The Questions That Keep Following Me…

For years, these thoughts have lived in notebooks, conversations, and quiet moments. I never really imagined anyone else would want to read them. But they have stayed with me long enough that I feel they are worth sharing.

Why now?

Because I am at a stage of parenting where you begin to set them free… and yet hold tight to the trust, the upbringing, the values you have given them.

You watch them make their own choices. You know they will make mistakes. You know some lessons cannot be taught, they have to be lived. And slowly, love begins to change form.

Sometimes, it is important that love is not clingy.

When love is not attachment, their wings don’t fear. They soar high because they know that what holds us together is always just a flight away.

I believe this change is important in a parent for a child to truly become free-spirited.

And strangely, when I look back, I realise that this process of letting go begins much earlier than we think.

Have you ever thought about the child who is crying the most in kindergarten?

Why are some children unsettled for days, while others slowly become playful, curious and comfortable?

Of course, every child is different. But over the years, I have often noticed that the child’s emotional state cannot always be separated from that of the parent’s.

When a parent is fearful, the child senses it.

When a parent is anxious, the child often carries some of that anxiety too.

When a parent is unsure whether the child will manage without them, the child begins to feel that uncertainty.

So, for every child that is unsettled in kindergarten there is a parent back at work or home who is anxious.

Children sense far more than we realise.

Sometimes, the child crying in kindergarten has a parent sitting at home wondering, Is she okay? Is he missing me? Will they manage without me?

And perhaps the child is wondering exactly the same thing.

That small separation at the kindergarten door may be one of the earliest lessons in trust — for the child, yes, but equally for the parent.

Today, I am standing at a very different stage of parenting. Letting go is no longer about a classroom door. It is about trusting them with a much bigger world.

And yet the questions remain strangely similar.

How much do we hold?

When do we step back?

When do we guide?

When do we trust?

These are not questions that have come to me recently. They have stayed with me through almost two decades of parenting, through years of working with children, learning, observing, questioning and forming very strong beliefs about what children truly need from us.

Perhaps what has changed now is that I feel ready to share them.

Because I have come to believe that raising a free-spirited child requires something from us as parents too — the courage to loosen our hold without loosening the bond.