"How To Raise Your Parents"
by the Rev. Krista Taves
March 18, 2007
Reading
Excerpted from Bringing Up Parents: The Teenager's Handbook by Alex J. Packer, pp. 11-12.
Look, I don't have anything against parents. Some of my best friends are parents. I know there have been sightings of parents engaged in joyful play and harmonious habitation with their children. I have been told of occasions when parents have lavished upon their progeny generous amounts of respect, encouragement, and junk food. I myself have witnessed those moments of glorious and uplifting familial warmth that can occur when parents convey love, understanding, and a bigger allowance upon their offspring.
So what do you want me to do? Write a book about how to get along with your parents when everything's just fine? About how to deal with the old man when he's fair, open-minded, and reasonable? You don't need to read that kind of book any more than I need to write it.
What you do need, though, is some help for those times when everything isn't just fine. When your parents are not fair, open-minded, and reasonable. When the weight of tension, conflict, and mistrust in your household threatens to crush everyone's spirit and self-esteem.
It's a funny thing in families: Often, the greater the love and commitment between family members, the greater the conflict and hurt. It's precisely because people care, because they want to protect and guide and make over those they love in their own image, that so many problems develop.
What do you care if some jerk at school criticizes the way you dress, or the lady down the street doesn't trust your judgment, or the gym teacher doesn't like your attitude? Big deal. But when it's your own family, your own parents, brothers and sisters, you do care, deep down. You want their love, respect, and approval, and they want yours. You have an investment in each other that you don't want to lose.
Sermon
I grew up in a very close family. Not only did we work together on the farm, we played together. Saturday nights were our special night. We gorged ourselves on pizza and settled down with popcorn and Coca Cola for our family show - the Dukes of Hazzard. Yes, this was the early 1980s and the Dukes of Hazzard were the hottest thing around. On Saturday nights, I would don a pair of ridiculous white heels I bought at a garage sale and saunter around the house pretending to be Daisy Duke.
Sundays were also family times. First we went to church as a family, and I would stand next to my father during the service. We would sing together Sunday after Sunday. In fact, it was standing next to his rich bass that I discovered my alto at the age of 12. After church we either went home and hung out together the rest of the day, or we went to one of our grandmother's and played with cousins. That is how it was, and as a child, I couldn't imagine anything better than living the rest of my life like that.
And then, I turned 13. And bit by bit, all these family times began to feel like huge unfair burdens. The Dukes of Hazzard suddenly looked really dumb. I was no longer satisfied with garage sale high heels. Being with family meant not being with friends, and I constantly worried about what I was missing. My grandparents, first generation immigrants to Canada, seemed distinctly behind the times and utterly disconnected from reality. When my mother drove slowly (and I mean slowly) through town with the windows down playing ABBA full volume, I was mortified. And my father, who had always seemed so wise, seemed to become the most dense, uncool, and controlling person I knew and when he tried to give me advice, my resistance was complete. He didn't know me and he didn't understand me.
And in some ways that was true. He didn't know me, and he didn't understand me. And how could he? With all the changes happening to me, my body was changing, I had thoughts and feelings I didn't know what to do with, I didn't even know anymore who I was and I didn't understand the feelings I had and why suddenly things that felt normal changed to feeling awful and uncool. More than that, I didn't want to share everything with them anymore. I wanted my own private space and I wanted to be with my friends way more than I wanted to be with my family. The little girl my parents had known was disappearing.
When I was preparing for this sermon, I had some questions for the youth. I asked them what parents needed to know about teenagers to be better parents, and almost every single one said something to the effect that they needed space to do their own thing, but they also wanted guidance. One teen said it was the difference between controlling and guiding. I also had some questions for parents, and one of the things I asked was what was the best thing and the hardest thing about being a parent. Almost every parent said that the best and the hardest thing was watching their kids grow up.
On the one hand, they love seeing the unique person you are take shape. Your parents want you to be independent, to have your own thoughts and ideas. And they raise you to be able to do that, and are so proud of you when you do. On the other hand, it also means that you are becoming more separate from them. You are not sharing with them everything you think and feel. You are becoming more private, and you tell your friends things you would never tell your parents. This is the normal thing to happen as you grow up. You are becoming more emotionally independent. You live more and more of your life separate from your parents, which means they can't know you like they used to know you. And they can't understand you like they used to understand you.
For many parents, this transition is really really hard. Imagine that you spend 13 years raising someone. Taking care of them every day. Protecting them. Thinking ahead to what to what they're going to need to be happy. For some parents, their whole being becomes wrapped up in raising their kids. And you pour all your love into helping them grow up. And then, they start to grow away, and you knew this was going to happen, but there's a big difference between knowing something is going to happen, and then actually having it happen. Many parents really really miss what you were like as a little kid and a lot of the conflict you may experience with your parents may have something to do with their struggle to accept that you are growing up.
This sermon is about how you can help your parents make the transition. It's about how to reassure your parents that you still love them, even if you are starting to want different things, and to have different ideas from them. It's about how you can help your parents adjust to the fact that you are growing up so that they are able to let go and not have it hurt so much.
