Some points to ponder if you are struggling to let go. What was it like for you to move out of your parents’ home and into adulthood? Did you go to college? Did you live with your parents past the age of 18? When were you ready to move out? Were your parents ready for you to go before you were ready? Or were you ready to go before your parents wanted you to leave? Individuation is a developmental task every young adult must complete in order to become an independent and self sufficient adult. Some families discourage individuation by refusing to allow children and adolescents to express their own individuality. Conformity is highly valued and dissent is not tolerated. These parent/child relationships can be described as enmeshed, when the child and the parent are not felt to be independent people, but rather the children are seen by the parents as an extension of the parents. When you make a mistake, I feel ashamed that you have embarrassed the family. Some kids rebel and express themselves through their appearance. The parents may believe that everyone should wear khaki pants and navy blue shirts and have traditional hairstyles, but the child wants to dress in all black with long purple hair and a safety pin through his lip.  Parents may see this as disrespectful and a power struggle escalates to the point where the child is kicked out of the house by the time they are 18, if not earlier. Do you know how to allow your child to leave home with grace and joy, rather than a big fight? If your parents were angry at you for wanting to be an independent adult, you might react the same way towards your kid without even realizing it. Have you allowed your child opportunities to make mistakes? To experience failure? Or have you taken care of everything and made sure your child wouldn’t have the opportunity to screw up? If they did screw up (as most of us do at some point as teenagers) did you make it all better for them or did they have to experience the consequences of their actions?  We can help them with how they feel about such experiences, being supportive and allowing them to express their emotions, but if we intervene to the point that they don’t feel the consequences at all, they miss out on the chance to learn from the mistake. Maybe you didn’t take care of everything so they wouldn’t have the opportunity to screw up, but rather you were careful to control every situation so the possibility of failure just didn’t come up. So what happens when they inevitably do face failure? It is painful, no doubt. We want to protect our children from experiencing pain. But can we trust that we have raised them well enough that they will be able to handle adversity and that they can live through painful experiences, even though they may hate every minute of it? Because there is literally no way we can protect our children from every painful experience. It just isn’t possible. What was it like for you when you went out on your own? Did you struggle? Did bad things happen? What kind of healing work have you done to address the pain of those struggles?  If you are terrified that what happened to you will happen to your child, it might be a good time to get some therapy.  It’s normal to feel this way, but if it’s interfering with YOU being okay, therapy can help.  I realized when my oldest child went to college (and it is coming up again as I am about to send my daughter off to school) that it pretty much drove me crazy not to know what my kid was doing all the time. Not seeing them daily and being able to look into their eyes and sense whether they are okay or not felt like a loss of control. I didn’t realize how much I needed to feel in control in that way until I lost the ability to see my oldest daily. So I worried, and worried, and worried, and monitored social media, and worried and worried and waited and waited for something bad to happen. My child would tell me he was okay but I didn’t know if he really was. I tried to hide my anxiety fr