Parenting – the best thing I’ve ever done in my life, and you couldn’t pay me enough to ever do this again.

I hope all the dads out there had a good Father’s Day last Sunday – I have 3 kids, all young men; 2 adults and the youngest in high school – my youngest and I spent the day together, and my other 2 called, wishing me a happy Father’s Day.

I spent time thinking about the hard decisions I’ve made as a father – and how often parents come to see me in therapy about their children, the conflicts they’re having, and the decisions they’re trying to make regarding their children.

Becoming a parent is like being married – you can tell the person all about it, but until they experience it for themselves, they never really know what it’s like. People I see for counseling have the best intentions for their children. Because they want what’s best so badly, they seem to lose all ability to make healthy decisions concerning their kids.

I think this is because, as parents we want what’s best for our kids. It’s painful to see our kids in physical or emotional pain, and we want to spare them pain. Because of this, parents do things to ‘rescue’ their children from painful experiences. I see this beginning early in life – parents usually start this as their babies cry because their parents have said ‘no’ to something – and because children are disappointed or unhappy that they’ve been told ‘no’, they cry, throw a tantrum, or otherwise behave in such a way as to show their parents they’re unhappy.

This is the pivotal point in life. As adults, we know life is full of "no"’s. Part of character building is overcoming "no" and dealing with this message. The problem I see is that, as parents we completely forget how important this lesson is in life. What happens instead is parents feel their child’s pain – and they don’t want their child to feel pain. So they change "no" to "yes". Two things happen at this point:

1. the child’s pain disappears immediately, therefore they stop whatever they’re doing to show their parents how happy they are;
2. the child learns that when they act out, their parents will give them what they want.

And this happens.

It wasn’t easy for me to confront my child about using drugs, watch him pee in a cup for a urine screen, and take him to get help (he was experimenting with marijuana in high school). As you can imagine, he was less than happy with me. To him, it was "no big deal". As a parent, I wanted to make sure it remained "no big deal".

The hardest decision I have ever made in my life was telling my 17 year old son he had to leave my home. He stopped attending classes and failed to graduate with his class. The deal was that he had to get passing grades in summer school or find a job for the summer or he would have to move out. He couldn't spend the entire summer watching TV and spending time with his friends.

He'd decided he wanted to repeat his senior year. So he didn't go to summer school and he got a few jobs but only held them for a couple days at a time before he'd quit. At the end of the summer, I had to kick him out. Because in real life, if you don't do what you need to do, you get evicted. It broke my heart but I felt that if I didn't give him the chance to learn this lesson, he would go on believing the world would give in to him, whether he did what he needed to do or not. Learning it now would be very painful for us both. But to learn it later in life might be even more painful. The stakes were high for both of us - would he learn to be accountable for his decisions and would I lose him forever?

It was devastating for me. I wasn't sure it was something from which we could recover.

I didn’t have a close relationship with my son for a couple years. I stayed in touch, and reminded him how much I love him, even though he wasn't speaking to me. It took me a year to clean my son’s room after he left.

But now, we are very close. And my son learned an important lesson. I won’t tolerate irresponsibility, not that anyone behaves responsibly 100% of the time. But when we do act irresponsibly, we have to accept the consequences of our decisions.

Do your kids a favor – help them learn to be responsible. Make hard decisions for them. And they may not make responsible decisions for a while. But that doesn’t mean you cave and rescue them. Because when you rescue them, you aren't doing them any favors; you are really doing it for yourself. Hold your ground and give them the loving, responsible message; be responsible.