Ep 66: Grown and Flown and Still Parenting

Lisa Heffernan, co-founder and author of Grown & Flown,
shares her vast knowledge on parenting during the late-teens and
even early 20s. Our Kids may be more grown up, but it doesn’t
mean parents don’t still have an important role to play!


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Full show notes


The day will come when you have to drop off your child in their
new room and go home without them. They’ll likely be smiling,
waving as you depart, from their cozy new dorm room. It’s a
surreal moment of mixed emotions to see your child grow up and
start living on their own for the first time.


The process of letting your teen go on their own can be
frightening for parents. The world is vast and chaotic, and
leaving your child to figure things out is both a time of pride
and fear. On college drop-off day, it’s normal for parents to
experience both excitement and dread.


I have a lot of burning questions about this monumental moment.


How can families prepare for a teen to leave the nest?


Is it more important to teach teens about independence, or
following the rules?


Will teens be in danger without parental supervision?


To get to the bottom of these questions, I interviewed
Lisa Heffernan about control, the process of
letting go, and finding a balance between it all as teens enter
their own world.


Lisa is the co-author of Grown and Flown, which collects
information, advice, and helpful tips from teen experts about
teens leaving home. Lisa was a parent who found herself without
any helpful information on parenting tips from the ages of 15-25.
This caused her to start the blog called Grown and Flown with her
co-founder and collaborator Mary Dell Harrington. The blog has
received millions of page views since the opening, and spurned
Lisa and her team to go further by creating a Facebook group
which has grown to over 130,000+ members.


Today, Lisa helped answer everything about the art of letting go
with hot topics such as helicopter parenting and
monitoring your child’s grades. The trick, Lisa
tells me, is to strike a balance between following rules and
giving autonomy for your teen. Without being overprotective, here
are a few of Lisa’s top insights and tips on creating a
relationship that will guide your teen towards healthy choices
and being grown and flown.


Helicopter Parenting


One of the most common parenting tropes today is the idea of a
“helicopter parent,” who ties to control every minutia of their
teen’s life. Lisa says that the concept of being a helicopter
parent is so undesirable that many parents are fraught with
anxiety over their actions because they don’t want to be seen as
a helicopter parent. Helicopter parenting can be a huge roadblock
in having your teen become grown and flown.


First, it is helpful to know what a helicopter parent is.
Helicopter parenting would be returning to your teen’s dorm every
week to clean and inspect their room. Or, another example of
helicopter parenting would be to steer your child into a desired
career field which will make them a lot of money over letting
them choose a career on their own. Helicopter parenting is
characterized by a parent’s overinvolvement in their child or
teen’s life. By controlling your child down to the smallest
level, teens aren’t able to form their own ideas about what they
want to do or develop any sense of independence to become grown
and flown.


When teens aren’t able to establish an independent identity,
there is a risk that they will not understand how to function
when they are grown and flown. This can make the transition to
independent living much more challenging for teenagers than it
would have been if they had an idea of who they were before going
on their own. In the worst cases, a teen having an identity
crisis while they are living on their own can result in dangerous
situations for both parties if they are unprepared. That is why
it is so important to nurture independence in the household, and
to strike a balance between the two when it comes to raising your
teen.


One tip to practice balancing independence and authority Lisa has
identified is the oversight a parent maintains over the grades of
their teenager. Technological advancements have allowed for
student’s grades to be viewed on demand for parents instead of
having to wait the entire semester to receive a report card. Many
parents have access to their teen’s grades through the websites
services that schools use to record this information, complete
with their own password and login. Parents who slip into the
“helicopter parent” mentality over their child’s academic
performance might check their child’s grades daily, sometimes
even twice or three times a day!


Monitoring Your Child’s Grades


I asked Lisa where here research has led her on the topic of
monitoring grades, and parents can do this in a balanced manner.
First, Lisa shared that it is important to keep an eye on how
your teen is doing academically. If there are warning signs that
your teen is struggling, then it is crucial to stay up-to-date on
that information. However, parents do need to understand that
they need to give their teen some form of autonomy over their
grades and allow them to succeed or fail on their own.


An example of helicopter parenting your teen’s grades would be
hovering over the parent portal, waiting all day to see what they
got on their most recent exam. This is not the way for a parent
to go about checking grades. A better tip for parents to
demonstrate trust in their teen is to take a step back from grade
monitoring. This will absolutely build the skillset to make your
teen grown and flown.


On the other hand, don’t be an uninvolved parent. Being
uninvolved in your teen’s grades would be forgetting to check on
them, or blindly trusting your teen to report them to you. You
want to give them autonomy, but at the same time parents
shouldn’t be in a place where they can’t extend oversight to what
their teens are doing. They are only teenagers, after all, and
shouldn’t be expected to function as a grown and flown child.


One tip for parents who want to develop trust between teens and
their grades is by giving them the ability to try and fail on
their own. Set some ground rules! You could tell your teen that
you will only check their grades once a month, simply to stay up
to date on how they are doing. Or, you could give them the option
to report their grades to you, without even looking through the
parent portal.


By allowing your teen to practice accountability in their school
life, you can help them achieve a better version of independent
thought and allow them to build skills that will lead them to
become grown and flown. Finding this balance between oversight
and independence is challenging but is totally achievable for
parents.


You Can Achieve Grown and Flown Balance!


Striking a balance between protection and independence extends
into so many other areas of parenting as well. In the rest of the
podcast, Lisa and I talk about achieving balance to prepare for
the grown and flown days. Other topics include…


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