View this post on Instagram

 

I’m straddling the parenting world between teenagers and young adults, and the years when I thought I was going to do this job perfectly are a distant memory. My kids have shot a hundred holes in that theory, and I’m grateful for it.

I started out with some good ideas that held up, but for the most part, I have learned the most from my mistakes. Many of my well-intentioned practices ended up being more about my agenda and not nearly enough about their experience.

Fortunately, my kids have let me know about my missteps and I’ve been willing to listen (sometimes after I first trudged sloppily through my initial defensive reaction).

Here is the list of things I’ve learned so far that may be helpful for all of us parents:

• Carry forward the loving and healthy ways we were parented, and improve on the ways we were wounded as children.
• Expect to make mistakes, address them, and always apologize well. Don’t avoid them and hope they’ll go away.
• Communicate respectfully.
• Advise, guide, and lead until they’re able to lead themselves. (This happens little by little starting when they’re tiny, and the transfer of leadership should feel uncomfortable but not terrifying. If we’re comfortable, we probably waited too long and they’re feeling controlled or micro-managed.)
• Most kids will lie and keep secrets—don’t take it personallyVbut try to make a safe, judgment-free space for them to bring us the hard stuff.
• Love unconditionally and do it actively; don’t assume they know.
• Talk about all types of emotions.
• Be affectionate, even when we’re disappointed.
• Get comfortable with disappointment and help them learn to be okay disappointing us. It’s part of the journey.
• Work on our own issues and learn to self-regulate, so they don’t have to hide themselves, suffer unnecessarily, or caretake/regulate us.
• Don’t share their lives with other people or on social media without their permission. It’s one thing when they’re little and so cute, or little and we’re desperate for advice from our parent friends, but they will begin to need agency over their stories earlier than we think.
• Beware of pride. It might indicate more about us and our desired path for their life than them. It can also feel like conditional love and make them hesitant to step onto their own path for fear of losing our approval.
• Let them explore and develop their own ideas about the world.
• Be curious and ask questions. Don’t assume to know how they feel or what they’re thinking.
• Be kind, loving, and forgiving—especially forgiving—toward ourselves. This is hard. It’s impossible to get it perfect. We are human. We will mess up but can choose to grow from it.
• Take care of ourselves the best we can under the ever-changing circumstances.

This isn’t the end of the list though.

Now, I’m in the next stage of parenting which is coming with its own set of instructions:

Adult Children Without Children of Their Own

• Be prepared to hear about the mistakes we made—the ones we already know about and the ones that weren’t even on our radar—and acknowledge and validate their experience. If this feels repetitive, they probably didn’t get the acknowledgment they needed the last time, so try again.
• Invite the less-than-forthcoming child to share these experiences with us. We have a chance to be part of their healing process and I promise that no matter how kick ass a job we think we did, there are still things they need to heal from. It’s the human condition.
• Support them emotionally and offer advice, but only when it’s requested.
• Keep doing all the relevant stuff above.

I also can’t help reflecting on what it’s like to be someone’s child as we try to raise children. Our parents, too, are getting some things right and making mistakes. It seems like a good opportunity to learn something before I have children going through the same experience.

Adult Children With Their Own Children

• Support them emotionally while they thrive and struggle to raise their own kids.
• Marvel at how they improved on our parenting.
• Keep our mouths shut when we disagree with how they’re doing it (unless it’s abuse).
• Offer advice only when requested.
• Expect them to find a whole host of new mistakes we made that haven’t yet been addressed or need to be processed again, as they try to reparent themselves in the process of parenting their own kids.
• Acknowledge and validate their experience.

I don’t know if I thought parenting would be a balanced relationship, but it isn’t by its very nature. As unnatural as it feels for all of my other relationships, I’ve come to realize that I will always want more than they will: more time with them, more proximity to them, more of a two-way relationship with them, not to mention a bigger window into their lives, thoughts, and feelings.

That doesn’t seem to be the reality though.

As parents, we are whole people with our own feelings and we might get hurt by our children, too—directly or indirectly. I’m just not sure, unless invited by them, that we will be given the space in these relationships to share that and still remain deeply connected. That’s an important reason to nurture our relationships with our partners and friends, so that we have a place to be acknowledged and validated. We deserve that.

It’s a wild ride. The only guarantee is that there will be ups and downs. I try to have gratitude for the ups without the expectation that we get to stay there for long. I rely heavily on self-forgiveness and my connection with other people during the downs, knowing we won’t remain there forever either. And I try to keep learning and growing, and doing my part to move this collective parenting game a little further down the field for the next generation.