RA on parenting

[Diana]

I agree with hounsic and Dtris. 

I will add that teenagers are highly alive beings, awash with newly released hormones, capable of accessing great depths of feeling and thinking, and awakening to the world as new adults. They are trying whether they know it or not to find out who they are. So the last thing I would do is steer them toward something I think they should do. They must discover it for themselves. 

Most of your work is done, in that you have brought a teen through the developing years of childhood and already instilled within them your own principles. And yet now I imagine is the most difficult part of parenthood and that is the letting go. Because teenagers need to find their wings, stretch them out, and fly in their own directions.

As serendipity would have it, right after I wrote the above I unintentionally came across the writing of Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet on children (which I hadn't read in many years):

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
    And he said:
    Your children are not your children.
    They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
    They come through you but not from you,
    And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

    You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
    For they have their own thoughts.
    You may house their bodies but not their souls,
    For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
    You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
    For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
    You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
    The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
    Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
    For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.