'Letting Go'

For most of us, change is difficult. When as a part of the aging process it involves a changing of the guard, a relinquishment of power and control, it is especially hard to effect gracefully.

As we get older, we must accommodate to a diminution of physical powers and its collateral byproducts. We tend to hear and see less and go to the bathroom more. The weight stays on and the hair falls off.

Time is no longer a friendly ally.

One of the most difficult changes facing parents is "letting go" of their children and doing so volitionally and graciously.

Recently I had a personal experience in this regard which was the genesis for this column.

It is my feeling that children learn about as much as they ever will from their parents by the age of 18. After that, parental admonitions are mostly redundant and unsolicited counsel falls on deaf ears.

From an early age I had been programmed as a problem solver in many areas beyond the ken of my parents. As immigrants they were not proficient in the English language or conversant with the customs and ways of America, and it devolved upon me to fill the gap. This role I carried into fatherhood.

I was logical, practical and reliable. My counsel and solutions were solid and dependable, and hopefully my children benefited from it. Along the way, by words and deeds, I made apparent the value systems I espoused. All this had its place and was a proper function of parenting.

Playing the part of "Father Knows Best" was relatively easy. The hard part was to know when to stop.

When children are first born, they need our help as parents to survive. We nurture, console and protect our offspring as well as guide, discipline and teach them. Thus, from infancy on parents maintain a position of control which continues through childhood and adolescence — and sometimes forever.

As parents we may think we have a monopoly on knowledge and wisdom, and sometimes we convince our progeny of this canard. Children naturally tend to regard their parents as powerful and omniscient figures and many parents revel in this role, earned or not.

As children reach their own adulthood a critical stage is reached. Parents are then at the crossroad.

Are we capable of unobtrusively allowing our children to lead their own lives or will old habits of oversight and control linger on?

The urge to save our children from the pitfall and mistakes that lie ahead is instinctual. From the purest of motives we want to give them the benefit of our own experience and save them from the heartaches involved in an unwise course of action. Desperately, we would protect them from their own folly, from being hurt, from being buffeted by life (as we were).

Sometimes the ongoing parental controls are exercised in so veiled, oblique and innocuous fashion that the parent is truly surprised at the annoyed reaction of the offspring to an ostensibly well-meaning word of advice or seemingly helpful act.

One of the subtler methods of retaining control is through the medium of money, the parent dispensing monetary largess long after the necessity and value of doing so has passed. Invariably, such parent reassures himself or herself of the continuing necessity for such benevolence, never admitting to self-gratification.

It should be axiomatic that the growing child needs to begin establishing an identity separate from mother and father and, in the process of growth and development, make his or her own mistakes. There is no shortcut, no painless panacea. The greatest gift a parent can bestow upon a maturing child is to free him or her from the ancestral shackles.

Few of us, unless hopelessly narcissistic, wish to produce clones.

With all of that said, I must add a personal word of caution: It's easier said than done.

That's why I feel so good that I passed a test of sorts the other day.

In a quest for different office space I had occasion to inspect a building in which my son, Kevin, has his office as a clinical psychologist. Upon learning my name and relationship, the parking attendant, the receptionist and the owner-manager of the building all greeted me as "Kevin's father" and continued to refer to me as such in subsequent introductions and conversation.

All at once I had no separate identity of my own and I had this strange feeling of displacement. It could have been ego-deflating, but happily it wasn't.

I had two immediate reactions.

First, I felt a warm glow of pride as all of them referred to my son in such laudatory terms. I basked vicariously in the esteem in which Kevin was held and in the knowledge that others shared my feelings that he was good and decent and likeable.

Second, it brought home saliently to me how many times Kevin, in growing up, was referred to as "Bernie's son," and how incredibly unidentifying that term really is. True, Kevin is my son by birth but he always had his distinct identity and a persona all his own which may have had little to do with me. Yet he had to bear the ordeal of living in his father's shadow for a long time — as I fleetingly had to live in his.

In this seemingly incidental and transitory vignette I realized a changing of the guard was taking place, as it properly should, and most significantly, that I would be capable of handling it. Rather than taking it as a debasement of my role as father, I viewed it as a positive and successful evolution in our relationship.

It happens in each generation, and being aware makes it easier to pass on the baton in the relay which sums up our lives.

Postscript: I didn't take the office space in that building, not because Kevin was there but it was simply too expensive for my present semi-retired needs.