Emancipation may be the hardest part of a good parent-child relationship. The steps and decisions that lead children toward independence from their parents also emancipate them.
The idea of a “good” parent-child relationship includes three things here: leadership, love and enjoyment.
Parents’ leadership behaviors are something that someone outside the relationship could see if they were watching.
Observers can actually see parents guide, nurture and protect, teach values, encourage talent, set limits and create expectations. Most of the time parents model what they teach.
The second part of good parenting is a bit of a gimme. But this is something outsiders can’t see – parents’ feelings for their children, in this case the feeling of love. It is also a sort of gimme because American society assumes that all parents love their children.
It is clearly not true that all parents love their children, but we act as if it were true. When parents do not love their children, they don’t admit it and nobody else mentions it to them. It is simply too socially incorrect and volatile an issue. But, most parents put their children’s needs ahead of their own whenever it is right to do so.
The third group of parenting qualities is more abstract. I think of it as enjoyment – parents and children enjoying their relationships with each other. This is different from children needing their parents or from parents being responsible for their children.
Parents who enjoy their children, in my experience, appreciate each developmental step. Some stages are more fun than others, of course, and which stages are more and less fun are different for different parents.
In any case, though, parents who enjoy their children recognize that children must crawl before they walk and walk before they run. Sometimes parents recognize development intuitively without knowing anything specific beyond “he’s just 5 years old” or “she’s 14.”
They watch and listen to behaviors, notice skills and skill gaps, take note of emotional ups and downs, and have the good sense to wait some things out.
They know, for example, that they must sometimes correct and guide their teenager’s behavior. They also know they need not and usually should not correct the adolescence stage. Youngsters grow through adolescence.
Parents who enjoy their children are supportive of their teenagers’ struggles without taking the struggles away from them. They deal with the uncomfortable feelings in themselves that are caused by seeing uncomfortable feelings in their children.
They know that teenagers sometimes like to have the protection of parental prohibitions, no matter how much they protest. Good parents are willing to issue necessary prohibitions. They know their opinion does matter to their teenagers.
And a big part of parents’ enjoyment happens when they see the humor in all of this. They can quietly smile about their teenagers’ behaviors and laugh out loud at some of their own.
And they relish the chance to learn about themselves.
It is exactly because of these qualities of good parenting that a child’s leaving home can be so hard. Parents are, after all, deeply involved in the parent-child relationship. Their children’s emancipation announces the end of a major time period in their lives.
More than likely, it will seem like the most meaningful period in the parents’ lives, and perhaps it is.
Emancipated children need less parental leadership. Parents can still enjoy their children’s growth but from farther away and, to some degree, only when they are invited.
The parents will still love their children as much.
The parents of emancipated children are also emancipated. Free. Of course, at times they may want to hum a few bars of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Freedom is just another word for nothing less to lose.”
Then, parents get to turn toward each other and toward themselves and raise the question of what new meaningful things they will now do with their lives.
Bill France, a father of three, is a child advocate in the criminal justice system and has worked as director of clinical programs at Luther Child Center in Everett. Send e-mail to bsjf@gte.net.
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