Parenting Through Transitions—How Their Challenges Catalyze Your Growth
Episode Notes
Navigating transitions with your children is a deep dive into raw emotions, facing conflict, and your own unhealed wounds.
These transitions aren't easy. The stakes feel so high! But when you face them with courage, compassion and curiosity, you'll find your way through the wilderness and onto a beautiful path. As you do your own work, you'll be an even stronger anchor for your kids!
Rowena Day is back to discuss:
1. How parenting changes neural pathways
2. Learning to set limits
3. Parenting differently than how you were parented
4. Growth vs. fixed mindset
5. A better way to praise your kids
6. The problem with peer attachments
7. The ultimate goal of all this parenting work
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
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Resources
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- More on Erikson's stages of development
- Dan Siegel's image of the flowing river
- Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself by Lisa Marciano
- Romans 7:15-20
- Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
- Hold On To Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté
- The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents by Dr. Lisa Damour
Transcript:
Alison: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast, where we are here for our third and final installment of this series on transitions.
For today's episode, I wanted to devote an entire episode to parenting through transitions. Because the reality is that one of the ways that life presents us with so many opportunities to walk through transitional seasons is through the act of parenting.
Our kids go through so many transitions from birth all the way until they leave the nest and even into young adulthood. If we're not aware and naming these different milestones, these different developmental seasons and what they require of us, we can find ourselves really disoriented because our kids are walking through a transition, and we need to figure out how to adto be that anchoring presence for them.
Because the truth is, as your children go through these different developmental transitions, you simultaneously have to go through your own. There's an invitation for us to do our own work, whether it be to grow in skills we never even thought we needed or thought we could have, or whether it be to do some of the work of reparenting ourselves, where some of what our kids are going through surfaces, areas of wounding in our own lives that we need to pay attention to so that we can parent from a healthier version of ourselves.
To anchor ourselves in this conversation, we're going to rely on the work of Erik Erikson. He's a psychologist who set forth this idea that we really are developing. We're going through transitional seasons throughout the course of our lives from being a tiny baby all the way to the end of our life. He identified eight stages of development that we all go through.
If you want to get all eight of those, you can go back to Episode 69: Your Future Self—8 Challenges to Resolve As You Become the Person You Were Meant to Be, where I walk through all of those.
But in today's episode, we're really going to focus on those first five that our kiddos go through, all the way into young adulthood.So if you're parenting, our hope is that this episode will help name and validate and normalize some of these transitional seasons that you've either already been through or you're currently in, or maybe you're headed toward, and if you're someone who's not a parent or maybe somebody who parented a long time ago, this episode still has a ton of value for you because we all go through these developmental stages.
So as you're listening, think about your own childhood because looking back is often so helpful in understanding where we are now and where we wanna go. I'm thrilled to once again invite my friend Rowena Day, who is a spiritual director and mother of four, back on the podcast to join me for this conversation on parenting through transitions.
Thank you so much Rowena for joining me in these conversations about transitions these last couple of weeks.
Rowena: Oh, thanks, Alison. This is a fascinating topic, to think about human development from all the different perspectives, emotional, neurobiological, social, spiritual, and how they're all connected and interwoven together in these complex and beautiful ways.
It's fun to try to tease it apart a little bit together and notice and name the invisible realities that are so much a part of our everyday, but that we take for granted.
Alison: I love how you call them invisible realities. They're always operating in the background. One of the things that really can bring them into the forefront when we're seeing our kids go through these seasons, or, in my work, so often when I'll hear parents start to describe a certain set of frustrations and I realize, oh, they're in a new developmental season and they haven't given themselves permission to recognize, oh, we're dealing with a whole new set of reality here.
We've got to adjust. We've got to change. We've got to be flexible to this new reality. That forces me to grow. We're going to start with the very first stage of development that Erikson talks about, from when a child is born to around 18 months, in this stage Erikson calls trust versus mistrust.
And in this stage, infants are learning in their bodies. This idea that we call attachment, this idea of safety. Can I trust a caregiver? Is there a benevolent adult around who can provide consistent, reliable care where I'm loved and safe and soothed and seen?
This is that basic need for a very secure attachment, a loving environment that fosters trust. And the opposite occurs where there's neglect or inconsistent care or abuse that leads to mistrust or what we call these insecure attachments.
