On Leaving the Nest

Recently, I was with my youngest son – I picked him up and we went and got him a tuxedo for his last prom as a high school student. He’s a senior and has been accepted at Ohio University. I wanted him to go to University of Cincinnati, but I think it was just too close to Dad for him. He didn’t want me to be able to reach out and touch him.

Renting a tuxedo is one of our ‘father/son’ things we do. I enjoy all of it except the bill and he likes our time together. We get a chance to talk about things in a relaxed way – we’re focusing on his tuxedo, so our conversations are kind of free-flowing, moving from topic to topic, we’re just hanging out together.

So we rent the tuxedo and we head back to Cincinnati for the weekend together. We’re heading down interstate 75, and I’m asking him about college. He’d been telling me he wanted to be a doctor but had recently said he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. So I’m asking him if he had come to a decision about a major.

It was then he surprised me. He started crying. I started asking him what was going on. He began talking about how much pressure he was feeling about college. That he had no idea what he wanted to do, that he was the only one of the three kids (he has 2 older brothers) to go to college and that he had to succeed, but what if he failed? And he was going to really be on his own for the first time.

I began talking to him about his fears and concerns, normalizing his feelings, and telling him how proud I am of him and how he’s going to be just fine.

I think it’s important to remember that our kids leaving home have fears they may not be talking about. I’d suggest parents talk about the changes that are coming if the kid doesn’t bring it up first. Listen to any concerns/fears/pressures and spend time acknowledging them. Help them see how normal they are and how supportive you are. This may be more than one conversation to have, and I’d suggest you regularly ‘check in’ with your kid to see how they’re feeling after you’ve talked; answer any other questions or concerns they may have.

My point is: listen to their concerns – be honest and supportive and remember - we left home and had some of these same feelings they have now. It’s weird to be on ‘the other side’ of this leaving home thing.

Namaste
Dennis Mendleson/The Cincinnati Therapy Guy

Donut, Dounut or Doughnut?

"You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left." – Itzhak Perlman


Recently, my 24 year old son got a dog. A puppy. The thing must have been really young, it was very tiny. My wife told me later she thought it was like 6 or 7 weeks old. I’m not big on identifying what breed a dog is. It’s big or small, short or long haired, and house-broken or not. That’s about it for me.

And I really enjoy dogs. We have three of them. They all live downstairs with my wife. (Another blog for another day that talks about our living arrangement which works so very well for us.) We rescued 2, and the third is a Pomeranian. I have 2 cats, Gracie and Puddy, so I guess I am a ‘cat person’ although I don’t think of myself like that.

Anyway, back to ‘Dounut’ the dog that belongs to my son. (Ed. note: rainie notes that the spelling of the dog's name has not yet been confirmed with the son. The spelling here is Dennis's version). Yeah, he called to tell me about this and I worried some about the dog. Would my son take care of the dog? Knowing my son as I do, my worry was that the dog was a short term interest for him. Once the newness of the dog wore off, he’d stop paying attention to it, and the dog would be left to fend for itself (Ed. note: Dennis's worst fear was that his editor...errr...wife would intervene on behalf of the puppy).

I have been very pleasantly surprised. My son has had this dog now for 3 months. He takes Dounut everywhere he goes, and they’ve really bonded. It’s so cool to watch them. One evening recently my son calls me to say, ‘Dad, this dog gets me up every 2 hours at night to go to the bathroom’. I said, ‘well that’s good practice for when you have kids’.

My son has done really well with Dounut. They come over on Monday evenings to watch football, and my wife comes up to visit with them. She and my son have developed a cool relationship over Dounut. That’s been fun to watch.

My wife tells me I am now a ‘grandpa’ and she’s ‘grammy’ to Dounut. She’ll talk to Dounut and say, ‘go see grandpa’ – I am sighing and rolling my eyes as I write this.

Life is really good. I have the love of my family and Dounut.

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.