There is a strange moment in every parent’s life when the child who once needed help tying shoelaces suddenly does not need help with much at all.
For years, we hover around them – Did you eat? Where are you? Who are you with? When will you be back? Have you finished your homework? Take the umbrella, don’t forget. Call me when you reach…etc etc..the barrage of questions and advices never end…
One fine day, the child leaves for college and suddenly, there is silence.
No daily updates. No detailed accounts of what happened during the day. No running commentary about friends, classes, food, teachers and plans. You call and ask, “How was your day?” The answer is “Fine.” “What did you do?” “Nothing much.” “Did you eat?” “Yes.” “Where?” “Mess.” “Who are you with?” “I am with my friends.”
And then comes the sentence every parent dreads: “Why do you need to call every day? Nothing new happens every day!”
That hurts!!! After years of being the centre of their little universe, suddenly we are reduced to a five-minute phone call, sometimes less. We begin to wonder what happened. Was our home a cage they were waiting to escape from?
The helicopter finally has to land.
We have become a generation of helicopter parents. We hover over everything. We monitor marks, meals, friendships, sleep, screen time, schedules and sometimes even conversations.
We do it out of love, we do it because we worry, we do it because the world seems dangerous, we do it because we have spent eighteen years trying to protect this child from every possible bump along the road. In this melee, somewhere along the way, protection can quietly become surveillance and the child knows the difference.
When a young adult goes away to college, one of the first things they are trying to discover is, “Can I manage this on my own?” They want to make decisions, make mistakes, choose their friends and decide how to spend their time. They want to feel grown up. Constant checking by the parents can sometimes send an unintended message: “You still do not trust me”.
Believe me, that is the last thing a parent wants to communicate.
The funny part, however, is that the environment has not changed for the parent. You are still sitting in the same house, in the same room, following much the same routine. The only obvious difference is that one room is suddenly empty.
What about the child? – everything has changed. They have walked into a completely unfamiliar world. There is a new room, a new campus, new teachers, new routines, new responsibilities and, perhaps most importantly, a whole set of unfamiliar faces.
Beneath the excitement, there may be apprehension. Will I fit in? Will I make friends? Will they like me? What if everyone else seems to know what they are doing and I don’t? What if I get homesick? What if I make the wrong choice? Can I really manage this?
The child may not tell you any of this. Instead, you may hear, “I am busy,” “I have work,” “I am with friends,” or “I will call later.” Perhaps they genuinely are. Sometimes a short answer is not rejection. It is simply the sound of a young person trying to find his or her feet.
Remember the four wheels – I once thought of parenting as being a little like driving a car.
When the child is small, the parents are the four wheels and the steering wheel. Without them, the car does not move. You hold the hand, cross the road, pack the school bag and teach the child, little by little, how to eat, read, behave, decide and eventually manage life.
But as the child grows, the relationship has to change. A car is not designed to remain permanently dependent on its four wheels when a puncture happens. A spare wheel comes in handy then. Also at some point, the child has to take the steering wheel. Perhaps the parent then becomes the spare wheel. It is an important part of the car, but it is not meant to be in constant use. It is there when needed. It does not insist on being used every day.
Maybe, that is what adulthood asks of parents.
Be available. Be reachable. Be interested. But allow the child to come to you.
There will be days when they need advice. There will be days when they need help with money, illness, a difficult decision or simply a bad day. There will be friendships that fall apart, examinations that go badly and moments when the world suddenly feels too large.
That is when the spare wheel matters. You do not have to keep proving that you are there. They already know.
The hardest question is ‘What happens when your child genuinely does not need you?
Can you accept it? Can you sit back without feeling unwanted? Can you resist the temptation to call simply because you are missing them? Can you listen when they tell you about their life without immediately offering a solution? Can you let them make a mistake without rushing in to prevent it?’
This could be the final examination of parenting. Not whether your child calls you every day. Not whether they tell you everything. Not whether they still ask what they should wear, eat, study or do. Perhaps the real test is whether they can walk into a new world and find their own way. And if they can, should we not quietly take some pride in that? After all, isn’t that what we spent all those years preparing them for?
We taught them to walk, then complained when they ran away from us. We taught them to speak, then were surprised when they developed opinions of their own. We taught them to make decisions, then became anxious when they stopped asking us to make those decisions for them. There is a contradiction here that parents have to learn to live with. We cannot spend eighteen years preparing a child for independence and then be offended when independence arrives.
So, parents should step back, not completely but just enough to give them room.
Let them discover, stumble and make friends you have never met. Let them eat the junk food. Let them forget to call. Let them solve a problem before you solve it for them.
And when the phone finally rings at 11.30 at night and you hear that familiar voice say, “Amma, I need to tell you something…”
Listen, for that is your moment. Not because they are dependent on you again, but because they have chosen to come back to you. There is a difference and perhaps that is the most beautiful thing about raising children. They eventually leave the nest but if we have done our job well, they know where the nest is. Perhaps good parenting is not measured by how much your child needs you but by how confidently they can live without you.
Well, isn’t that, after all, what we were trying to achieve?
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