So during this stage as a parent, we're really learning how to create this safe, nurturing environment as imperfect humans who are not going to do it exactly right. There's a steep learning curve for us, and sometimes I fear that all this talk of secure attachment can put undue pressure on parents to try to make such a perfect environment for an infant that is also not reasonable and not a fair expectation of parents.
So Rowena, what is it like as a parent to go through this transition yourself, even as you're aware of what your young infant is going through?
Rowena: One of the things that I think is most wild about parenting is that you find that you're navigating your own transitions simultaneously as you're navigating how your children are transitioning through their developmental stages. Whereas previously, before you were a parent, you were only going through your own transitions.
Then you have a baby and it feels like there's a transition happening at the beginning, every day, every week, every month, and it's a lot of rapid fire transitions. Trying to meet the needs of each stage and then a new one starts and you're trying to figure things out again.
I think also most importantly, the fleeting nature of time and feeling, for me at least, the ache of time passing. The letting go journey begins right away. It's a strange paradox of watching your child develop while also letting go of who they have been.
You have to be so nimble and so kind to yourself as you are thrown into the deep end of parenting. There's no way that we can assume a one size fits all approach to how everyone experiences these transitions, but I think there are some very common ones that we walk and wrestle our way through.
It can be a beautiful thing and so life-giving and also really challenging. It can be a lot of both-ands that are very intense at the same time, such delight going through the transition of letting go of the life you had before you had a child.
I knew that cognitively before I became a parent, but walking through it myself was a whole different ball game.
Alison: It reminds me of last week's episode about the competing needs for authenticity and attachment. We were talking about it in the context of adult relationships, but in a parenting relationship, you also face some of those competing needs.
It can really touch on areas of our own lives where we maybe didn't get that kind of parenting, where nobody ever really did that work of holding space for us. So we're struggling to figure out how to ground ourselves and to be kind to ourselves while we're also trying to learn those skills with our kids.
Rowena: Yeah, there can be a lot of tension that can arise within us. The transitions for an infant are obvious, but I think what is perhaps less talked about is the way that it changes the adult's brain and so the parents themselves go through significant shifts in their neural pathways.
Several decades ago, there was one book on parenting and now there's an overwhelming amount of information and opinions and advice about how to take care of this baby well. It can be a stressful thing trying to sift through and take some of the wisdom, while also learning and accepting that parenting is a learned skill.
I think sometimes we can have the expectation that we will have the intuition immediately to know what to do and I think there is a lot of that built-in, and also it requires slowly learning to grow and trust your own intuition.
Alison: I love that you say it's a learned skill. We're not expected to hit the ground running, knowing exactly how to do it. God designed it that way. We're not expected to show up perfectly. As much as it's a huge transition, obviously for the child who's being brought into the world, it is a huge transition for the parent and to honor that, as we've been saying over and over in this series, to give yourself space and permission to be in process with it.
These stages come fast and quick in these early years. Because pretty quickly we're into this second stage we're children, say around 18 months to around three years, they're still not in school. But they're developing more autonomy. This is where Erikson talks about autonomy versus shame, where children need this safe place.
They need safety to explore a little bit more to begin to differentiate a little bit. They're going out on their own. They're exploring their environment. They're asserting their independence which is really necessary. Also they need a lot of support. They need to do that within, again, that secure attachment, and this is where we have to shift and develop another skill set seemingly overnight to parent our kids through this next stage.
Talk to us a little bit about that, Rowena, about the parent's experience as our children get a little bit more active.
Rowena: With that comes a lot of joy about witnessing these milestones and the immense growth that they go through. Just delight in seeing their ability to play and be present. The way that they express their emotions so freely and in such an embodied way, that can also be challenging, but is also, I think, very inspiring for adults to embrace their emotions more fully, their ability to name what they want, and watching their personality unfold.
I think one of the most significant transitions for parents as the baby grows from infancy to toddlerhood is the challenge of establishing freedom within limits and discerning and figuring out how to give choice to your toddler without it being too overwhelming or too restrictive so that they can develop their autonomy.
You're going to be hit with those decisions moment after moment. I love Dan Siegel's image of the flowing river in the middle and on one bank you have the bank of rigidity and on the other bank it's the bank of chaos. Somehow as a parent learning over time, that is a dynamic and challenging dance to figure out.
