A Parent's Best Friend

"Maturity is your best friend." If I've said it once to a mom or dad walking this parenting road a couple paces behind me, I've said it a thousand times.

When my son was about 18 months, we were visiting my mom when he started to fuss over not getting something he wanted. I'd read  Love and Logic, so I knew how to handle this. I would let him know his fussing had consequences. I told him we would have to go home if he kept it up. That only riled him up more, until he was on the verge of a full-fledged meltdown. Still, I pressed on, trying to keep my controlled Love and Logic voice despite his wails: "Braden, by screaming, you're making a choice to leave Grandma's house. Is that what you want to do?" No response, just more melting. Then my mom, apparently more aware than I was that this child was 18 months old and probably didn't understand complex decision-making processes, stepped in with something he actually could have, a simple toy he could play with. He perked up, stopped crying, and we were all able to enjoy each other again.

My son was acting like a baby. Because he was a baby. Concerned that by not dealing with this willful episode head on I would create a rebellious teenage drug-addict degenerate, I tried to parent a baby in a way that wouldn't be effective for a couple more years. Most of the Big Parenting Issues I've encountered over the years were not handled by my brilliant, well researched parenting, but by maturity. My kids' maturity has been my dearest friend.

When I see a younger mom frantic that her son will never be generous with his toys, I try to encourage her that maturity is going to do its part to rectify that. When a little girl can't be separated from her mom for more than five minutes, I remind that mom that maturity will do its work. Just this weekend, I dropped off my big girl at a band camp two hours away without another soul that she knew, and I remembered that 16 years ago she would barely let me out of her sight to use the bathroom. Oh, how maturity has done its good work in her.

As I watch one child of mine preparing for his freshman year in college and another preparing for her freshman year in high school, I see the work of maturity up close. One seems so ready to go, having outgrown what we can teach him here, while it's hard to imagine the younger one being in that spot four years from now, when today she can't even make toast. But maturity will do its work, I have no doubt.

It makes me wonder, then, why we resist getting older. Does maturity cease to be our friend after we turn 21? 30? 45? Do we really get to the point where we say, "Yes, this is it. I'm the best me I'm ever going to be, and I'd like to stop learning and growing right here"? Surely not, but that's sort of what we're doing when we grumble about aging.

It's true that age itself is not making us better. Science tells us that our bodies start declining before we're even old enough to rent a car. Age takes our muscle tone and flawless skin, our hair and our eyesight and our hearing. It takes our speed, which is going to be a hard one for me to swallow. But age doesn't just steal from us; it gives back. If we let it, it gives us maturity. And maturity gives us wisdom, understanding, depth, perspective, compassion, and contentment. It does makes us better--better husbands, wives, children, parents, and friends. Better human beings.

I may not welcome Age when it shows up at my door each October, but if it brings its friend Maturity with it, I will treat it as a welcome guest.