“Even ice melts to water and gets hot.”
David Porter / Issac Hayes
I have always loved this lyric. I now think of it in a larger context than that of the love song it comes from. Everything changes, why am I resisting the inevitable?!
As a parent it allows me to recognize that the world changes. And it has most certainly has changed from the one which I grew up in. We parents can get nostalgic for the times we grew up in. We also can recognize the many changes that have happened right before our eyes. I often forget that the world my kids face is different in many ways from the one that I grew up in. Often, those differences make my experience irrelevant to my children.
As much as I would like to apply all the lessons that I learned when I was their age; to save them from my mistakes. I cannot. This is not because my children do not listen to me, but because they are facing different realities than I was. The world changes.
Often, when we are parenting, we do this hovering thing. There’s an entire generation of parents who have been labeled “helicopter parents”. I would say that maybe all parents have done this at some point, it’s more a question of how often. When our kids are young, we may stay close by as they have their “firsts” so we can support them if needed. Kids take their first step; we pay attention and we also let them fall and get back up. We focus on success, reality, not our fear of failure.
As they age parental focus changes. We get farther but still pay attention. As they grow up it can be harder to understand what reality is! The chopper gets bigger, parents circle from higher up. Sometimes they just monitor the flow of traffic and head home. Other times we parents are like cops in LA, we ‘ve got endless fuel and that searchlight is full focus. Running after them and chasing them down often feels like the best way to keep them safe, but often their reaction is to run further from our focus.
Focus and attention are different. When I focus on my task at hand, I feel productive and successful! I wanted my child to feel successful. Nothing wrong with that. However, it became less and less helpful to focus on his task at hand. We were focusing so much on making him feel successful by managing his ADD that we forgot to pay attention to the rest of that singularly fabulous individual human.
I grew up in New York City and learned strategies for what to do if I got lost or separated from my companions. We all learned these rules; go to the token booth or where to wait on the platform so we could be reunited. As a parent to kids in the same world and a different world, one with cell phones, these strategies are completely outdated. We text where we are to reconnect. We no longer give directions to anywhere, just addresses and let an app determine the best route.
This is also true for less tangible situations. When parenting pre-teens and teens it is important to remember that the strategies for dealing with peer pressure, bullying ostracizing are different in the very different world of social media. Even the social media strategies that we taught our now young adult children don’t apply for parents of pre-teens and teens now! There is, however, one lesson which remains from our kids’ era. Once you put something “out there” digitally (wherever there is) you lose control over who sees it and how, it cannot be take it back and it will be there forever. We can remind our kids to pause before posting.
Another “strategy” which holds true as things change is that listening to, rather than telling is a parent’s best plan. Listening to our children is even more important given the ever-changing digital world. As parents we think we know, we understand, because we have been there, we were teens and young adults once. But, our “there” is different from their “there”. This has always been the case and is even more true now.
Adolescence as a stage echoes our own experience, so remembering what our “there” felt like is relevant, some things are similar. Teens are yearning to be independent of family and to make their own decisions. We are not cooler, more “in touch” than our parents were, although we might like to think so. The pre-teen and teen years are the age where parents stop seeing everything that their children do. We stop knowing all the people who influence them. It is a natural part of the process of growing up, to grow out of the shadow of the family.
Although we yearn for rules that can be applied evenly and to all situations, so we could prepare them for all eventualities, we know that this rarely works. It would be easier if things were one size fits all. How to best respond to people changes with the situation, and the personalities involved. When you consider this, it seems crazy to think we could have the answers for our kids.
The teenage years are when they step out on their own more. This is the time they get to build their sense of themselves as autonomous beings, and exercise judgement, while still in the safety of your home.
It is great to set boundaries and expectations that lean forward. To do this and also give them space to make mistakes, get disappointed and maybe even hurt, with us nearby for comfort and support. We may not recognize that being around is comfort or that listening without comment is support, when they seem outwardly indifferent. Remember being a teen?
Thinking back on our teen years, we can remember the relationships we had with friends and family. It is good to remember why we listened to some people and not others, who we did trust and why.
The world has changed since I was a teenager. I marvel at how articulate the next generation is about feelings, while remembering how “dense” my own parents were. My parents grew up in the days of being seen and not heard, my father didn’t process feeling out loud. My desire to talk about feelings was something he tried to accommodate but had no practice at.
The level of communication that my kids exhibit with the people in their lives is astounding to me. It took me well into adulthood to be able to access much less articulate complex feelings. Each generation a little better. Even as it feels sometimes like nothing has changed, or we are moving backwards, it is not true. Things change, sometime imperceptibly until you step back and take a long look. Over time even ice melts to water and gets hot, look out.