Giving freedom within limits and doing that uniquely to each child so that they have that sweet spot of developing their autonomy, knowing that the boundaries are firm and secure while not being too restrictive and also knowing that they have some choice.
Alison: So how do you navigate that transition inside of yourself as you're having to learn this really important new skill set on the fly? What goes on inside of you and how do you help yourself through that transition?
Rowena: Yeah, there's a lot of making mistakes. I think it's a process of learning, oh, that worked, that didn't work, okay, and fine tuning along the way. Okay, that gave them way too much freedom, and that did not go well for me or them, or wow, they were really upset, and they felt like I took away their choice, and I wonder if there are creative ways that I could have addressed that situation so that it worked for me, but it also gave them a little bit more autonomy and choice.
That is going to be a constant conflict between parent and child, but it can be a beautiful thing of learning to listen to yourself and listen to your child and slowly, as the authority figure, navigate getting in that sweet spot. It's not something that I think you can jump in that river and swim there all the time–you're going to hit the bank kind of bounce around on the banks until you eventually get more into a groove as you get more experience with parenting.
It can be disorienting to feel like you're finding your way as a parent when you've got a toddler in front of you that you've got to make decisions with quickly.
Alison: Just thinking about all these conversations we've been having, it requires that ability to anchor yourself in the uncertainty. I don't know. I'm going to make some mistakes. There's a lot of trial and error, which requires us to have some of that psychological flexibility with ourselves.
This stage for our kiddos is about autonomy versus shame, but it's also inviting us to not shame ourselves, not beat ourselves up, to show compassion for ourselves while we're in that process of learning this very nuanced dance.
Rowena: Yeah. If it's multiple children, it is different for each child. So it's a new experience and adventure every single time. To give ourselves a wide open canvas to experiment and to know that we are going to mess up and it's not about being perfect, that's not what the child needs.
They need someone who is mostly present and that is the work that toddlers offer us is where are we scattered, where are we distracted, toddlers like to pull you into the present. It can be a huge gift and it can also be a huge challenge because you may not want to be in the present moment, battling for 10 minutes to try to get shoes on or whatever it may be.
I think toddlers offer an enormous possibility for us to experience discomfort within ourselves, and to notice and name how we're feeling at any given moment, and to allow the full experience of life with all of the emotions.
Something that caught me by surprise was the sheer sensory overload that can happen at this stage. There's a lot of sights and sounds and you're being touched a lot and there's smells and there can be legitimate sensory overload for our nervous systems and we can surpass our neurological threshold for certain senses and, by 9 a. m. you might be completely overloaded.
You've been up for three hours already but you still have the rest of the day ahead of you.
Alison: Yeah. Naming there that it's okay. Again, we could shame ourselves for that. It's okay. You're going to feel some sensory overload. It's a lot of new bodies in your space. It's a lot of new stimuli every single day. Give yourself that process of adjusting, maybe shifting how you go through your day.
You may have less capacity for other people. You may have less capacity in other ways. If you work full time, that's another variable where you're suddenly having to balance a whole new set of stimuli on top of existing ones. Be really gentle with yourself as you transition yourself through this season.
Rowena: I think that's the key to it all, is being very kind and gentle with yourself. That then enables you to be a little bit more kind and gentle with your toddler.
Alison: The way that we are with ourselves as we transition even at that young age models for our children that it's okay to be in process. It's okay. If I'm trying to be perfect and beating myself up, there's an unspoken message to my child that they need to be perfect and not be in transition.
If I'm able to show my children, this is what it's like for me to be kind to myself through this, they're going to catch that. More is caught than taught. They're going to catch that as they're learning how to be in that process with themselves.
Rowena, as we, again, are moving rapidly, time is on warp speed here, into stage three, Erikson talks about the preschool, early school years of initiative versus guilt, where children start to show interest in specific activities. They might start to show interest in particular types of play and other children.
They're getting more autonomy and they're learning more. So again, speaking of these transitions, big transition for them. They're experiencing more of the world, which brings up complicated emotions in them that they don't have the capacity to name or process. So we're also helping normalize for them some of these different experiences of feeling hurt or feeling scared or feeling angry when they don't really have a way to process those things.
