Who’s Leading?

When Parents Stop Acting Like Adults

Last night I was FaceTiming with my daughter, talking about relationships and the awkward dance of figuring out who you are next to someone else.

At one point, I heard myself say, “When we’re grown, I envision…”

My mouth stopped mid-sentence, and my hand flew up to cover it.

She started laughing immediately. I doubled over.

When we’re grown?

I’m decades into adulthood. She’s just stepping into it.

In many ways, I have grown up alongside my girls. Untangling patterns I once thought were normal. Finding language for things I used to swallow whole. Starting over at forty will do that to you. And there’s real value in admitting we’re still becoming.

But humility has an edge.

If we never arrive in the role our children need, that’s something else entirely.

At some point, the adult in the room has to stand in position.

And I’m not convinced we are.

We Haven’t Just Stepped Back. We’ve Stepped Down.

It feels like the world has lost its bearings. Institutions wobble. Norms blur.

We’re quick to blame algorithms, schools, politics. And yes, those forces shape our kids. But they are not raising them.

We are.

Healthy adulthood absorbs volatility before passing it on. It sets the tone instead of matching it.

Instead, we’ve slid into mirroring what unsettles us, reacting publicly and engaging the world at the same emotional altitude as our kids.

We call it transparency. We tell ourselves it strengthens connection. But lowering ourselves into the same reactivity doesn’t steady anyone. It lowers the bar of what adulthood looks like.

We’re no longer elevating childhood. We’re dissolving the distinction.

Emotional Honesty or Emotional Spill?

Many of us were raised by people who didn’t know what to do with feelings. They suppressed them, spiritualized them, dismissed them, or weaponized them.

So we swung hard in the other direction.

We vowed to be open—to name things, to let our kids see our humanity.

And that’s good.

But the pendulum didn’t stop at center; openness became overflow.

We process in front of them, not before them. We narrate our anxieties in real time, confiding in them about dynamics they aren’t equipped to metabolize.

But children aren’t meant to stabilize the emotional climate of their home.

“You are not responsible for anyone else’s unhealthy emotional needs. Including mine.”
Protection for them. Reminder for me.

Because when you grow up around someone whose emotional world spills outward, responsibility blurs. You begin carrying what was never yours to hold.

If we aren’t careful, we recreate that same confusion under the banner of vulnerability.

Suppression isn’t healthy. Spillage isn’t either.

Our job isn’t to hide our emotions. It’s to show our kids what it looks like to carry them without handing them off.

When adults can’t contain themselves, children learn to monitor.

And children who are busy monitoring don’t get to simply be children.

The Attention Economy Came for Us Too

I spent years watching teenagers curate their lives online with skepticism.

Now I’m watching adults do the same. Not ironically or reluctantly. Intentionally.

In the space between “this is absurd” and “if you can’t beat them, join them,” we crossed over.

The same parents who warned their kids about chasing likes are now refreshing their feeds, adjusting captions, and studying engagement.

This isn’t about fashion posts or filters. It’s about a more pervasive hunger—the desire to remain visible, to feel selected and highlighted, to matter in a world that moves on quickly.

But when we compete for attention in the same arenas our kids are still navigating, we flatten the hierarchy.

Kids instinctively feel when the adults around them are still seeking approval. And there’s something particularly reassuring about adults who aren’t auditioning.

An adult still looking outward for validation cannot offer refuge from it.

We Lost the Long Game

If the previous section is about external performance, this one is about time.

There was a stretch in history when adulthood implied the ability to think beyond the immediate moment—to absorb discomfort without acting on it, to make decisions based on where things were headed, not how they felt right now.

Restraint wasn’t repression. It was foresight.

Now we discharge. We post. We react. We speak in ways that relieve tension in the moment, even if they complicate the future.

Rules tighten when we’re irritated and loosen when we’re tired. Consequences shift depending on the day. What matters most is often how we feel in the moment we’re addressing it.

But parenting has always been a long game.

When we choose short-term relief over long-term formation, our kids learn to live the same way—reacting instead of building, soothing instead of strengthening.

The cost isn’t chaos. It’s fragility.

And fragility doesn’t prepare anyone for adulthood.

The Quiet Abdication

Beneath all of it, we’ve confused equality with sameness.

We tell our kids their voice matters—and it does. We invite their opinions. And we should.

But we erased the distinction that protects them.

Parents and children are equal in worth. They are not equal in responsibility.

When we collapse that difference, we hand our kids moral and psychological weight they aren’t meant to carry. We pour our opinions, our fears, our unfinished questions into their jar before they’ve sorted their own.

No wonder they feel overloaded.

Sorting an inner world requires space—to ask, to doubt, to differentiate.

If we are constantly mixing our unresolved questions into theirs, they lose the ability to recognize what actually belongs to them.

Children are not meant to help us figure out who we are—even if raising them inevitably shapes us. We are meant to usher them into who they are becoming.

That requires height. Not dominance, but distance and perspective to see further than they can.

What Are We Actually Seeking?

When we grab the spotlight, blur boundaries, offload emotion, and collapse the space between adult and child—what are we really trying to solve?

Often, it’s relief.

Relief from no longer being needed the way we once were.
From the silence that exposes what we’ve avoided.
From unfinished parts of our own story.

Some of what we call openness is simply an attempt to steady ourselves in front of an audience.

But stability doesn’t come from being witnessed. It comes from being grounded.

Relief feels immediate. Restraint rarely does. And our kids can tell the difference.

If insecurity is driving some of this—the need to be recognized, to be validated, to matter—then the answer isn’t becoming louder or more visible.

It’s maturity.

The kind that can tolerate fading relevance without scrambling to reclaim it.

Reclaiming the Post

This isn’t a call to harden ourselves or pull away. It’s a call to step fully into adulthood again.

Raising kids requires more containment than commentary.

Maybe society feels unstable because too many of us have abdicated our role. Not consciously or rebelliously. Just over time without realizing.

We can step back into it.

Still human. Still in process. But willing to stand where adults are meant to stand.

Our kids don’t need us on their level.
They need us grown up.