While close family relationships are important, unnecessary dependence on each other is not healthy. As an infant you can’t do anything besides poop. As you grow you naturally become adept at life skills. Even while enjoying our time as parents with the kids at home we need to keep in mind that our darling 2 year old, 12 year old, 17 year old is going to be an adult and will be living as an adult a lot longer than as a child, so intentionally raise them and teach them the skills to be independent.
A few small examples:
As a child we set your bedtime and made sure you were in bed at a reasonable time. At some point when you were in high school we intentionally had a conversation with you and told you that we were no longer setting the bedtime. You could go to bed whenever you wanted. You still had a curfew and needed to be considerate of others in the house when they were trying to sleep, but if you wanted to stay up till the wee hours of the morning you could. Of course you still had to get up for school on time, continue to keep up your good grades and any other commitments. This was a small way to give you some independence to make decisions for yourself and suffer or benefit from the consequences of those decisions.
Boy Scouts provided lots of opportunities as well. Letting you pack your own bag for campouts as you became an older and more experienced scout, be a scout at summer camp on your own (even when Mom and I were there all week as leaders), and being a boy leader in the troop. You can relate to this even more than we can I’m sure.
A more recent example is how we took care of college for you all. The first year we paid for everything. Your sophomore year you paid for some of your expenses (don’t recall how that evidenced itself). Your junior year you started paying for your books. Even with Peter in school right now, I don’t recall what the added responsibility is for your senior year, but I think you get the point. Rather than kicking you out of the nest at 18 we gradually gave you more and more responsibilities.
As with so much of parenting this is a delicate balance, but if you have the mindset of training your kids to be independent functioning adults as each situation arises you’ll be able to evaluate how best to handle it.
A few small examples:
As a child we set your bedtime and made sure you were in bed at a reasonable time. At some point when you were in high school we intentionally had a conversation with you and told you that we were no longer setting the bedtime. You could go to bed whenever you wanted. You still had a curfew and needed to be considerate of others in the house when they were trying to sleep, but if you wanted to stay up till the wee hours of the morning you could. Of course you still had to get up for school on time, continue to keep up your good grades and any other commitments. This was a small way to give you some independence to make decisions for yourself and suffer or benefit from the consequences of those decisions.
Boy Scouts provided lots of opportunities as well. Letting you pack your own bag for campouts as you became an older and more experienced scout, be a scout at summer camp on your own (even when Mom and I were there all week as leaders), and being a boy leader in the troop. You can relate to this even more than we can I’m sure.
A more recent example is how we took care of college for you all. The first year we paid for everything. Your sophomore year you paid for some of your expenses (don’t recall how that evidenced itself). Your junior year you started paying for your books. Even with Peter in school right now, I don’t recall what the added responsibility is for your senior year, but I think you get the point. Rather than kicking you out of the nest at 18 we gradually gave you more and more responsibilities.
As with so much of parenting this is a delicate balance, but if you have the mindset of training your kids to be independent functioning adults as each situation arises you’ll be able to evaluate how best to handle it.
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