If you would keep your children, let them go

A cautionary note to parents

Rx: Hold on to their kite string, but let it run out as far as it wants to go, and watch them soar! 🪁

In my essay about the best practices of good parents, I mention the importance of “letting go”. This means pulling back on the amount of parental attention and control and advising and presence as the child grows in competence and readiness for independence.

In multiple conversations with various adolescents and young adults and no-so-young adults, one of the most common complaints I have heard from them was about their parents’ over-involvement. This took the form of too many attempts to influence/control and too many demands to spend time together. This parental pressure resulted in their child submitting due to fear or guilt, resisting/rebelling (directly or passive-aggressively), or most often a combination of both. In every case, the parent’s failure to step back/away to give more respectful space to their developing child resulted in damage to their relationship.

Warning: Railroad crossing ahead! ❌🛑

This is quite a common predicament because there are some near universal points of conflict and incongruence between the child’s and parent’s view of and investment in their relationship over time. Those divergences are represented in this graph ⬇️

Totally unscientific image by author (for illustration purposes only)

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From birth to the start of school (~5 years), young children and their parents are hugely important to each other (assuming the presence of “good-enough” parents). Children want and need their parents almost continuously, albeit with occasional push-backs in service of their growing autonomy (“I can do this all by myself!”). Good parents are continuously preoccupied with their young child’s well-being, so there is generally good balance and alignment (see parallel red and blue lines above).

When children leave home for school, they discover there are many attractive peers and in loco parentis adults in the world. They naturally start investing attachment energy in those extra-familial persons, and the investment dosage increases steadily over time. Attachment energy (cathexis) is a limited resource, so more investment outside of the home translates into less at home. This is the natural order of things. Beings who expand their social network beyond their family of origin have a survival advantage, and this tendency has been naturally selected. Most of us do that. So far, so good.

Most children do not want their parents to stop caring about them, no matter how old they get. But they do want the nature and extent of that caring to change over time. They want the caring to be less instrumental (doing things to/for) and more intentional (thinking about, being available). They usually want to spend less together time. The ideal transformation of parental attachment/caring as the child grows is beautifully expressed in this poem.

There are two points where the gap between a child’s and parent’s expectations for their relationship is the greatest: the child’s adolescence and the parent’s older adulthood. This is where there is maximum danger of a disruptive mismatch of attachment needs and damage to the relationship.

Adolescence

Thank you for the freedom when it came my time to go — Dan Fogelberg, ‘The leader of the band’

The main developmental tasks of adolescence are to develop a more stable cohesive identity (individuation) and establish strong attachments to a network of peers. The adolescent’s still strong attachment bond with their parents can be experienced at times as an obstacle to both tasks, triggering a torturous process of ambivalent attempts at disengagement (“I hate you! What’s for dinner?”).

The good-enough parent of the adolescent is able to contain their love and concern for their (often wild and incautious) offspring and be less “involved” than their emotions might otherwise dictate. Their communication style will ideally shift from telling/directing to asking/consulting. They will gracefully accept their adolescents’s absence from Sunday dinner and family vacations while missing their presence.

If/when the adolescent leaves home for work or school, a new equilibrium is usually established. While distance can make the parent’s heart grow fonder, out of sight also helps keep the young adult out of mind for periods of time, and vice-versa. The relationship usually settles down with time apart. But parents who refuse to adjust to the new normal of that more separate relationship will generate great resentment in their young-adult child resulting in more conflict and often more defensive distancing.

Older adulthood

As parents age out of their careers, they suddenly have more time and space to fill in their lives/days. As they lose their worker identity and purpose and status, they may cling more to their parental one. The inevitable losses and loneliness and ill health of later adulthood can trigger a desire for “more” from their adult child. That makes sense from the parent’s perspective.

The problem is that their adult child is at this point busy managing their early and middle adulthood with its time and energy demands of building a career, earning a living and in any many (not all) cases raising children. To suddenly be confronted by an increase in parental expectation/demand for more (time, energy, love, care etc.) can provoke a genuine relationship crisis.

Most children feel love and a sense of gratitude to their parents, and perhaps a feeling of indebtedness for resources provided, sacrifices made and services rendered. This can make it difficult for them to set limits and say “No” without guilt to escalating requests and neediness on the part of their aging parents. Parents who are insensitive to their adult child’s real life demands may react to any refusal with anger and attempts to enforce compliance. All this will exact a cost in terms of relationship comfort and quality.

Forewarned is forearmed

The purpose of this essay is to alert parents to these two (at least) points in their relationship with their child where expectations are likely to conflict for what kind and how much interaction there should be. The parent is always the parent, and it is largely up to them to exert good judgment about such matters. Failure to do so will exact severe costs.

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Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. -- Kahlil Gibran

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