Parenting 1

Our role, as parents, is two-fold:

1. To provide security, care, encouragement, support, protection and nurture to a brand new, tiny, vulnerable human being.
2. To gently coax that little child OUT of childhood, and INTO adulthood.

Of course, you say, it’s obvious? Not to some parents it isn't.

To NOT do option 2 above, is (one of) the greatest dis-service we can do to a child.

It’s true that children grow rapidly on the outside, I blinked, and my boys are now 16 and taller than me.

But, that’s just the outside, the visible, the physical, the body. What about their INSIDES? Who takes an interest in helping a person grow up on the inside?

(I know a 50 year old, who looks 50 on the outside, but is only 9 years old on the inside. The trauma was so great at that early age, she shut herself down and never progressed through teenage to emerge triumphant into adulthood. A mother to three children, but still herself, a child inside).

Our role, as parents, is NOT to mollycoddle a child, keep them immature, childish, little, dependent and vulnerable.

Our role is to teach them to tie their own shoe laces, to manage their own money, to cook for themselves, to choose their own clothes, to make their own career choices. To teach them how to be Responsible, that there are Consequences to the actions they take and things they say and the way they treat people. Shielding teenagers from this, keeps them small on the inside, so they enter the Big World of Adults  COMPLETELY UNPREPARED.

The young adult’s choice then is:

  1. To Father and Mother themselves and grow themselves into adults, or

  2. Remain children on the inside, bouncing from partner to partner, from job to job,  church to church, looking for the care and support they refuse to give themselves.

Notice I said their "Choice".  It set me free, when I realised I was responsible for me, when I stopped blaming my parents, my past, my upbringing.

I set me FREE.