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The hardest part for me in being a parent is when your child hits puberty and starts taking steps toward being an adult. The first clue my baby was not a baby anymore was the fact he is 6 foot tall and 160 pounds. It is hard to let go sometimes. You end up viewing your teenagers like the father in the commercial who is handing over the car keys to his teenage daughter and he sees her as a 6 year old.
For some reason these days parents are priming their kids for college as early as elementary school and it especially obvious at the middle school level. All the must dos in the parent handbook that include making sure your child is involved in certain clubs, community organizations and for those with a bit of cash on hand, funding the start of your child’s non-profit organization, which always looks good on a Ivy League application. Don’t get me wrong, it is a good thing in the case where a child is truly touched by a situation and their actions develop into a non-profit organization with their parent’s and/or community’s support. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.
My problem is usually, not always, the child’s life becomes what the parent wants for the child and becomes less what the child wants his life to be. I know the intentions are good but it makes me sad. My son caught on to this part of being an adult last year and seemed concerned that he might have to be and do things that aren’t part of who he is to be successful. Well, how do you answer that? As idealistic as some of us want to be we all do this to some extent. But my answer to him was just try to be yourself. Stay true to who you are and what you believe. Maybe you won’t be Harvard bound but you will be happy.
Yesterday someone said to me (hence triggering my first post in months) - there are extremists on both sides of an issue. There is on this issue where you have some parents who go to extremes to set their child up for success based on their desires not their child’s. Then there are the parents who don’t give any help or direction to their child and the child is left wandering alone into adulthood.
These extremists cause a lot of problems for us moderates on both sides of the issues. Some of us are called racist and anti-immigration when in fact we are against illegal immigration because it involves breaking the law. We horrifying find ourselves walking next to skin-heads when we abhor everything about their views. We get accused of being against freedom of religion because we think it is disrespectful to the memories of those who were killed in the 9/11 attacks to build a mosque of such magnitude in the area.
We can teach our children that they can agree to disagree. We can teach them that they don’t have to nor should they embrace the extremists but the extremists do have a right to freedom of speech. We can teach them to sing praises to the freedom we have and to the men and women of the armed forces who every day fight for that freedom. We can teach them about integrity and being true to themselves. We can teach them about respect.
