Do you know your teen or adult children?

When parenting young kids, it’s so easy to fall into the role of benevolent emperor. We basically control every aspect of their life…and they still love us. You will never hear a young child with bitter criticisms about their parents. Although parenting young kids is a demanding job, I now say that those were the easy years… because parenting burgeoning adults was completely different and more complicated than anyone ever informed me!

Once during their late teens, I remember being struck one day that I actually did not really know my kids. They were growing and changing so much…but I was not.

We adults just keep moving along in life, getting more fossilized by the day. Getting more and more comfortable (or tired) with life not realizing that the little people in our homes are only just getting started. And their dreams expand way past the walls of our homes, as they should.

How many times do parents say the years flew by but ever notice how kids never say that?

And then as they keep growing, in stature, mind, and voice, parents either have a hard time accepting all the changes or they didn’t notice.

And this is where we can clash with our kids because we should also be changing. We absolutely must change! I hope to high heaven that I am not the same person now as I was when I was 28! I cringe when I think about myself back then!

We get focused on our kids, we don’t think about ourselves. How we need to improve, how we need to change and develop.

And by doing so, we can actually get along better with our kids. And we become better parents.