What's going on for us as we're helping our children navigate this transitional season?
Rowena: Yeah, here in this stage, boy, attuning to emotions is hard work, both to our preschool-aged child’s and to our own. So their passionate curiosity and delight about life is such a joy and also they can have a lot of passionate tears and emotions about, to us, small things. The way their toast is buttered, this can be a big thing.
You're navigating many of these moments and that requires a lot of attuning to your own emotions. It is hard work and here again, I think the tension of holding love and limits together is one of the biggest challenges. Trying to find ways that may be different than the way that we were raised ourselves or what we have seen modeled. Going through all the internal dynamics of, how am I going to teach responsibility to my children?
Alison: Which is another transition for us. That transition from how I want to do this may be different than how my parents did it. That in and of itself can stir up a lot of inner conflict inside of us as we give ourselves permission to try things a different way in a way that may go against what we were taught.
This is where gaps in our own experience can show up even the best of parents–there are different generational models of parenting.
For example, there's much more of a focus and an emphasis on the importance of naming emotions now than there was 20 years ago, 30 years ago. So we are parenting in a different way, and also in ways that we maybe didn't get parented.
Like you said, we're in this dual process of figuring out how to honor our own internal landscape, the different parts of us, the different emotions in us, even as simultaneously, we're trying to learn how to do that with our kids. I remember one time you and I had a conversation and you were describing this experience to me.
I remember helping come alongside you and you have four young children to parent in addition to your own inner 12 year old who enters into the mix from time to time and who also needs you to honor and validate her emotions that she's having about all of this.
Rowena: I think children at this age make possible a huge potential for inner growth for us as parents especially coming into contact with this term that I like from this book called Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself by Lisa Marciano.
She calls it the shadow side and how inevitably children will trigger or draw out our shadow side to the surface and we become more faced with how we can be swept away by an overwhelming tsunami of emotion that we didn't know was capable of rising up within us. We can see ourselves at our very worst, and all humans have this shadow side.
In Romans 7, it says, I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do. I think this becomes so much more evident and pronounced when you're a parent and forced to reckon with this shadow side of yourself that you maybe thought, nah, I don't really have that. I'm so calm. I'm super patient.
Her book is hilarious. I feel like any mother could read it and find such a deep relaxation in it as they realize we all have a capacity to be filled with rage at certain moments. I think it's really important to name that in in this stage of life of being with our kids because it's not talked a lot about and I think it's really important that people don't feel alone when they're met with that inner volcano that's rising.
This can cause such distress it can be easy for parents to get really discouraged or stuck in shame or guilt about that. There's such a beautiful way that can be brought to the surface and be like, wow, I really flipped my lid there. That's certainly not how I want to be and so you make the repair. But the inner growth that we go through is not this beautiful, calm, serene walk in the garden.
It is a bit of a battle at times to name different parts of ourselves that are really coming to the surface that we haven't interacted with a lot in the past.
Alison: Yeah, it's so true. Every relationship gives us these opportunities to grow. These opportunities to grow are not always, as you're saying, pleasant. They often show up as these overwhelming emotions that we don't want to feel. I'm keenly aware, as I'm listening to you, that these opportunities for growth can come through other means.
Just being a human being in relationships with other people, it is really normal to have these opportunities to investigate our own big emotions. Parenting can be one of those crucibles for that is the most off-putting because we're like, “we're not supposed to feel this way about our own children”. But in fact, it's another crucible in which we're learning to face the reality of our human nature with curiosity, with compassion, and also with an eye toward growth.
So that brings us into the next stage, which according to Erikson is the early school years–industry versus inferiority.
This is where our kids are headed out to school. They're with their peers more than they're with their parents. They're getting grades. They're starting to measure themselves against their peers. They're interacting with teachers, and we're trying to help our kids develop a sense of confidence, a sense of competence, as opposed to a sense of inferiority.
Again, this one touches on so many of us personally, because this is where we start to have more memories and we remember that struggle. It's very visceral inside of us, our own struggle with this feeling confident and competent versus inferior.
So what's going on for us as parents in this stage, Rowena?
Rowena: I think some of the common transitions for parents in this stage is navigating a healthy attachment with a kid who is slowly needing you less. So some of the challenges that come along with that is navigating this really big tension with allowing your kids to struggle and fail in an age appropriate way, and not rescuing or preventing failure or learning of consequences.
