...Many parents don't quite get this theory. Last summer in the New York Times, Tina Kelley reported how camp officials and counselors are besieged by nervous, high-maintenance parents, calling about bunk placement, private lessons and special cereals and vitamins for their children. It is not uncommon, according to the article, for parents to smuggle cellphones to their sons or daughters against the rules of a camp. Clearly, some parents don't know how to let go.

Much of this has to do with the modern mania for minimizing risk. A Girl Scout leader in California recalls how, as a child, she broke her arm on two separate occasions. Now, because parents become outraged and litigious at the crunch of bones, the Girl Scout camps where she works forbid even the climbing of trees.

Parents, however, deserve some sympathy. They are making adjustments of their own. At first, the absence of children at camp seems like a reminder of married life before children arrived -- a time of dates, movies and unmonitored friskiness. But soon it dawns that the absence of children is not a reminder but a preview -- the glimpse of a time when children no longer come home. In an empty house, it quickly becomes clear how much of a couple's conversation weaves around their children -- how much of their own lives has become an investment in the lives they produced. ...

So this is the independence we seek for our children -- to turn our closest relationships into acquaintances. Of course, I knew this getting into parenthood. But the reality remains shocking. For a time, small hands take your own -- children look upward, and you fill their entire universe. They remain, to you, the most important things in the world. To them, over time, you become one important thing among many. And then an occasional visit or phone call. And then a memory, fond or otherwise.

Labels: childhood, parenting

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