By Tiffani Dhooge
“Children should be seen and not heard.”
I hated it when they said that. And yet… somehow, it embedded itself deep inside me anyway.
When it was my turn to parent, I didn’t even realize it was there—until it started coming out of my mouth.
It showed up in how I reacted.
It shaped how I showed up.
It built walls I didn’t even know I was building.
I’m not here to be your friend. I’m your parent.
My job isn’t to make you feel good about every decision. It’s to raise a contributing member of society. We can be friends LATER—when you’re paying your own bills, carrying your own weight, and living your own consequences. But TODAY, my job is bigger than being liked.”
I grew up believing that kids were supposed to listen. Not talk back. Not negotiate. Not challenge. So when my son started pushing back with ideas of his own, it triggered something I didn’t even realize was buried inside me.
It felt like he was questioning my authority.
Questioning my judgment.
Questioning me.
And the truth is, I was already carrying around the fear that I was failing.
I was doing everything I knew to do: providing, protecting, setting boundaries—and still walking around with that heavy, hollow feeling that it wasn’t enough.
That I wasn’t enough.
So when he started pushing back, when he had opinions of his own, it didn’t feel like normal teenage behavior. It felt like proof. Proof that I was getting it wrong.
Proof that no matter how hard I worked, I was missing something.
I couldn’t separate his development from my own fear of failure.
I couldn’t hear his voice for what it really was
All I could feel was the weight of not measuring up.
And when you’re already questioning whether you’re doing it right, even a normal conversation can feel like a threat.
I wasn’t scared of losing him.
I was scared I wasn’t enough to help him build the life that he deserved.
It’s a terrifying thing when the way you love isn’t received the way you meant it to be.
But here’s what I know now:
Conversation doesn’t diminish your authority.
It refines it.
It took me a long time—and a lot of uncomfortable moments—to realize that my job was never just to protect him….it was to prepare him to stand.
with strength,
with boundaries,
and with the courage to sit in the hard conversations.
“Loving him well” meant standing in the weight of my own fear and stepping back anyway
so he could have the space to find his own way forward.
Because if I silenced every conversation that made me uncomfortable,
I wasn’t raising a leader.
I was raising someone who would second-guess himself forever.
And that’s not the legacy I wanted to leave behind.
