Improve your parenting: work with teens you didn't raise.

This is not me or a teen I work
 with, but it's what our conversations often
look like. 

I belong to a couple of online communities where (mostly) women discuss their changing relationships with grown children after they leave for college. 


There is worry about staying close, of course, about losing a pulse. There is worry about what we won't know by feel anymore. 

Who will offer all those helpful, crisis-dodging comments that start with  "Why don't you..."?

How will they know if we don't tell them? 

May I offer a little something from my "been there" files?

Distance won't end a healthy parent-child relationship, but distance will grow it into a healthy adult relationship as you lose your opportunities to influence choices, and your son or daughter gains the chance to make decisions. 

Relationships don't stop when that happens. If we let them, relationships evolve like people do. 

We do judge. We have been the boss of them since they were in onesies. We call it other things when they're older - directing, suggesting, coaching - and we know enough to "let them handle" (non-life threatening) matters, but when kids live at home, it is impossible not to know the things they could be doing or doing better to make their lives as good as we would if we were them.  

We change our language, but we tell them still. 

"It's only my opinion, but..."

After our nest emptied, I began to work with teens at our local  Boys and Girls club helping them write their life stories. I love it because the things they share, and say and really want to tell me are not treated or organized to avoid judgment. They want to be heard, I want to know what they think. There is no stake in it beyond that. They don't worry about my opinion of them and I don't worry about their grades.

And, nothing is better than listening to a teen who does not expect to be judged. Indeed, if I had to pick a single moment that makes me look forward to working with these kids every year, it's the one when I say something to a teen that surprises them, and a look crosses their face that makes me know what they looked like when they were four, and they say very slowly, "that is so true."

I remember well, those years when our kids were moving away and I worried that the state of our relationships - up or down - would freeze in place.

Were we really done already, I wondered?

What I know now, what all my new empty-nest friends will  know I hope, is the lovely paradox: that the further apart we allow ourselves to be, the closer we become as we are less guided by our old roles in each other's lives and grow to simply like each other as people.

Today, my relationships with my grown kids are much like those I cherish with the Boys and Girls kids. I want to know what they think, and they want to tell me about their lives and they want to hear about mine.

And even now, every so often, I throw out an observation, and I get this: "That is so true."

And it makes me feel like we all turned out just fine.

Don't be this kind of parent

The file is now closed.
Whew.

We have, with our youngest's college graduation and move to Boston, now launched four successful adults. All have careers and benefit plans, all still like to come for dinner and go shopping, and I'm feeling good about the mom in the mirror. 

I'm tempted to offer pages from the "worked for us" file, but the "don't do this" file is probably more useful.Some scraps of backstory: 

Remember when Rex, the insecure dinosaur in Toy Story made this comment after trying to scare Woody:

"I'm going for fearsome, but I think I'm just coming off as annoying?"  Put that aside.

Remember the "Cincinnati Zoo Mother" story this summer about the woman who turned away long enough for her toddler to fall into a gorilla enclosure? And, that the gorilla was shot before he could harm the boy? 

It was a sorry and sad thing, and even before the internet blew up over this woman's "neglect" you had to feel for her once you knew the reason for why it happened, which was because that's what accidents do, they happen. 

"It's not about the decision to put down the gorilla," said commenters, which don't get me started. "It's about the fact that the kid got away from the parents."  

Once, I let go of my small child's hand in a busy store and he bolted. I dropped the things I was holding and gave chase while he scrambled up a spiral staircase like a crab, and headed straight for the propped open door. A busy two way street was feet beyond the threshold. I quite literally tackled him before an oncoming car, then dissolved into tears to think of what almost happened.  

Before that happened, I was a good mother. After it happened, I was a good mother. But in today's viral video world, had things turned out differently and had I been filmed with my full arms as my little one wandered off, I would have been shredded by people who simply hadn't made the same mistake yet.   

When I was a young parent, I said things often to suggest that accidents happen to careless people. And I was not short on opinions where less conscientious, poor example-setting parents were concerned. I was vocal about parents who smoked in the car with their kids, or left their kids alone at young ages, or left them in cars to run in to the store, or partied too loud or too late while their young kids were home and listening. 

After that near disaster, I said things like that rarely. 

I bring this up, for two  reasons. First, because I think parents who judge other parents to put their own behaviors in a good light not only don't impress their kids, but wind up modeling  intolerance for their own cohort, a big no-no among kids as soon as they don't need play dates to make friends. 

