Raise your children to grow up – leave them a way out of the nest.

Take pride in your children growing up strong enough to leave you – not in raising your children dependent on your love and approval. Do not glorify this “my forever baby” idea; take pride only in children who stand proud on their own two feet as grown adults. Make sure your children know what’s expected of them, but don’t assume they’ll do it. Make sure they know your rules, but ALWAYS expect them to grow AWAY from you, not to grow attached to you.

Understand that your rules are not absolute. They may one day inform you that your rules are not right. Make notice of a child who tries to demonstrate to you that they are MATURE and RELIABLE rather than strong and aggressive. If you want strength, raise them strong. Don’t expect they’ll turn out that way on their own.

Hold yourself accountable. Yourself. Not the kid. If your kid is not doing well, it’s your fault. You haven’t been aware of their needs. Maybe your kid needed encouragement rather than discipline. Maybe they needed discipline rather than permissiveness. The kid doesn’t need to adapt to your way of being; your job is to adapt to theirs. And again, you need to make your expectations clear to a child whose personality is very different from yours. What do they get points for, and what do they lose points over?

Know that some of your children want to make you proud – some of them want to make you happy. Treating these kids the same would be a mistake. If your kid wants to make you proud, you can’t expect them to be working toward making you happy and vice versa. But you can inspire a child who wants to make you happy to make you proud instead – you’ll just have to tell them to… And tell them what would make you really proud… and happy as a consequence.

And for heaven’s sake, try to show you care by some other method than yelling at your kids. It Does Not Work on a sensible human being!

There’s always a balance point; discipline and permissiveness, fun and work; activities and boredom… You will have to add boredom to your kids’ lives, too. It is IMPORTANT, vital even, to let your kids be bored sometimes. Just passive and doing nothing. Don’t teach your children that they need to be “always on,” let alone that YOU have to be the innovator of things to do. Surely you can spare a Saturday or Sunday a month for doing absolutely nothing all day, making having lunch and dinner the biggest undertaking for the whole day. You create creative kids by letting them worry about their own entertainment. (Buy them toys without too many accessories. Buy them Barbies and fabric, a needle, and thread. Toy cars without car lanes. Let them create the accessories.¹

If you have the ability to see people for who they are, nurture the strengths of your children, and try to weed out the weaknesses. Don’t worry if they are not perfect – find workarounds where you can’t find solutions. Try to help them figure out how to live with their weaknesses if they cannot grow out of them. Build them ladders and walkways to solutions, don’t expect everything at once. Even if you see that your child is a freaking genius, don’t forget he or she is still a child. Or a teen.

And once they’re almost grown up, don’t make them pay for the stuff you didn’t do right. They may not be ready yet, but if you didn’t get them there by their 18th birthday, it’s too late for now unless they ASK YOU for help. Don’t chase them to “challenge you” if they don’t feel the need to challenge you. Once they’re 18, you don’t get to discipline and “raise them” anymore. You’re DONE. Your time is up. You’re out of moves.

Now, it is up to your child to ASK YOU if they need you. If they’re gone, let them go. Your bad you didn’t make it a pleasant experience to be near you.

Lastly, fight for your right to be a sensible parent. Learn to say when enough coddling is bloody well enough coddling.

1. “Buy them Barbies?! Give them a needle?!” I hear you shriek. Yes, buy them Barbies or something. I have never met an unhappy girl who got to play Barbies. I’ve heard tall tales of them existing but never met one. Being forced to play Barbies is another matter, of course. I had 5 good friends as a child; 4 of us loved playing Barbies, and 1 of us had them but didn’t really care for them. I don’t think she’d love Barbie if she had been pressured to show her femininity by playing Barbie like mommy did… Or something. The 6th, I don’t, oddly enough, know. I never played with her outside of school hours. Even as an adult, I know a TON of women who still think fondly back to their Barbie play, not even counting my numerous collector friends. In contrast, I know NOBODY, even though I was somewhat semi-famous for collecting Barbie, who has come to me saying she hated Barbie or that Barbie gave her a warped body image or some such.

   As far as needles go, getting pricked in the finger is not going to kill ya. Just supervise, and if it turns out you have a psychopath for a daughter, take the needle away and take her to see a shrink. ↩

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