The Parenting Season Nobody Prepared You For

Dear Friend,

Will you have a close family when your kids are adults?

Kerry here!

Through every season of parenting, I've tried to keep my eyes on the next stage.

When my kids were little, I was thinking about kindergarten:

Can they use the bathroom on their own?
Can they wait their turn?
Can they know their ABC's?

Through elementary school, I had my eyes on adolescence:

Do they know how to live their values?
Can they manage their own schoolwork?
Do they get real practice making their own decisions?

When they hit adolescence, I was thinking about college and whatever came after:

Can they create a budget and manage their money?
Can they make good choices about friends?
Can they live on their own in a dorm or apartment?

You get the picture. I was always trying to parent one season ahead, teaching the skill before they needed it, so it would be there when they did.

And then I hit a season I hadn't thought about or prepared for.

Lately in my work as a therapist, I'm noticing a shift in who's walking through my door. I'm seeing parents who want to repair their relationships with their adult kids. And I'm seeing the young adult kids, the ones who are frustrated with their parents, who actually still want a close family but don't know how to get there.

I'm seeing older parents in real distress about losing contact with their kids and their grandkids. A lot of them have no idea what they did wrong. Some of them gave their kids everything they had and simply assumed closeness would be there at the end of it. The distance baffles and wounds them.

And here's what stops me every time: these were not bad parents. They loved their kids and did their best. They prepped them for kindergarten, for adolescence, for college, for careers.

They just never parented toward the last season, the one where their kids are grown and the whole relationship has to run more on mutuality and less on authority.

Because here's the thing nobody told us: there's a season after the launch. It's the longest one. It's the relationship you'll have with your kids for decades, longer than all of childhood put together. And almost no one parents toward it on purpose.

So I've started asking myself a question that I want to hand to you, too:

Will you have a close family when your kids are adults?

Not "do you love them." Not "did you do your best." Those are a given. The question is whether you're building, right now while they're still under your roof, the kind of relationship that survives the day you're no longer the boss of them.

Here's the part you can actually use this week

The whole secret of parenting one season ahead is simple, and it works at every stage: look at the season your kids are in right now, look at the one coming next, and ask what they'll need to be ready for it. Then start building that today, before they need it.

It's the same move whether you've got a toddler or a teenager:

Got a little one? Can they handle a transition, stopping one thing to start another, without a meltdown?
Got a fourth-grader? The next season needs a kid who can make a few real decisions without you. Hand a few over now.
Got a sophomore? The next season needs a young adult who can wash their clothes, make their own meals, and recover from a mistake. Let them practice while the stakes are still small.

We don't wait for the season to arrive and hope they're ready. It's more helpful if we build the skill while there's still time, on purpose.

And here's what took me years to see: parenting doesn't stop at "launch."

There's that last season, the longest one, and it needs a skill too. But it isn't laundry or budgeting or résumés. It's the ability to keep a relationship warm and honest through ups and downs. It's the capacity to stay close once closeness is fully optional for them. That's the skill almost none of us were taught to build ahead of time. And it's the one I've been practicing, clumsily and on purpose, in my own family.

Over the next two emails I'll show you exactly what that's looked like, including the challenge one of my sons handed me that turned out to be one of the best parenting assignments I've ever been given, and the quiet inner fight that nearly kept me from doing any of it.

For now, start where you are. Whatever stage your kids are in, look one season ahead, and help them build the skills they'll need next. Then sit with the bigger question underneath all of it, the one I wish more of us asked a decade earlier than they do:

What will it take to have a close family when your kids are grown?

With love and laughter,

Kerry and Palmer

P.S. This is a 3-part series and part two lands next Sunday: the challenge one of my sons handed me.