Second, because very judgmental, intolerant parents run the risk of being the last people on earth their kids will turn to when (not if)  they mess up.  At this moment, many of our young adults are three weeks or so  into the later high school or early college years. With all that yummy freedom, 'tis the season to mess up, magnificently.

I wince to remember those sanctimonious remarks I made as a young parent, when I was going for this:

but probably coming off as this:

If I made a mistake, I would
not want to tell this
 woman about it.

An inexperienced parent wants to appear competent, of course. But I think, when the chance presents itself to judge others, it's a gift we can give our children to remind them that making mistakes is as much a part of life as bad storms and potholes. You get caught in one, but you tend to see the next one coming. 

And "earned" smarts last longer and are more useful than the "lucky" kind. 

Nobody knows what mistakes they haven't made yet, we only know that when they happen, we'll want to reminded by people we love that we're still the people we were before we messed up. 

That is a very good thing for our kids to see in the Mom and Dad mirror. 

While the spirit is a puppy

Here is the man I never married
and these are the kids I never had and 
I look nothing like that woman either.

When I was eight or nine, I went on regular trips to a local amusement park with some best friends. Inside the park's giant arcade, across from the rows of pinball machines were coin operated machines that produced things like fortunes and predictions, like the machine that sends Tom Hanks into adulthood overnight in the movie "Big." 

One of them, for a quarter, would show you your future spouse and children. The weird, grainy photos were all 1920s era and featured unsmiling, long suffering souls who looked like they'd been forced to pose for the picture or else. 

Usually, the men sported handlebar moustaches and suspenders and the women wore long skirts. Standing between them were always a gaggle of morose kids who stared flatly into the camera as if it had ruined their lives.   

Forget the roller coaster or round-up,  this was the attraction we hit first in our summer shorts and striped shirts, our overbites not yet corrected, our quarters gripped by fingers sticky with cotton candy. 

Photos in hand we'd huddle to view, and then argue with the results: 

"Mine looks like Curly from the Three Stooges."

"Mine's all dressed up but he's next to a tractor and a bale of hay"

"What'd you get?"

"Lemmee see yours."

"Ewwwww." 

And so on. 

Because young children worry about things like being kidnapped by spies, or attacked by bears, I wondered briefly what would happen if my future family were anything like this.  I remember thinking about that while walking barefoot to a store to buy candy because walking around town in bare feet wasn't horrifying yet. 

What would I do if he had a moustache? 

Eventually, my head was turned by a boy on the bus and I was able to advance to more serious things, like what if bear jumped out of the woods near the bus stop? 

There was horror in the world, both of the natural and manmade variety. There was a fire in France that killed 142 people. There were hurricanes and tornadoes and trains that ran over people.  For a while, everyone talked about Charles Manson. There were the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz.

My biggest problem however, was what would happen if my cat Mittens went out and never came home? 

What would I do without Mittens? 

Fifteen years ago, in the ghostly aftermath of 9/11, I watched our young kids watch us, watch their teachers, react. I worried that they would now begin to see the world as we adults did at that time – unpredictable, terrifying, a place that seemed impossible to control and where it would never again be possible, not really, to completely relax. 

But it struck me then and now, that to watch young children at play, particularly when they  don't feel watched, is to witness spirit as a puppy, in its most hapless and sprawling state, not yet curbed, still so infused with curiosity, imagination, and spontaneity, it can have the power to dwarf the hardest reality.    

For a while. 

I wish for us to make it last. To not over-inform. To not caution too much. 

I wish for us to know that despite incomprehensible changes in our adult worlds that fray the edges of our own spirit, we are still former children. For the sake of our current children, I wish for us to remember the days when we were more fascinated by what we didn't know, than fearful of it.   

Children did then, and children do now fill their minds with fantastic predicaments of their own making – of cats not coming home and  bears popping out of the woods and what kind of a husband that boy on the bus would make – all completely believable in the dark before sleep. But a child's spirit is a puppy, warm and irrepressible, a steadfast ally with the answer to everything and the power to show them a future worth dreaming about. 

To honor and shield that spirit as a puppy is one of the best things we parents can do to honor our child's time in life, and, the memory of the children we ourselves needed to be at such a time. 

Back when we worried about noises in the woods and marrying people who hadn't been around for several decades.