When your boss says she is proud of your work, it seems she is taking a little bit of credit for your accomplishment. In contrast, you feel differently when a colleague hears of your accomplishment and says, “That is amazing! I really admire what you did there.” The difference revolves around our recognition of someone’s independent capacity: Admiration is something you have for someone who has done something amazing on their own. That is why our kids need to hear that we admire them.
When we tell our children “I love you,” they feel safe. When we tell your children “I am proud of you,” they feel approval. When we tell your children “I admire you,” they feel identity, power, freedom, and personal pride—the same emotions we feel when a colleague tells us they admire us. You have it within your power to give those priceless feelings to your children. All it takes is admiration.
Obviously, there is not much to admire in a toddler. But, as your children get a little older, they develop skills and knowledge and preferences that are foreign to you. They eventually develop opinions and priorities and plans that diverge from yours. It is not uncommon for parents to hear an emerging young adult say something like, “My life. My problem. My decision.” That jolt is hard to take because it means your child no longer worships you. We have spent a lot of years being adored by our children, and adoration is terribly addictive. No parent wants to give up that high. But we must. We do not bring children into the world so that we will have someone to worship us.
As it progresses, this process of a child becoming an independent self can trigger fear in parents. Our identity as parents is in helping, but we cannot help with matters that are beyond us, regarding skills we have not mastered, cultures we do not understand, futures we have not lived. When a child embarks on a very different path from ours, letting them go is analogous to putting them in a small boat to sail alone across the ocean: we sense that we will be useless to our child, and that can make us fearful.
As I have shared before, fear creates monsters out of us, making us do and say things that are not congruent with who we are at our cores. So, it is no surprise that some of the most-regretted parental outbursts happen during this phase of the child’s emergence. The fear is real and unavoidable, but hopefully if you see it coming, you can avoid the hurtful collateral damage. Rather than seeing it as a crisis, parents can choose to see that this separation of selves is the primary mission in parenting. Parents are not biological Xerox machines, spinning out poor copies of poor copies of long-forgotten originals. We are trying to raise a child to become a unique self who can function independently in the world.
My oldest son, Hunter, called me the day before his wedding to tell me that he wanted to take his wife’s last name. I doubt there is any set of words that I could have expected less than those. The words literally stopped me in my tracks. Never had I thought about that possibility. Where in the world had he gotten that idea? But, after taking a few hours to think deeply about it, I could see that Hunter’s decision to take Katie’s last name was completely consistent with some core principles on which we had raised him. He had simply taken those principles like a key in jazz, then riffed his own masterpiece from them — a masterpiece that took me completely by surprise, as all masterpieces do. He is not me; he amazes me. He is beyond me.
When we raise children, we are producing original emergent content. In other words, we do not know exactly where this is going or what this will be. It is critical that we acknowledge that our child is becoming something more than a poor copy of us, that they are becoming something beyond us, and that this something will emerge on its own. This is where the phrase “I admire you” comes in. As you see your child’s amazing life-art taking shape in ways you never imagined, step back to admire the beauty. Then, let them know.
When your children hear your admiration, they will feel they have done something wholly theirs, that they are becoming someone wholly themselves, and they have taken a small step toward the unspoken-but-obvious ultimate destination of being your peer.
Your admiration is a turbocharger for your children’s pursuit of themselves, releasing the handcuffs of expectations about being just like Mom or Dad. I know it hurts a little bit to hear that it’s good that they are not just like you. Take comfort: you will still see some of your brushstrokes in them when they are grown. You will be proud of that. And, of course, you will still love them. But hopefully you will also admire them as amazing, independent human beings who went beyond your experience, beyond anything you ever taught them, beyond your imagination.
Beyond you.
Scott Davis – More to Life Elder and so, so much more.
Article published in More to Life – Edition 69
