Don't be 'friends' with your children

“I am not a fan of rigidity or of distant, authoritarian parenting. But I see a great many pseudo-sophisticated children ... who need parents and not tall pals,” commented Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman.

It's a fine line we parents walk.

We probably all want to be liked by our children, to be friendly with them. And when we need a friend to lean on, our kids are conveniently there and often willing to offer us comfort and support.

Yet, we are not friends (or shouldn't be).

That may sound a bit harsh, but let me explain. A friend is a person to whom we relate as a peer, an equal, a buddy, a companion. Friendship is a give-and-take relationship. It involves mutually giving and receiving.

A parent, on the other hand, is a bit different. Parents protect, nurture, guide, discipline, support, comfort. Parents give, but take very little. Parents receive from their children, but primarily in the satisfaction we receive from doing our job as parents. We look to other adults for friendship, not to our children.

That might seem pretty self-evident. But as Goodman points out in her column, many of us parents seem to have forgotten the distinction between friendship and parenthood. Especially in times of stress, today's mothers and fathers too often want to see children as miniature adult friends.

The divorced woman who confides in her 11-year-old daughter, the father who makes his adolescent son a “drinking buddy,” even the parents who give in to their children's threatened “I don't like you” are all examples of such inappropriate friendship. Children are neither confidants, buddies, nor people we should seek to always please.

I'm not at all suggesting that we be closed, cold, or harsh as parents. I strongly believe that unconditional and all-encompassing love is at the heart of parenting.

Yet such love is a gift we give our children with no demand that it be returned.

The bottom line we're parents, not friends.