This can be hard for us as parents to resist the urge to step in and solve all their problems for them while also being a support figure for them.
Another challenge I think at this stage can be the immense self-awareness that we develop over time as a parent in respecting the authenticity of our kids and their interests and being really aware of times when we might be trying to heal things from our past self at that age, or ways that we're trying to continue our desires through them.
So a small example for me was that I had to mourn a little bit when my daughter tried soccer and didn't want to continue anymore. I loved playing myself and a part of me wanted to keep living out my love of soccer by watching her play and I remember when she was like, I think I'm I think I'm good–I don't think I want to do this anymore.
I remember feeling, oh, that aches a little bit and needing to feel that and release that not shame myself for that. I want to let her be who she is. But that requires that transition of letting go of things that you hoped you would enjoy with your child.
Alison: That's a great example. Another thing I've come across is we can see things about ourselves that maybe we still don't like in our kids and come on too strong, trying to get our kids to fix things at a certain age that really are more about our own inner wrestling.
Rowena: Yeah. So if a kid is shy or something and you're wanting to help, push them to be a little bit more extroverted
Alison: –because it was painful for you when in fact because you parented them differently, they're actually at peace with their level of extroversion or introversion.
Rowena: They might be very comfortable being introverted.
Alison: We can project onto them our own wounds. It's so important, especially as they get a little bit older, to do our own work of, wait, what's me? What's my own growth curve here? That takes a lot of this agility to be very aware of our own stuff, even as we're trying to shepherd them through their growth.
Rowena: Carol Dweck captured this really well in her book, Mindset, about the concepts of growth versus fixed mindset. Fixed mindset being this cognitive idea that our abilities are unchangeable. So either I'm good at math or I'm not good at math. Whereas growth mindset is the idea that with some effort and practice you can improve and get better.
This might be what we are trying to teach ourselves is to have more of a growth mindset, and this can be in any capacity of life. And, it might not be across the board that we have growth or fixed mindset, but it's really interesting to notice when we might be parenting from a place of fixed mindset, and trying to gently move ourselves out of that.
I am not fixed in this state and that I think is the gift that transitions bring us, is that they help us move through some of these fixed mindset ways of being, and get a little bit more adaptable, or a little bit more self aware, or whatever it might be.
I find it so fascinating that the way we praise has a profound influence on how we cultivate a fixed or a growth mindset in our kids. Kids who are always called smart actually are less likely to approach challenging tasks in the future out of fear that they might not be considered smart anymore and lose that kind of validating praise.
She found that cultivating a growth mindset was done through a different type of praise, where you praise the effort and the ability and the process rather than these labels of being smart or not smart.
I find that so interesting. Growth mindset cultivates more of that intrinsic motivation and fixed mindset is more tied to extrinsic rewards and motivation. For example, if your kid is learning fractions, you could say, wow, you are so smart. You did all those fractions.
Or you could say, wow, I saw how hard you worked on learning your fractions. You've come a long way with all that effort. So praising them for their effort and for trying rather than the result is so crucial in cultivating that growth mindset and not setting themselves up to fear failure and making mistakes.
Having that same mindset within ourselves of being comfortable making mistakes and being gentle with ourselves when we fail and parenting from a growth mindset of ourselves while doing this with our kids–it becomes a very meta process.
Alison: Yeah, I love that. Again, that modeling. I'm having a growth mindset toward my parenting. I'm not a bad parent or a good parent. I'm working really hard to figure things out and you're modeling that as you're doing that for yourself as your kids are trying to figure out how to have that same approach.
So let's talk a little bit about this fifth stage. This is where we get into adolescence, where Erikson talked about a sense of identity. I talk about this a lot in The Best of You, this sense of selfhood versus role confusion. There's a sense of who we are in the world, what our values are, our place that we have a place in the world now.
More recent research suggests that this stage expands into the 20s, now that kids aren't really arriving at their full sense of identity into the 20s. We actually need to be parenting our young adult children. It's not like when they graduate and go to college that suddenly the parenting stops.
It doesn't. There's still a lot of parenting years all the way through our kids' lives. But this is a really pivotal season where we're trying to help our kids essentially differentiate from us, find their own identities and feel a sense of internal stability.
