Letting The Parents Be !!!

I really believe that the role and the duty of the parent should have an expiry date. They can’t be responsible for us forever. Think about it, for one to be a responsible adult parents start letting go in your teens, when they give you more and more control over your life choices. I think for the job of letting go to be complete, the ‘child’ needs to assure the parent that they are ready to take over. I have learnt that the quickest way to get a parent to treat you like an adult is to act like one. The best time is in one’s late teens and early 20s when you own more and more of your choices and the consequences. Letting the parents be frees them so that they can focus on themselves and catch up on some of the dreams they may have put on hold to raise you. Remember this was a complete human being before they had you. There should come a time in life when both of you are fully functional adults and therefore relate as equals. This will minimise the role confusion.

A few tips on how to let the parents be.

1. Stop expecting your parents to parent you on demand. If you go to them needing some mothering/fathering and then when she/he jumps in and does their thing don’t complain that they are treating you like a child. Parents parent children, not adults! Don’t get upset when your parents ‘meddle’ when you have not let go of your need to be parented. It’s either you want to be an adult in your life or you want to remain a child in theirs. You can’t be both.

2. Stop sending your parents mixed signals. Stop expecting them to switch between treating you as a child and treating you as an adult … as and when YOU see fit. Leaving and cleaving is not just to protect you as an adult but also to free the parents from unending ongoing ‘parenting’ responsibility.

3. Stop expecting parents to bail you out just because they are your parents, give them the option to do so because they want to not out of some familial guilt.

4. Stop blaming your parents for everything that goes wrong in your life. Deal with your childhood issues so that you can own the choices that you continue to make rather than conveniently blame them on the parents. You can’t be a 40 year old woman who still blames your mother for the choices you continue to make, at some point those choices became yours.

5. Stop holding grudges for the mistakes your parents made when you were a child. Just like you don’t want people to keep on reminding you of the mistakes you made when you were young, parents also don’t need to be continually reminded of their parenting mistakes. At some stage you have to accept that this is just another human being, who did the best they could based on what they knew or thought was the truth at the time. Let go of this notion that parents are meant to be perfect human beings, they never were and so a lot of the decisions they made were flawed. Show some compassion and rather judge them on what their intention was. Most parents generally want the best for their children.

Letting the parents be does not absolve you of your responsibility towards them later in their life. The cycle of life means that at some stage your parents will become dependent and look to you for support. The roles will reverse and you may end up being responsible for their well-being. This should be a gradual process introduced and handled with respect and humility. Do not strip fully grown adults of their right to having an opinion or say in their own life. Just because the aging parent is not comfortable with or familiar with the world that you now inhabit does not mean they are not capable. Unless there is some mental incapacity, the time for you to take care of your parents and the nature of the support they need should be determined by them, not you. Aging does not make them children, just adult dependants. Trust me there is a big difference.

So the cycle of life means you start off fully dependent on your parents, they slowing let go and you slowly take over responsibility for your life. You then reach a stage where you are equals and each responsible for own lives. With the passing of time your parents slowly become dependent on you.

Do yourself a favour and let your parents be, you will discover amazing human beings who are much more than just the people who gave birth to you!

P.S.

A tip to all those still parenting young children, know that how you treat your children when they are young will influence how they treat you when you become dependent on them. Their treatment of you will be based on or be a reaction to how you treated them as they were growing up. After all, you are the one who has set the tone for how to treat those dependent. So if you treat them as irritating annoyances, know that that is how they are likely to treat you when your time comes.