How parenting is like holding a spring
spring in the same place for as long as possible – but how do you do this?
One way is to squeeze the spring very tightly, to make sure it doesn’t escape anywhere. And so you squeeze and you squeeze, trying to control it – but sooner or later, one of two things will happen. Either you will get tired and your hands will weaken, or the spring will slip out from between your fingers and escape.
And when either of those two things happen, what we discover to our dismay is that the spring doesn’t stay where you want it to! Instead, it suddenly jumps out of our reach and rolls far away!
Parents do have the responsibility of raising children into adults who love and fear the Lord. But some parents approach that task by trying to control their young-adult children very tightly – what they study, how they spend their time, what friends they shall have. And their aim is to keep their young-adult children right where they want them – in the right career path, under their roof, and in the same church!
But what often happens is that once their young-adult children find their freedom – perhaps by getting their own car, or by buying a flat and moving out of home – they sometimes go very far away from their parents. Conflicts in the home can sometimes lead to young-adult children springing very far away from us. And it’s almost as though the effort that the parents have spent in trying to keep their children in the one place, corresponds to how far the children go when they finally attain the means of independence.
This can be very hurtful for the parents, who really do love their children. And it can also be damaging for the children, who now feel a distrust of parents whom they could otherwise have turned to for advice and support.
But there is another way of holding a spring – and another way of parenting young-adult children.
Instead of squeezing a spring as tight as you can and for as long as you can, hoping it will stay in the one place when we eventually have to let go, we should instead gradually let go of the spring. When we let go gradually, it is more likely to stay here, than if it escapes from our tightly clenched fist. And then when we can finally relax – or we have no other choice but to let go – we can know we have done our part to make sure the spring stays in the right place into the future.
In the same way, parents of young children do start off having to hold on tightly to their children – young children don’t automatically know that a boiling pot is hot, or that doing homework is wise! But when children grow into adulthood, we must not keep squeezing our children. Instead we have to learn to gradually – and then finally – let go.
As we gradually let go, we are giving young-adult children increasingly more and more responsibility. More and more opportunities to exercise wisdom in decision making in the reality of life. It even includes giving them the opportunity to make and learn from mistakes, and to live with the consequences of their decisions.
This does not mean we let go of the spring all at once – this is also a recipe for disaster! But while they are under our care, we intentionally give them more and more scope for exercising wisdom, while protecting them from too great a cost. Sometimes their mistakes might even be financially costly ones for us! But this is merely the cost of growing the capacity for wisdom in our children.
[ PS: I shared this analogy with our pastoral team a few weeks ago... ]
