How to be friends with your kids and still maintain the right respect levels
Let's look at some techniques for being friends with your kids yet maintaining the right respect levels.
- First off, we have to decide what, exactly, being "friends" with your kids means. The fact is that this definition is a moving target. The nature of your friendship with your kids will change over the years. Understanding this is the key initial step in being friends with your kids yet maintaining a parental relationship with them as well.
|
|
- In other words, the nature of your friendship with a child of ten years is obviously going to be different than the nature of your friendship with a child of twenty years. Maturity makes a big difference in the way you approach a friendship with one of your children. One of the huge mistakes parents make these days when trying to befriend their children is failing to make this distinction. They want to interact with the children right now as if their children were grown men and women with children of their own. Again, this is a gross mistake. When your children are young, when they're still living in your home, still dependent on you for food and clothing and shelter, there's got to be a certain formality to your relationship that will gradually disappear over the years as your children strike out on their own. It will gradually and naturally disappear over the years; you won't have any hand in forcing it.
- So, if you want to be friends with your kids and still maintain the right respect levels, you've got to first decide what those respect levels are and lovingly yet firmly convey them to your children. Ideally, those respect levels would include: you being able to set the rules for how late your children are out; you being able to know whom you're children are dating, what parties they're attending, etc. In other words, you're their provider and protector; you know it and they know it; and they respect it.
- You're only going to get their respect, however, by healthily watching over them, and this is where friendship initially comes in. Your kids won't respond well to a dictator style of parenting. They won't respond well to a "I'm just as cool as that cute guy/girl in the mall" style either; what you're shooting for is something in-between. To maintain the right respect levels as a parent you've got to have the firmness, intelligence, and consistency that a parent, by definition, should have; to be a friend to your kid you have to-simply be their friend.
- Not, of course, that being friends with your kids is a simple affair. "Simple" here implies the basics-kindness, empathy, and, above all, staying a million miles away from abusive behavior of any kind. Squeezing a child's arm too hard is a good way of guaranteeing the death of friendship and the right respect levels. You don't want to appear to be trying to be your kid's friend. Spoiling them, cooing over them (especially if you've got ulterior motives)-these are nothing but invitations for disrespect and alienation. If, on the other hand, your child feels a constant flow of love, deep and warm but not drowning, as manifested by your sincere interest in their day to day lives, the antics and personalities of their friends, the little comedies and tragedies that fill up a child's world-you'll have established a good foothold. This is the way to start a friendship that slowly evolves from parent-focused to friend-focused as your child matures and is able to provide and fend for themselves.
