Letting go of your kids
By Jim Vine
Who ever would have thought I would have a problem in this matter? I’ve enjoyed being a father of growing children, but I expected that when the time came for them to marry the partner of their choice, I would be delighted for them, feel no sense of loss and simply take it in my stride.
I mean, the day before our daughter’s wedding I wasn’t ready for what my emotions were doing — all on their own. I wrote her a letter the night before her wedding. It took about three attempts, and it wasn’t finished till well after midnight. I still have a copy of that letter, and I think she does too.
Most of my adult life has simply washed over me, and generally speaking I have rarely been caught out with my emotions running off in one direction, while the rest of me (that used to be “together”) is going in another.
How should we react to inner feelings that scream: “I know what’s happening, but my heart isn’t ready to let my child go, even if my mind says its perfectly o.k!”
Recognise that the marriage of your child is one of life’s significant “rites of passage”, and one of the last “separation” stages of the child from you, the parent.
Also recognise that parents and children who have had a close family friendship will almost experience the “stages of grief” when their child leaves home to marry.
What can a parent do to minimize the pain?
1. Live all the growing up and teen years, to the best of your ability with as few regrets as possible. In other words, redeem the days when your children are small. Be as sentimental as you like (or call it a sense of history if that’s more manly), but remember your child will not tend to live in the past as easily as you do.
2. Start the letting go process in earnest the day your child becomes a teenager. Establish a responsibility-growth plan, that as well as increasing your child’s skill in decision making, is reminding you that your baby is in the process of becoming an adult of marriageable quality, and is aiming at the day of departure from your nest.
3. Talk through with your spouse and develop a mind-set of “lift-off” long before your child is interested in cloud nine. If you get real brave, even talk things over with your teen.
4. On the occasion of your child’s engagement, have a speech prepared that in effect says to this happy couple, that you and your spouse are actively pursuing a “rear-guard action”; reducing your responsibility as parents, and extending the engaged couple’s responsibility to make choices and to live with their consequences.
5. On the day before the wedding I think you should, as the parents of this bride or groom, explain your position. To the best of your ability, help your married child to “leave their father and mother” with as little pain as possible. And encourage them to see themselves as a newly married unit of equal value to their two sets of parents …and forever different from now on.
You know, if only I’d done all this while our children were growing up, maybe I’d have been better prepared to let our kids, particularly our very special daughter, go.
I must tell you, I wrote this brief article 19 years ago. Then why reprint it now? Well, we are now watching our own kids, who are watching some of their kids slip through their fingers, in the direction of marriage. And you know, I believe the five suggestions in this article are just as appropriate now, as they were to me then.
Jim Vine, is the former director of OAC Family Life Programs and creator of the MarriageWorks video series. Jim & Grace can be contacted at javine@optusnet.com.au
