The Long Path to Independence

WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST Michael Gerson published a piece in today's paper on the mixed feelings he has when his kids go off to summer overnight camp. I swear he took the ideas and the sentiments right out of my head. Alas, it is the action, not the thought, that really counts. Plus, he got to it first -- and wrote it better than I could have.

"The ultimate goal of camp," Gerson writes, "is the cultivation of independence -- for a child to be away from home and face problems without the assistance of parents. Children stand on the edge of a cliff, willing themselves to jump into the water below. Or manage a canoe during a thunderstorm on an overnight trip. Or ride an impossibly high zip line into the lake. In the process, they pass from taking external direction to accepting internal challenges: I will do this because I choose to do it -- because I want to test myself."

I'm certain that, independence, is one of the big reasons my kids love sleep-away camp. In addition to the intense relationships they form with other campers, a variation on the independence theme (they're weaning off the intense relationship they have with their parents).

Like Gerson, I find it difficult to watch them go off on their own. I worry if they will find their way without their parents at their sides, whether they will get hurt, whether I will miss out on something magical that I cannot record on the video camera.  But that's a natural parental impulse, isn't it?

I remember the first time I dropped off our oldest at day care when she was a toddler, and she just blended right in with all the other kids, stepping into her own world, not the one we had kept her in until then. It was tough, but I realized, that's what it's all about. She has her own world to shape and eventually inhabit, and it will unlikely not be the one I'm living in. It's a long road to full independence, but this was the place to start. Too much later and it would be a shock to her system.

And ours, too. The fact is, both parents and children move inexorably along a path toward independence. As Gerson writes, "At first, the absence of children at camp seems like a reminder of married life before children arrived -- a time of dates, movies and unmonitored friskiness. But soon it dawns that the absence of children is not a reminder but a preview -- the glimpse of a time when children no longer come home. In an empty house, it quickly becomes clear how much of a couple's conversation weaves around their children -- how much of their own lives has become an investment in the lives they produced."

They key, I suppose, is to recognize this is happening, to let it be -- slowly and gradually -- and to get a life of my own. 

Jeff

Comments

[Rinky]

How quickly you have learned that we spend so many years preparing our children to live their own lives that we forget to prepare ourselves for life after they have flown the nest. It is easier if our children live around the corner and we can still interact with them and our grandchildren.If that is not the case then one really needs to find other outlets. Camp is a preview, but not the real test.

[Jeff Weintraub]

I'm sure you're right

[carol feder]

"There are but two special gift we can give our children; one is roots, the other is wings." (Home=roots. Camp=wings.)
"Protect our children so they survive; prepare them so that they thrive."
I have had these two sayings taped to my desk for the past 20 years. I've learned that kids do, not just fine, but better, when they learn to interact and depend on adults other than/in addition to their parents.

[hedera]

Don't assume this only applies to people with kids. I have no kids and never will have. But I retired 2 years ago; and my entire life changed. If parents define themselves by their children, non-parents define themselves by their jobs. Who are we when we no longer go to an office, no longer dial into the conference calls? Mind you, I like retirement. But it took work. We all have to think about these changes, and plan for them.