”We feel ourselves more moved by the skippings and jumpings and babyish tricks of our children than by their activities when they are fully formed, as though we had loved them not as human beings but only as playthings or as pet monkeys.” It is much easier to love your children when they haven’t yet developed their own emotional trick bags both to handle and evade their personal challenges.
The greatest challenge of near-adult children is getting through to them at all. Teenagers are remarkably adept at degrading every thought and advice shared. If I have positively influenced my children, it has purely been by osmosis, modeling activity and approaches, maintaining my boundaries with them to match those they erect with me, and making myself available whenever they are ready to ask my help.
That last part does not come easy. It is tempting at times to match another’s sulking with your own. But being a parent means putting aside your own feelings for the wellbeing of your child, if for no other reason than to model what mature emotional responses look like. There’s no quicker route to becoming emotionally secure than proving to a teenager that such people exist.