There's a ton of transitions for kids in this adolescent season. It's also a huge season for us as their parents because again, so many of us got stuck in one of these stages. We're still wrestling to find our sense of identity. We're still wrestling to feel our place in the world. Yet we're trying to help our kids navigate their way through it. So again, it brings up these opportunities for us to confront some of these challenges in our lives.
Rowena: There's a real ongoing need for kids to remain dependent and attached to their parents, while also getting a little bit more freedom as they get older. I love Gordon Neufeld's and Gabor Maté's book Hold On To Your Kids in discussing a lot of these dynamics in navigating attachment during these years, knowing when to give space and freedom and offer emotional support and attunement.
The real importance at this stage is kids not becoming peer-attached. Of course, peers are important and having peer relationships is vital. But I really love that this book highlights the importance of keeping the primary attachment and secure base as the parents so that they can have healthier relationships with their peers.
Having peer attachment is inherently unstable because these parties are both in such crucial developmental stages that these relationships are not made to be stable attachment figures.
Alison: Yeah, this is so interesting because this relates back to the theme of this whole series, where adolescence really is that wilderness. It really is that incredible liminal place for our kids. So we become that liminal attachment figure, while their peers, like you're saying, are so important, we also want to equip them with the very skills we're trying to talk about in this series, which is the ability to tolerate some distress, the ability to tolerate a lot of competing emotions and to think for themselves and to not default to over-attaching to others so that they don't have to face the uncertainty and the confusion and the internal commotion that is inherent to this season.
Adolescence really is the epitome of a transitional season from childhood to adulthood. I love what you're saying. This is where it's so important for us to be equipping them to push off of us at times as they're learning how to find their own voice and not find another bigger, more compelling attachment figure to lock onto.
Rowena: As you say the words “push off of us”, that immediately brings to mind one of the most helpful images of what adolescence is like that Dr. Lisa Damour talks about. She's written a lot about adolescent development as a psychologist and the analogy of the swimming pool and that teenagers want some freedom to swim around in the swimming pool, but then they might get overwhelmed.
Occasionally you want to come back to the side of the pool, which is us, the parents, before they kick off or push off the wall again. The biggest transition that I'm anticipating is the unpredictability of knowing oh, is this a moment that you really need me? Or is this a moment that you're pulling away?
The dance of it going back and forth and trying to ready myself for that. In order to walk with my kids as they transition from being a child to being a young adult, it is an ongoing kind of negotiation and dance, and it might be a very awkward dance at times. It might feel really beautiful and seamless at other times.
Alison: This is where that idea of us being that guide in the wilderness requires so much internal stability from us. It requires us not to take things personally. We talk about that when we're parenting adolescents, it requires us to be that voice of wisdom.
We go into those transitional seasons with our kids. That's true of all parenting, but I know in my own experience, I write about this a little bit in The Best of You. When I met my husband, he was a widower with two young kids. With the two young kids, they had lost their mom, so they had already gone through a major disruption to a primary attachment. There was a lot of grief there.
There was also a lot of stability. My husband did an amazing job of being a stable figure. That transition for them doesn't take away the grief. It never takes away the grief. Also there were a lot of really beautiful, stabilizing attachments that allowed them to go through that. Introducing myself as a new attachment figure for them required me almost immediately to provide this anchoring presence.
I love that swimming pool metaphor. There's a parallel to parenting that we're talking about here that applies to the role of being a stepparent or even an adoptive parent, no matter the age of your kids, where you very quickly are stepping into an intense season of transition for a child who has lost a biological parent, or has gone through a transition of parents divorcing.
In my case, I've gone through the loss of a parent, where my role is to stand in the gap, to stand in that place of transition as that anchoring figure while your kids are sorting out their own identities and their own identities in relationship to you.
It can be so tempting, whether as a biological parent, whether as a step-parent, whether as an adoptive parent, to want to bring our own needs into the relationship at that time. Our own needs to be liked, our own needs to be affirmed, our own needs to be valued.
It can be very tempting to bring those into that relationship when really what our kids need as they're finding their own way, as they're finding their own identities, is for us to be very human. I always say to parents at this stage: you get to be a person, you get to have feelings, you get to sometimes get your feelings hurt.
