Teenagers Master the Art of Letting Go

There will always be things that you cannot control. Let it go. Take some time for yourself. Sometimes we need to be someone else, besides a mother on the verge of nerves, ready for the crisis.

"Mumma godi!" The plump arms would stretch for a few seconds before the little one fell to the ground and insisted on being loaded. Sometimes I protested and tried to show him the merits of two perfectly functional legs. He would drop a little more and it would become a drop of gelatin. Sometimes I had to scrape it off the floor and carry it, and in others I let the jelly discover the inconveniences of lying on the floor while I waited patiently for him to succumb to the art of walking.

Like all the other parents, I spent a few moments daydreaming about the time when the little boy would be independent. At that time, independence sounded like this:

No more diapers!

No more battles at lunchtime.

No more nodding in the middle of the story while the little boy stayed awake.

No more stepping on the strange toys and the drowned screams in the room of the sleeping child.

No more, 'What the hell caused that stain?'

Nobody noticed about the roller coaster ahead. The psychology lesson on adolescence as a period of "storm and stress" faded with years of dust that accumulated in the grade. And it is not known when that beast of adolescence would appear. There he could be watching the children around him explode while his own son is not "acting", relieved that life has given him roses. And boom! One fine day, his son turns around with a fixed grunt on his face and tells him to back off.

So how can I, a father who sees them as babies, take a step back, especially when I'm pretty sure that his worldview is taken out of a dystopian novel or a work of extreme fantasy? More importantly, how do we stay sane? There are no shortcuts or safer ways to avoid cracks. But some things are better remembered when we tied ourselves to the roller coaster to hell.

The only person you can change is you.

Think about it. We spend our whole lives trying to change others, surrounding ourselves with worries and a checklist of the things we need to change in our family and friends when the only person we can really change is ourselves. This does not mean you have to put up with half-eaten meals that accumulate mushrooms under the bed in the teenagers' room! That's just a bad habit that hopes to turn into food poisoning. Accepting as a seat of change means that we must closely observe our reactions and turn them into answers directed at resolutions rather than accusations.

Strive to accept them and not change them all the time.

Let's be honest. Even though the eggs come from the same basket, they hatch differently; they have different paths and totally extravagant ways of following that path. There are days when you can find yourself staring nostalgically at another egg from another basket and wondering why you do not like that baby. "Why cannot he study so hard?" Or "Why cannot it be 99.99 percent?" Well, they cannot because they are not that egg. They are unique. They may seem lost for now. All we must do is accept that your options are different. The child, even if he is a six-foot-tall with stubble and a different baritone, needs to be told he is loved, regardless of his choices, failures and successes.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://indianexpress.com/article/parenting/blog/parenting-tips-how-to-let-go-teenagers-5751929/