Recently, I had the opportunity to sit in on a discussion between four 20-somethings. The topic: how their parents raised them. Of greatest interest to me were the two young ladies who observed that their parents never prepared them for adulthood.
What they shared were numerous stories about how their parents cared for them, protected them, made decisions for them, and in one instance even insisted that all pay checks be turned over to the parents because the parents didn't believe the child would make good decisions on what to do with the money. One of the young ladies described her college life as "brutal" because she was never prepared to handle attention from boys. The other spoke of the trouble she got into financially because no one ever showed her how to manage money. The longer they spoke and the more they shared, the clearer it became that the parents spent all of their time focusing on the journey (childhood) and never considered that all children are destined to become adults. In other words, they completely missed the point that as parents we need to be preparing our children for their destination - adulthood.
I understand the desire to keep children from what will harm them. Of course we are called to protect our children. I understand that we want to give our children the best, but when we seek to "bubble rap" our kids, either consciously or unconsciously, the law of unintended consequences takes hold and the children are harmed.
My wife and I always believed that one of the duties God gave us as parents was to take a child who was fully and completely dependent upon us, teach this child how to be independent in the hope that as adults we would be interdependent. I am always just a bit confused by parents who don't prepare a child for adulthood. Do they think they will be around forever to live and breath for their child? Don't they know that anyone or anything who/which doesn't learn to breath on its own cannot survive? Then there are the parents who demand a child stay subservient to them in diligent obedience all of his/her live. These parents cite the commandment "Honor your father and mother." But giving honor doesn't mean as an adult I still do everything my parents want me to do. Curiously, very few of these parents are doing everything grandma and grandpa want them to do.
There is no one size fits all answer to, "How do we prepare our children for the destination of adulthood?" Parenting, no matter how young or how old our children are, requires us to set an appropriate tension in the family. It is akin to setting the tension in a trampoline. Set the tension too high and the performer hits his head on the ceiling. Set the tension to low and the performer bottoms out. Manage every aspect of the child's life and the child is strangled by micromanaging. Manage the child's journey too loosely and the lack of structure will result in an undisciplined approach to adulthood. While setting tension in the family is critical and difficult, it is not impossible.
There are four primary areas one should pay attention to in the quest of preparing a child for adulthood. These areas are represented in the acronym S.I.P.S.
S piritually
I ntellectually
P hysicallly
S ocially
Every area needs an appropriate amount of attention and remember to do it in sips. It's awfully hard to drink from a fire-hydrant.
I think what is encouraging to me in this is seeing how much you learned on the fly, knowing the sources of a lot of what is in here. Sometimes it's hard to know you don't have it all figured out in advance, and when another life is involved, that just makes it all that much more daunting.
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