Entering Adulthood

What's this? Kaycee is actually blogging? I thought she disappeared!!!

No, Ladies and Gentlement, Kids of all ages, I'm still here!!!... though without anything truly inspiring or insightful to write about. My life has suddenly become school, work, and family spats. Go life. So, I shall post a blog about a concept that is ever so near and dear to my heart on this, the day before the day before my 19th birthday... Adulthood. I have this idea in my head as to how this is supposed to work, so here it goes.

People are born into this world to parents. Theoretically out of love, now a days more so out of infatuation, drugs, alcohol, self-esteem hang ups, jerk wads, etc., but don't get me started. After all, this is how it's SUPPOSED to work. So people are born to parents. The parents' job is called "parenting." Now don't start in on the sarcastic "oh wow, no duh Ralph," there is a point to that statement. The occupation of Parent cannot be summed up in one word. It's not like it's administrative, janitorial, management, manual labor, there is no category. The parent is to meet the child's physical needs: food, clothes, bed. The parent is to teach the child: speech, potty training, table manners, social skills, responsability, finance management, common sense. The parent is to meet the child's emotional needs: encouragement, appropriate self-expression, love. The end goal of parenting, aside from establishing a life-long bond to span a transition between generations, is to produce a young adult equiped with the necessary skills to move out of the parent's house and create a life for his or her self.

The child will never be "ready" to take on the real world and establish what their own, individual life will be. That would require having already experienced everything prior to that leap of faith out of the parents' home. There simply comes a point when the parent has done his or her job. There is nothing else to teach the child, it is time for the child to learn from different venues. It is not necessarily a crack at poor parenting, it is simply fact. Parents can't teach their children everything that their children will ever learn. Teaching a person is a task to be shared with many people. There comes a time that the child must try to provide for his or her own self. And, most importantly to me at the moment, there comes a time that the child must leave the parents' home simply to establish a separate identity. The point of parenting is to produce an adult, not an extension of the parents' own house. If done correctly, that extension occurs on its own. If forced, that extension will be severed when the child finally does leave. If you try to grow a plant by yanking it upwards and screaming "BE TALLER!" you're going to pull it up by the roots and destroy it.

By locking the door and saying "No, you can't leave, you belong to me!" you are destroying that extension that will occur naturally if you just let me go. It's time to sit back and see what kind of adult you've produced. When that time comes, and the parent can't do that, then the entire point of parenting has been lost, and the world will never know whether the parent succeeded or failed.