Page 49 - The Intentional Parent

Striking a Good Balance
There is a caution I must advise about the process of letting your children show you they have “earned” the autonomy they seek, and that is that you have to be aware of your control issues as well as whatever issues there might be about your resistance to letting your kids grow up.
It is part of the normal struggle of being a parent to have mixed feelings about your kids becoming independent and on their own. Sometimes it does not feel all that good when kids show you, even when they show it appropriately, that they can take care of themselves. This is when you have to carefully examine whether your demands for evidence of sufficient maturity and judgement are realistic. It is fine to be strict, but another matter to be unreasonable. At every age and station in life there will be questions about whether “it is okay” for a child to have responsibility to do certain things that require judgement.
The parenting action we examine in this section is the push-pull that goes on between parents and children that involves “giving permission,” which is an outright “yes” based on past behavior, and setting a limit which is a “qualified” version of either giving permission or withholding permission until a greater level of responsibility has been shown.
Turning Intention into Action
One of the things that makes the processes of “permission” and “limit setting” so difficult is that when kids ask for permission to do things they rarely consider the timing of the request, and when they do, the timing always favors them. It is easy to get
The Intentional Parent by Peter J. Favaro, Ph.D. 49