Now just to give some qualifiers here, when I say parents I'm not assuming everyone lives in a home with a mother and father, or that the people who raise you gave birth to you. Or that you're being raised by someone you call Mom or Dad. I'm using the word parent in a generic sense, to indicate those people who are responsible for you now.
And in case you're thinking that this sermon is just about making life easier for your parents, as you will see, it is just as much about making your own life better. Just by trying to reach out to your parents, you will become a more mature person, more of an adult, and more ready to take on the responsibilities and freedoms of adulthood that you want so much right now. And even better, you and your parents can move through this time with more love and less conflict. And that is always a good thing.
So first things first. If you want to help your parents accept that you are growing up, the first thing you have to do is try to understand your parents better. Now I know you may be thinking – "Heh, you want me to understand my parents? Shouldn't they try to be understanding me? After all, I'm the kid, and they're the parent!" Those are reasonable questions. But in every family, every person has the responsibility to be their highest self. And even if you think your parents aren't being their highest self, that doesn't give you the excuse not to be your highest self.
If you want to understand your parents, if you want to raise your parents, you have to know something about where they are at in their own lives. And this is where it gets really interesting. Because chances are, that while you are growing into adolescence, your parents will have some form of a mid-life crisis, which usually happens sometime in their 40s, but it can be earlier or later. So just as you're moving into this scary and exciting time in your life, your parents are also moving into a scary and exciting time, because what happens in a mid-life crisis is that you begin to question everything you have done with your life. Whereas teenagers are at the beginning of their futures, your parents now have a pretty big past. During mid-life, people evaluate and examine their lives, their dreams, their relationships, their careers, and their values. And quite often, they get a lot of restless energy from what they are going through. They have to accept dreams they didn't achieve. They have to reevaluate what they thought they wanted and may realize they want something different. All this is heightened by the experience of watching you grow up and away, because a huge part of their identity has been wrapped up in raising you, and now that you're growing up, their identity is going to have to change. What this means, is that they are changing as fast as you are changing. And just like with you, this makes them not very fun people to be around sometimes.
My parents both hit their midlife crisis when I was 15. My mom decided she didn't like cleaning, cooking, and doing laundry just at the time that my dad was questioning whether he wanted to farm. She started acting in the community theater, dressing like a gypsy, and going shopping. He bought a new car and started singing in three choirs. At the same time, I decided all men were the enemy and God was a lie. I cut my hair off and I wore suits and ties to free myself of the shackles of patriarchy. All of us started questioning everything we believed. My dad read books like, "Did the Virgin Birth really happen?" My mom read books like, "Using crystals to Discover Your Past Lives," and I read books like "Why Men Ruined the World."
Sometimes all of our combined restless energies worked great together! We had such good conversations! But sometimes, the sparks flew. My mom would say my dad didn't understand a thing. I would say my dad didn't understand a thing. And my dad would say that he understood everything just fine, and then we'd keep working on him until he apologized for thinking he understood everything was just fine! And my three younger brothers? They just hid.
At that time, I was really hard on my parents. I really judged them for all the ways I thought they didn't understand me. What I didn't understand was that their lives were changing as much as mine, that they were both questioning all the choices they'd made in their lives, regretting some, struggling with the consequences of others, and that they didn't have all the answers and that they were going to make mistakes.
Part of raising your parents to accept that you are becoming an adult is to work on yourself to become more open to your parents as being more than simply parents. As little kids, we don't have the maturity to do this. When you're kids, it's all about you, and your parents are there primarily for you. But the older we get, and the more able we are to be mature and responsible, the more we have the ability to see people for who they are, rather than what they can do for us. A beautiful thing starts to become possible when you become a teenager. You can begin to start building a friendship with your parents. And friendship is much more of a two way street than a parent child relationship. Now I'm not saying that your parent child relationship ends. That never really ends. And as teenagers you still need them to protect you and provide you with guidance and stability, but at the same time, your growing maturity and your ability to think for yourself, means that you can start building a new kind of relationship with your parent, a relationship that is a bit more equal.
This is going to help you raise your parents into people who see you in new ways, who see the new you that is coming to be as you leave behind your childhood and move into being an adult. When you start being open to seeing your parents as more than simply parents, you're showing your parents that they are not losing you. They are losing the child you used to be. But they are getting something new and special in return. They are gaining a new kind of son or daughter, a son or daughter who is using all their new adult ways to be with their parents in a deeper way than they could before. And that means your parents are more likely to treat you like the adult you're becoming than the kid you used to be. And, if you consistently choose to act more like a responsible mature adult than a child, you are also likely to be given more of the freedoms that you want so much, because adults can be more trusted to use freedom responsibly.
When I go home to visit my parents now, we have a good time. Thank God they're both far beyond their midlife crises because raising them through that was hard work! We're good friends now, and our friendship grows stronger and more precious every year. This journey, the journey of parent and child, is so complex! I think we're raising each other our whole lives and I don't even think that stops when our parents die. Because we never stop being our parents' children, and we never stop that journey of growing into a fuller realization of who they and we are as people. I think it's one of the most powerful journeys many of us have. May we walk it lovingly all the days of our lives.
Amen and blessed be.
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Send Questions or Comments to Rev. Taves: Minister@EmersonUUChapel.org
Updated: 03/31/07