finishing well in parenting

By Abby Glaser
Encompass Community Advocate
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of finishing well where it applies to parenting. Obviously parenting never really ends, but the seasons of it change! For context, my husband and I have five kids that range from 14-24. So, we have three out of the house now and two still left at home. We are in the home stretch of active parenting after two and a half decades of our lives revolving around it! When my kids were little, I often thought this would be the easier stage…what could be harder than breastfeeding and sleep deprivation and potty training? I laugh now at how unaware I was to the realities of parenting teens and young adults! While I’m not finished yet, I’ve learned a few things in this process of how to finish well with your kids that I wish someone had told me!

• They need your presence even more as a teen than they did as a young child! While they don’t need physical care like they did when they were little, they need you around in a totally different way. What that looks like varies from family to family. In my house, one time of day I have found that helps us stay connected is after school. We often think of the big moments as monumental… prom, teaching to drive, graduating high school, etc. But the real monumental moments are in the small ones. Before bed, seeing them before school, rides in the car to sports. Those small moments of connection are truly where the work is done, where you are planting the seeds for your relationship with your future adult child.

• It’s time to start letting go! We all know the first time we hold that tiny baby that someday we will have to let them go. What many of us aren’t prepared for is how much earlier it comes than we think! As loving parents, it’s natural to want to protect your children from any pain or harm. But parenting teenagers gives us a valuable opportunity: to allow your kids to fail with a safety net. While we may feel a desire to save them, the best thing we can do is let them fail and help them learn from it. Allowing our children to suffer the consequences of their choices teaches them valuable life lessons. They can learn those lessons from the safety of their home and family or they can learn it years later when it can have a much bigger effect on their lives. One study of college students found that those whose parents were very strict had low self-esteem. They had more behavioral problems and showed less initiative and persistence than students whose parents weren't so strict.

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• Lastly, these last years of active parenting are setting the stage for your relationship with your adult children. While it can be incredibly hard to become more and more hands off with our kids, the more freedom we give them to discover themselves the better in the long run. While parenting young children often requires strict micromanagement, teens need something else altogether. They need room to explore and discover and grow without their parents controlling every aspect. So what does this look like practically? Carefully choosing your battles! Is this a big deal? Will it have a lasting impact on their life? When it comes to things like haircuts and messy rooms and the like, we often have to let it go! These later teen years have a huge impact on the relationship we will have with our adult children. There will certainly be arguments and power struggles and frustrations in this season; but if we can start treating our child with respect, autonomy and as the adult we see them becoming; we will see big returns in that relationships as they enter adulthood!

There’s certainly no blueprint for raising kids or finishing well. But we can make small shifts and allowances in how we parent that can often help us do so!

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