support system, the friends you depend on most are those that are always there to listen, free of judgement, free of opinions. It’s a tall order, when you’ve been handing out orders and directives for years, but if we want our little birds to grow wings, eventually we have to sit back and let them sort through issues, no matter how much we want to "fix" them.
If anything, my kiddos teach me more about myself these days than I teach them.
After a year of distance learning, that’s quite humbling. But I’m becoming more attuned to the fact that, when my children ask me difficult questions or find themselves in difficult situations, most of the time it isn’t my job to find a solution anymore. Snacks after school and band-aids on boo boos I can do. But when my kid asks me why his girlfriend broke up with him in a text message? Or if there’s really a God? It’s time to listen. In the words of Lady Bird Johnson, “Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.”
As parents, we have to remind ourselves that we aren’t raising children — we are raising adults. These small people get bigger, and what we say and do in these fragile moments of their lives shapes and forms their world views as adults. So when we don’t know the answers, sometimes it’s best to just be there.
I don’t know what it is like to answer the phone to hear my daughter say she has run away.
Or have a child that comes out but expresses their fear of telling the other parent. I don’t know what it's like having a child with a terminal illness that is struggling to make sense of it. But I do know that should I find myself in one of those situations one day, I want to show up bravely as their friend. Not with answers, but with open ears and unconditional love and the reassurance that no matter what happens, I will hold their hand through it.
