How Do I Parent as My Kids Become Adults?
Parenting requires so much hands-on instruction that it can be tricky to know when and how to navigate the moments of letting go, of releasing them back into the hands of the One who gave them to us.
As parents, we experience a variety of milestones with our children throughout their developmental journey. Some of these experiences make us cheer. Some make us cringe. Some make us hold our breath with prayers as we try to release our clenched jaws. Some milestones are filled with expectant hopefulness—they may even include ceremonial fanfare.
Cue up the photos of preschool graduates with little mock signs, walking over bridges. When our kids are these little guys, their milestones captivate crowds of iPhones and tissues. Or many moons later, we show up for our kids—now giant humans—as they proudly walk at their high school graduation ceremonies.
Once there, it dawns on us that we are being faced with the unbelievable assignment of letting go of the ones we’ve promised to hold on to with everything we’ve got.
This is quite a shift of sorts, isn’t it? On some level, our bodies are asking these visceral questions: How can I let go of what I’ve promised not to lose at grocery stores and parades—since the day they burst on the scene of our lives?! How can I trust that when they are out of my sight, these treasures of my life will be protected from harm?!
But we often keep these questions suppressed.
This “letting go” business somehow doesn’t feel official until we are catching our breath, watching our son(s) or daughter(s) pack their cars for university. I remember it clearly, watching both my boys at their appointed time—take this other-worldly leap. I watched as they drove away—with all their things stuffed to the gills in their car(s). My purse still held freshly discarded receipts, tracking all the curated items for new dorm rooms. Their new charcoal grey bath-towel sets and desk organizers promised me their future cleanliness and academic success was possible!
A Repeated Letting Go
Yet, if we’re honest, on some level, we have always known, deep in our gut, that this letting-go gig isn't a once-and-done experiment. Instead, it seems we are gifted (and sometimes haunted by) incremental reminders all along the way. Sometimes we don’t hear it. Sometimes we do.
For instance, when we’re weathering a new season of tantrums that make us wonder what alien took over our beautiful child’s body, we are in the trenches and can’t see which way is up. Or when we’re busy making packed lunches, grumpy and grumbling under our breath, wrestling with the certainty that the food we’re making is destined for the trash bin, we have our noses too close to the grindstone to see the bigger picture.
Or when we are staying up late for another night—not sure where our kids are, past their curfew—praying for their safety while wishing we knew a little bit more about the peers they’ve chosen in that season of relationships.
Stewarding Versus Control
These loops of rumination keep our head down in both love and anguish. All these twists and turns in parenting make us humble and dependent on the One who sees what we can’t see. We find ourselves so squarely at the heart of the Father, asking for help to trust God more.
There are these other moments, however, when we catch glimpses of the bigger journey unfolding around our family’s daily grind. And in these meta-moments, we suddenly lift our heads long enough from our business to hear the Holy Spirit whisper to us that our kids were always precious gifts we needed to entrust to God’s hands. We don’t control their lives so much as seek to steward their stories, which, to our own bewilderment and shock, were always destined to be different than our own stories.
Their paths may well be marked to walk in places we don’t yet see. We are tasked with bringing them to the trailheads they need to walk with Jesus. We may well coach them there. But we can’t walk it for them, no more than they can walk our journey for us!
Proverbs 3:5-6 reminds us:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.
Releasing Them to Jesus
This is the God we must cling to in every turn. And this is the One whose hand we pray our children’s hands will grasp. We learn along the way that we can’t do any of this path-finding without our gentle Guide alongside us. Comforting, correcting, transforming us as we walk. Is it any surprise that our kids need that same guiding One to comfort, correct, and transform them?
So, yes. We are stewards. With great courage, we ask for help to know when it is time to hold on tight (and keep our kids alive another day!) and when it is time we bravely (little by little) learn to release our desire to control what it is we can’t control (and never really could). We release not with a spirit of neglect, but a spirit of devout and steadfast love, certain that our kids are loved all the more by the One who knows their path and will never let them go.
