Dear Reader,
I’ve been thinking about something we all know but rarely talk about openly – what happens to our kids when they leave home and go out into the world.
We raise them the best we can. We love them well. We try to teach them right from wrong, how to work hard, how to treat people with respect. We give them everything we’ve got – our time, our wisdom, our resources, our hearts. And most of the time, they take it all for granted. Not because they’re bad kids, but because that’s just human nature. When something’s always been there, you don’t really see it.
Then they leave. They go off to college, or move to another city, or start their careers, convinced they know better than we do about how the world works. They love us, sure, but they don’t really get what we were trying to give them all those years. Our advice sounds old-fashioned. Our concerns seem overblown. Our values feel outdated.
And then the world gets hold of them.
The world doesn’t care that they’re good people. It doesn’t care that they were raised with love and attention. The world doesn’t give a damn about their feelings or their potential or their dreams. Bosses who don’t value them, friends who disappoint them, relationships that fall apart, plans that don’t work out the way they imagined. They get knocked around, sometimes badly. They discover that most people aren’t looking out for their best interests. They learn that fairness isn’t guaranteed and that being a good person doesn’t automatically lead to good things happening.
Some of this teaches them valuable lessons – resilience, independence, how to stand up for themselves. But a lot of it is just hard. Really hard. The kind of hard that makes you realize that the people who loved you unconditionally, who worried about you, who tried to prepare you for exactly this – maybe they knew something after all.
That’s when the phone calls start coming more frequently. That’s when they actually listen to your advice instead of just waiting for their turn to talk. That’s when they start to understand that all those family dinnersthey couldn’t wait to escape, all those conversations they found boring, all that support they took for granted – it was something precious.
They don’t all come back physically, but most of them come back in ways that matter. They call more often. They ask for advice. They start to repeat the things you used to say. They begin to understand that home wasn’t just a place they outgrew – it was a sanctuary they didn’t even realize they needed.
Some of them do come back to live closer to family. Some realize that the place they were so eager to leave actually has something to offer that they can’t find anywhere else. Some discover that the life they thought was too small for them is in reality exactly the right size.
And when they do come back – whether it’s for a visit, or emotionally, or for good, – there’s something different in their eyes.
They see you differently. They see home differently. All those things you tried to give them that they couldn’t appreciate before? Now they can. Now they understand what unconditional love looks like, because they’ve learned how rare it is.
It’s not that they needed to suffer to appreciate us. It’s that they needed to see what the world looks like without the safety net we provided, without people who were automatically in their corner, without the kind of love that doesn’t have to be earned or maintained through performance. This isn’t about them coming home defeated. It’s about them coming home wiser. They bring back everything they’ve learned out there, but they also bring back a real understanding of what they had here all along.
Maybe this is just how it has to be. Maybe some lessons can only be learned through experience. Maybe the greatest gift we can give our children is raising them well enough that they can go out into the world, get knocked around, learn what they need to learn, and still find their way back to what matters most.
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