Self Reliance: Don't Leave Home Without It

A subject which has cropped up lately relative to family life is the individual's process of becoming an adult and separating from one's parents.

Some parents, my mother the main poster child among them, adopt a laissez-faire attitude towards the impending adulthood of their offspring. They encourage independence at an early age; very often this encouragement backfires when they saddle their children with too much independence or responsiblility. Taken at its extreme, the non-clinging parent can often become falsely reassured of the emotional maturity of their child; this false reassurance goes a long way to assuage the parent's feelings of guilt about their neglect, whether it is benign, unintentional, or because they are simply self-absorbed.

No child should become the confidante of their adult parent. No child should be confronted with adult realities before they are of an age to understand them. (There are many instances in human history and places in the world today where there is no such stage as childhood; it should be clear I'm writing about this in the context of a generalized Western middle class background.)

A child confronted with adult realtities is experiencing a subtle form of child abuse - believe me, I know that score only too well and would have been likely more socially well-adjusted had I not been forced to join that particular orchestra.***

Other parents hold their children so tightly and hover over their lives so closely that the boundaries between them are either terribly blurred or, and this is more damaging, completely indistinguishable. In its milder incarnation, these parents are known as "helicopters" - they hover over their children and monitor their lives, both inner and outer, at what is acknowledged as an extraordinary level of attention. The helicopters are completely aware of what they are doing, and most of them finally let go, eventually and with the proper show of reluctance.

At the extreme end, the symbiosis is so complete and overwhelming that neither knows where they end and the other begins, and the child is forced to struggle against tremendous odds and lashings of parental guilt to achieve even the smallest amount of independent adulthood. I also consider this a subtle form of child abuse, as the individual person's progress towards independence is hampered at every step, rendering it a much more difficult process to achieve.

Having never experienced the latter sort of parent, perhaps nurture triumphs over nature in this category. For the life of me, no matter how empathetic I try to be, I simply cannot understand the need of a parent to telephone their adult children (or even college age children) on a daily or twice daily basis. I cannot understand the need of a parent to micro manage the decisions of their adult child. As much as I have tried, I simply cannot understand or respect an adult child who accepts this kind of parental intrusion as par for the course and never attempts to become their own person. I save my sympathy for the fellow travelers on the way, however, and I encourage them to persist in the difficult journey towards true selfhood.

Because I have never been and will never be a parent, I fully recognize that I am at a disadvantage in understanding the truly unique bond that can be formed between parent and child.

But everybody at one point has to cut the umbilical cord and join the greater world; the comforting notion of a Super Daddy or Super Mommy who will swoop in and fix all disasters can sometimes be a difficult one to abandon, but learning to stand on one's own two feet and take on the world, come what may, is the most valuable lesson of all.




***But join it I did - I had no choice at the time, as my very survival was at stake, and one of the traits that is most important to me now and often defines me is an intense self-reliance. That trait reluctantly drags along its own double-edged sword, but that's a whole 'nother post on its own.