Parenting: UNTYING APRON STRINGS

Instead of actually “cutting the apron strings,” my kids gently and firmly, even lovingly, helped me untie them. With love and good humor, they persistently peeled my single-parent mothering off their backs. For about three years each, they worked on developing new relationships with me. I did my best to reciprocate. Having insisted on and modeled mutual respect since small kid days, I was still able to put my foot down on occasions when I felt that the price of their bid for self-determination was too high, but only after very thorough discussions. If I regressed into intrusive “parental entitlements," they were sure to remind me that pulling rank was not how we did things..

One of our more difficult win-win solutions came the first year my daughter had her license. She wanted to drive some friends to a New Year’s Eve Party in my car. She was an excellent driver, a very responsible person, no highways would be involved, and she promised to have only two beers in the four hours she'd be there. I was concerned that she would be distracted by rowdy, drunken friends or hit by someone else on this night of drinking. I was scared silly for her safety and told her why. She heard and understood my concern and we worked on it together, both explicitly aware that my trust in her honesty and good judgement was the bedrock for her growing freedoms.
“Okay, our decision is: You go to the New Year’s Party for four hours. It’s okay to pick up those three girlfriends on the way, but not to offer other rides or make beer runs, and you and no-one else will drive my car. You agree to drink only two beers, no wine coolers or hard stuff (drugs were not a question with her) and switch to Pepsi at least an hour before you drive home.”

“Right," she agreed. "And I’m gonna call you at 1:30am so I can reassure you that I am sober enough to drive and am on the way to deliver my friends home. When I drop them off I’ll come straight home.If you think I'm too drunk to drive when I call, you'll come in a cab and drive us home and I will curl up and die of embarrassment."

Of course I couldn't sleep till she got home but she did as she had promised. This girl was born wise. If there was more to the story, she took well-calculated risks with my trust and her privileges and made sure I would never hear the rest.

I figured the best I could do with both of my teenagers, model with them, and rely upon for their safety and my peace of mind, was to ensure that they would think things through. We were lucky, we took risks, and they did well. I'm sure my many conversations with God helped us along. That New Year's Eve was not an easy night for me, but I'm convinced that, no matter how many knots are in them, untying apron strings works out better than cutting them.


Untying Apron Strings by Abby Freeborn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. For permission to use contact randmxcentric@gmail.com