Parenting is Both Loving and Not Caring

Kid: “Mom, blah blah blah.”

Mom: “I don’t care. But I do love you!”

Doesn’t that feel good? Not caring can feel so dang good! I don’t care about a lot of things. I don’t care if if I catch the news every day or if I’m a few minutes late for some things. Okay, for several things! And it’s not just me. My husband doesn’t care about the laundry on the floor or if the bed never ever ever gets made again.

I don’t care if my kids earn perfect grades or become impressive athletes. I don’t care if they stop going to church or never leisurely read another book. I will never stop loving these three young humans, but I will never care about absolutely everything they do or do not do.

Like two sides of the same coin, love and not caring go together. You could also say love and letting go, if that sits better. Or, parenting is as much hands off as it is hands on. No matter the words, this work is not for the faint of heart! It may be easy to love our own kid (most of the time), but it is a great challenge to know when not to care.

Straight up, here is the importance of not caring: you will not rest if you 100% care for every single detail of your kid’s life every moment of every day. You cannot be you, a full self, a healthy human, if all you do is care about your kid. Sometimes, it is best not to care.

Let me be clear. There are parents who literally do not care an iota, which is often related to mental health or trauma or addiction. I’m not advocating for that. Do not stop caring for your kid’s basic needs. That is not cool. This is what I mean: I am learning to care less and at times not at all when the timing is right.

Let’s start at the beginning. When a doctor hands a parent a brand new baby, or you receive a child through adoption, you do not promise to protect this child from every possible problem. You do not promise to raise that child to perfection, or become the most remarkable caregiver. Before and after becoming a parent, you are as human as ever. The writer of Ecclesiastes, perhaps the world’s first life coach, assured us there is a time for every season under heaven. I agree. There is a time to care and a time to not care.

I am slowly learning this complex parenting wisdom, which grows more complex as my kids add years to their ages. I feel it in their schoolwork, which I hope they do well and work hard and I will support them as best I can. However, as much as I love for them to do their best, it is perfectly fine that I do not care so much for the end result. I can point out their grades, but not take their work personally. I can remind them and be clear with my concerns, and after that I need to know where my own parental responsibility starts and stops. Their future is completely out of my hands, unlike when they were little.

When they were little, I chose my kids’ day cares and babysitters and often even their friends. Now, none of that is true. They will choose their post-high school path, just as they will choose their own friends. They will choose their hobbies and whether they care that they wear dirty-looking work jeans to school every dang day, making it appear that our family shops for clothes out of the trash bin outside the thrift store. Again, out of my hands.

I love them so much, and I refuse to care for all the details that shape their lives. If parenting is raising small humans to grow into independent and helpful adult humans, then at some point, I have to hand over the burden of caring so much.

Perhaps this is God’s way of loving us, too. In Isaiah 43, God loves us and we belong to God. This chapter is the only moment in the entirely of the Bible when God explicitly states: “I love you.” But like the stoic parent who does not say the words out loud every single day, you know it’s true. The absence of the words do not make the parent’s love for you any less, only quieter. From the first page of Genesis to the last page of Revelation, God’s love for you sings from each chapter.

I will fiercely love my kids as long as I live, and sometimes my love will be elevator music they can hardly hear as they learn to do life on their own. It will be there, my love for them, at times by way of quiet background noise, yet still they will know it is there. Lingering and steady; that I both love and do not care because fierce love risks stifling both our lives. The poet Rainer Rilke puts it this way: “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go, for holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”