Also it's your job to be strong enough, to be that figure that they're going to push off of; it's a both-and of, I'm going to be here, I'm going to stand firm here, I'm not going to move, and I'm not going to try to, in my case, replace something that's been lost.
That's not my job. My job is to honor that loss and honor that I'm not that replacement attachment figure, but as I stand firm in my own identity, in my own work that I've done, I can be this stabilizing force for you. I can stand here with you in every valley you're going through, again, whether it's through your own loss or whether it's through the ups and downs and trials and tribulations of adolescence.
I have enough strength to stand here and to let you come and sometimes push off of me and sometimes cling on to me and I'm not going to cave either way. I'm going to be here for you. It's really a profound time of showing our kids what it's like to be that stabilizing presence. Again, I want to underscore here–we're not God. We will get our feelings hurt.
We will want our kids to appreciate us. Of course we will. At times it's appropriate to say, man, you can push off of me, but you can't hurt me. We can set those limits in this season and we can honor our humanity–and also–I'm never going to leave. I'm not going to leave. I am here. I'm never going to leave you.
We're really modeling that lived embodied presence of how God is with us as the ultimate parent. The ultimate parent who's always there with us. He also is real. He honors when we've stepped over boundary lines, when we've done something to hurt him.
He isn't without passions, he isn't without emotions and also he's always there. So for me, that experience of parenting has required so much deep soul work of this thing, Rowena, that you and I've been talking about this whole series of honoring my own humanity, my own emotions, even as I deeply embody the privilege of being this liminal figure, this attachment figure in the wilderness.
That really is the work of all parenting. We are an incredibly crucial figure in our kids' lives through all of these seasons. Our job is simultaneously helping to launch our children so that they can live their own lives apart from us. We're always doing that dance internally of wanting to feel that closeness with them and also wanting to release them to fly, to live their own lives.
That really comes to a head in these adolescent years. It continues into the young adult years where we watch them. My husband always uses this expression: we launch them like little birds. They leave the nest and they fly and they make it to the next tree. It's amazing. Our role shifts.
Again, we're so thrilled that they make it to the next tree. We're also there if they fall and they hit the ground and we need to be there to help them get back up. That work never changes. We continue that work for the rest of our days. We continue that work, stabilizing ourselves while we also release them. That paradox of both-and gets heightened as our kids age, the older that they get.
Rowena: That is so true and underscores the ongoing process as a parent to be letting go continually while navigating having Healthy attachment and then having a healthy attachment towards adulthood. Those bigger releases of okay, now you're going to college, now you're living on your own,
Alison: –married,
Rowena: –and you're building a family of your own and setting the foundation for that secure attachment along the way allows for that letting go to happen in that gradual way. And then the fruit of enjoying a beautiful relationship with your adult children is what I hope for.
Alison: Exactly. The thing that's so cool as we're rounding out this series is that it's a parallel process as we're helping our kids through these different seasonal transitions. We're setting them up to launch and to develop healthy relationships and to have kids of their own.
We're simultaneously doing the work of essentially becoming even more whole so that as they leave us, we're also okay. We also still have purpose in life. We also still have a beautiful life to live both apart from our kids and with our kids. It really demonstrates that dance we've been talking about throughout that whole series as we're equipping them, we are also simultaneously equipping ourselves.
These transitions are not easy as we've discussed this whole series. They also yield this ongoing fruitfulness and bringing more goodness into the world.
Rowena: Yeah, recognizing that our development is not complete because we've reached adulthood. That there is ongoing development in all of us until the day we die, and that is a beautiful thing. Change is both hard and disorienting and we wouldn't want to stay the same our whole life long.
Learning to hold ourselves loosely and who we have been and who we are and who we're becoming through the endings and the neutral zones and the new beginnings, having moments in life where we can reflect and look back and honor and name and notice and feel and grieve and allow ourselves to move into a new season.
That cycle repeats and having that broad lens of the totality of our life I think is so helpful to know that this is a process that comes and goes and comes and goes again in ever evolving ways. Life is not linear. It's about these cycles repeating so that we can grow to be more and more whole people and the people that God has made us.
Alison: This has been such a rich conversation. We've talked about this so much and yet moments of this have surprised me. I'm so grateful again that we could do this.