Class of 2022: Go forth in confidence

Pea Ridge High School graduation is Saturday.

More than 160 students will walk across the stage to receive their diplomas.

Graduation is a time of change, for parents as well as for the students.

Despite many students thinking of graduation as an “end,” it’s really more of a beginning, a commencement to something larger, something more. It’s their passage into the world of adulthood — to jobs, to further education, to responsibility as well as privilege.

Each stage of graduation brings greater privileges and more responsibilities.

The Class of 2022 has seen its share of challenges and sorrows — from a classmate whose life was saved by quick thinking of teachers when she passed out to losing a classmate to death to the fears and restrictions of the covid pandemic. They’ve been experiencing the vicissitudes of life in microcosm.

Much has been written this past decade about “helicopter parents” — parents who hover over their grown offspring protecting, guiding, bossing their adult children. Ultimately, overprotective parents smother and handicap their children preventing them from developing into the mature adults they were designed to be.

When a baby is born, the parent bears the total responsibility for feeding, protecting, caring for that child. With each passing year, that responsibility changes and the parents have to change their tactics. If a kindergarten child is parented as an infant is, or a teen is parented as an elementary-aged child is, then that child is handicapped and will not develop properly.

So, too, when a child becomes an adult, they need to be allowed to be an adult. They will make mistakes. Sometimes parents have to sit back, maybe “sit on their hands” to prevent themselves from interfering. It hurts to watch our children hurt or suffer, but some of the best lessons come from failure.

Parenting doesn’t really end. It changes.

“Adulting” as some of the young people call it, is hard. But, life’s hard. And learning to deal with the good and the bad with grace is what helps us mature.

“Parenting is for the sanctification of the parents. The children can get sanctified when they become parents,” Debby Beisner, mother of eight, once said.

Parents, let go. Stay close, love them, guide them when they ask, encourage them, listen to them and pray for them. But, don’t smother them or prevent their growing into responsible adults.

Graduates, go forth confident in the lessons you’ve learned and treasure each day, each relationship.