Hi, friends.

I am beginning to think I should write a book called Grow Up and Let Your Kids Grow Up: Untangle your family crap so your kids can be healthy adults. I'm only partly kidding. I'm seeing so many examples of parents of adult and near-adult kids (roughly ages 16-25) who just can't stop interfering and controlling their kids or trying to take over things their kids should be doing. Sometimes it's big stuff, sometimes it's small stuff, and sometimes it's hilarious stuff.

I get it. I really do--it's extremely difficult to back off progressively as your kids get older. And the pandemic knocked a lot of families back in terms of maturity and independence when kids were just stuck at home with very little peer interaction and very little interaction with systems and adults on their own. So it makes tons of sense that parents of kids going to college would think that they need to do the research on how their kid can connect their device to campuswide internet, instead of just assuming that this would be something all the incoming first-years would be told on the first day of Orientation. (That's an extremely minor but extremely common example of the stuff I'm seeing.) The parents and the kids haven't had the kind of gradual letting-go experience that generations before us did, so when they hit that steep cliff of going off to college and getting almost zero information (because if your kid is 18, the college legally can't tell the parent a whole lot about college and your kid at college) it's way more disorienting and scary than it would have been if all the previous years have been about letting go slowly.

So it all makes sense. But. This is just another part of parenting that we have to do consciously and intentionally. If you are letting your kid go appropriately, it's going to feel uncomfortable. You are learning new things and doing new things. Even if it's your second or third or sixth kid. But you can help yourself through it more easily by doing two things. One is by focusing on the new skills and experiences your kid is having, and how letting them own and work through those things on their own shows them how much you trust them and believe in them.

Another is by figuring out what's really behind the uncomfortable feelings you're having. If it's just missing them, kind of a reverse homesickness, that's so normal. It feels awful and you'll get through it, and it may never go away but just become less prominent in your personal cocktail of emotions. If it's that weird feeling of time slipping away, of feeling like you've lost them now that they're gone, that's normal and extremely painful, too. All you can do for that is figure out what the best adult parent-adult child relationship with them would feel like, and work toward that from your side.

If you're feeling panic, guilt, excessive worry, or something else out of the scope of a regular developmental phase (because leaving home is a normal developmental phase), that's where you need to dig in and figure out what's behind that. Maybe you got the idea somehow that you need to guide your kids so they never make a mistake and never fail. Maybe your own parents weren't there for you appropriately during the time you left their home, so you're really being triggered by your kid leaving and it's making you panic. Maybe you're getting an adrenaline rush from worrying and have gotten addicted to that rush. (It happens.)

If the emotion or reaction you're feeling is out of scope of the normal leaving home of your kid, there's something else going on that's alost definitely not your fault. Be really super-nice to yourself while you dig around in your brain and memories to figure out what you didn't get when you were at that stage that you needed, or what cultural ideas you've taken in about how you're supposed to feel right now, or anything else that could be causing the overlarge negative feelings. A large part of parenting is just sucking it up, whatever "it" is today. But that doesn't mean that you have to be mean to yourself why you figure out why sucking it up hurts more than it should. There are a lot of people out in the world who actually do want to hurt you, so you need to not be one of them.

And if you're reading this and thinking about how you've worked through it and are letting go at a pace that feels great for your kid and for you, help support the parents you know who might be struggling with that separation. Just a little kind reality check when they ask if they should overstep, or a congratulations when they hold back. If we can create a culture of appropriate letting-go for ourselves, then everyone benefits.

Thanks for reading. Tomorrow I've got a recipe (literally) for you.

Love,

Magda

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