I made a bold confession at a party last weekend.
It was a safe space. I was surrounded by longtime friends with whom I’ve traveled and raised children and laughed and cried and all the rest. The conversation turned to the new school year, and my friend Lisa asked how I’m feeling about my daughter leaving for college in two short years.
“Awful,” I admitted. “Dreading it.”
And then I said the thing.
“She’s my bestie!”
You’re not supposed to be friends with your children. Everyone knows this. It conjures images of moms buying their kids White Claws and turning a blind eye to vaping and borrowing their daughters’ skirts even though they’re way too short.
“It’s a very egocentric, needy template that people have in their minds,” my friend and podcast partner John Duffy said. “The feeling is that your child’s missing out on some really important lessons and lectures because you’re forgoing parenting your kid to be friends with your kid.”
Duffy is a licensed clinical psychologist and family therapist. I confessed to him years ago that I’m friends with my kids — but only because he told me he’s friends with his first. It felt like a delicious little secret we shared, until I realized he doesn’t keep it secret at all.
One evening we were giving a presentation together around the release of his book, “Parenting the New Teen in the Age of Anxiety,” and an audience member asked what we thought about parents who treat their kids like friends, rather than kids.
“George is my best friend,” Duffy answered, referring to his son. “And it’s not even a close call.”
A little explosion happened inside my heart. Like, wait. That’s allowed? And we can admit it? In public?
Now I’m watching friends and acquaintances move kids into college dorms, walk kids down aisles, send kids into the wilds of adulthood, and I see their hearts doing a different kind of exploding — loss rubbing up against love rubbing up against sorrow rubbing up against tremendous pride. And I’m thinking, “It’s because they’re our friends, right? We raised them. But didn’t we also befriend them?”
I asked Duffy if we’re chipping away at the old taboo.
“Certainly more parents are willing to say they’re crazy about their kids than when I started this practice 20 years ago,” he said. “I think that’s a step in the right direction. But there’s this little bit of joy left on the table when you leave it just at that. There’s real value in getting to the point of saying, ‘This is my friend. I don’t just love watching them from a distance. I love being with them. I love experiencing life with them. I like seeking their counsel as much as offering mine.’”
Baked into the hesitation to befriend your kid, I think, is an assumption that it leads to permissive, risk-prone behaviors. But when I think about my closest, most intimate friendships, we guide each other away from harmful people and choices and habits. We call each other out on bad behavior. We work to bring out the best in each other.
“Part of the friendship formula is you have a thousand in-jokes together,” Duffy said. “You have a kind of language together — some bits you do together. And then when it comes down to, ‘I have to say this hard thing to you,’ or, ‘We need to have this moment,’ then you really have the moment. You’re more likely to give this person your ear if you’re not just an abstraction, you’re not just a title. You’re invested.
“That’s how you want your close relationships to feel,” he continued. “Warm and loving and every once in a while you have to work some stuff through. Your friendship between you and your kid can be all of those things. That doesn’t mean you don’t parent. It’s just more collaborative than authoritative. ‘I found this thing in your drawer,’ or, ‘You’ve got a boyfriend now. Let's talk about what this all means.’ Not, ‘Here’s how this is going to go.’”
Few of us raising kids right now grew up with a parents-as-friends model, Duffy said.
“There was more of a power differential — I have the upper hand and when decisions are being made, you’ll do as I tell you,” he said. “I don’t think those were the best days. A lot of us acted out of fear. Or we were cagey with our parents. I think the joyful closeness that comes with being friends with your kids can also be parental leverage. It might be the only way, with all the noise in their world, that they’re going to listen to me when I need them to — and maybe vice versa.”
I once interviewed Lisa Heffernan and Mary Dell Harrington, co-authors of “Grown and Flown: How To Support Your Teen, Stay Close as a Family and Raise Independent Adults,” and they framed parenting in a way that sort of blew my mind.
“Our relationship with our young adults will last longer than our relationship with our adolescents and little kids, God willing,” Harrington told me. “My mother’s 92. My relationship with her as a young adult and adult has lasted many more decades than when I was a kid. … We want to emerge with our young adults with them looking to us for advice and support and companionship.”
Which is another way of saying … friendship.
“My kid wrote to me and said, ‘Let’s run a marathon together,’” Duffy said. “And I thought, ‘I really don’t want to do that. And there is no way I’m not doing that.’ If you’re lucky, you’ve got this friend for the rest of your life who keeps you in the know and keeps you young and you’re excited to see them and you know they’re excited to see you. The visits aren’t just perfunctory.”
And you truly see each other.
“As a therapist who works with kids,” Duffy said, “I always wish the parents could see their kid the way I see their kid. They would fall in love with this kid and want to hang out with this kid. But they don’t see that kid. They see somebody else.”
Rooting our parenting in friendship isn't going to buffer us from the hard stuff: the mistakes, the heartaches, the fears, the losses. But it allows us to bring our whole hearts, our whole selves along for the journey. And I think there's tremendous beauty in that.
