Martha’s Big Adventure – A Parental Guide to Grown Children
By Martha Randolph Carr
There is really only one skill required in order to be a good parent once your children have grown into adulthood. It is the ability to appear supportive without really saying anything. Any comment that borders on opinion travels through the air waves and lands as judgment in the fragile ears of our children. An innocent remark about how a new car looks or an old job is doing and the wheels start turning in our offspring’s head.
“What did you mean by that?” asks our incredulous twenty-something. It’s as if we’ve just confirmed their worst suspicions that we had always hoped for more out of them. Truly, if our children are paying their bills and not asking us for money we’re already on the road to parental bliss. If they’re also putting money into any kind of investment plan and have some kind of faith in some higher being, have started looking around at someone nice to settle down with and might volunteer at something while cutting back on the processed foods, well, that would be nice as well. However, all of that we as parents would be wise to keep to ourselves for a couple of very important reasons.
The first is because the time has passed to guide our children toward some bright and shining future. They’re
actually in that future and it’s their turn to pick and choose what it’s going to look like. Every time we butt in we’re actually telling them they’re getting it wrong, try again. That can be a real confidence blaster.
The consequences of over-parenting any adult can end up being that our grown children stop trying to create bigger and better and start settling for smaller and what appears safer. The results of that are often a lot of great opportunities get left on the table. Worst case scenario is that the child is living in your basement. No one wants to see that.
Risk is a necessary part of the big picture and its cousin, failure is vital as well. The first adds a certain amount of exhilaration to life and pulls the idea of faith out of theory and into practice. The second teaches us what we want to keep or discard in the description that is our lives.
Failure is also a much better teacher than success when it comes to building a nice, big fat dream. When we find ourselves able to stand back up again and can see how to solve a problem a piece at a time we also catch on that there actually is a solution to just about anything. There will be some compromise, some letting go, a few bumps and bruises but even the worst of it can be resolved. We learn to take that with us as we move forward.
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