The Parent Thing

I love my father. When I was a kid he truly was my hero. My dad was tall, handsome and wonderful in my child's eyes. He took time to read to me, threw the ball with me, played tennis with me and taught me how to ride my bike. If I had a problem, I could always go to him for help and guidance. He's well educated, well traveled, and a successful business man now recently retired from running his own business.
What I have experienced as an adult child is that this same childhood paragon has little interest in what goes on in my life and little, if any, tolerance of any opinion contrary to his. Though we are on the same page when it comes to politics and such, he doesn't care to hear anything that is not a mimic of his own opinions because he is after all, an authority on whatever subject is at hand. He will close down a conversation and tune out as it suits him, leaving you wondering why you bothered to attempt to talk to him in the first place. Though he asks what you are up to, he is only interested in hearing the Twitter version at best. His world revolves around him.
Never having been a parent myself, I cannot speak for what it is like to be the parent of a child, much less of an adult child, but I imagine after playing the role of parent, a person might be anxious to get back to paying attention to their own life and no longer have to worry about their children now that they are adults. Fair enough.
Now that we are in our fabulous fifties, I would caution to take the lessons of our own experiences with our parents and use them to help us in how we relate to our own children or younger adults in our lives. Being the authority on everything and discounting the opinions of our children, nieces and nephews, and other young ones, is a lost opportunity for everyone involved. Coming into your own as an adult, and that heady feeling you should have when you finally "arrive" now that you are of a certain age, is wonderful. Letting ego take over is not. While your children may always look to you for your wisdom and love, they also need to be looked upon as the adults they are, which includes being fully capable of intelligent conversation and discourse, with some ideas that you may not have ever thought about. It's quite possible that they too are an authority of sorts in certain areas of life, and that you could learn from them. For example, I would be lost in technology if it were not for my twenty something friends who have turned me onto many wonderful things in technology going as far back as teaching me about texting, telling me about MySpace (yep that long ago) and how to manage my files better (DropBox!). I would be a novice in knitting still, if it were not for my twenty something friends who had the patience to teach me things that I now know. My twenty somethings also remind me how important it is to keep my voice and be heard, to never stop being a rebel to the cause.
Never stop learning, never stop LISTENING and always remember the lessons you learned from how your parents treat you, so that depending on your experience, you can change it, or model it. Ego makes us feel inadequate if someone much younger (or anyone of any age really) knows a lot more than we do about certain things. Our souls however, allow us to  express our innate curiosity and the strong desire to want to know even more than we already do! If we feel secure in all of the wisdom and knowledge we have acquired by the time we have reached our fifties, then we know that it is a given that other people have things they can learn from us no matter how old or young they are. We don't have to be concerned with having to be responsible to know it all, even when it comes to our children. It's OK if they know things that we don't. They have spent their young lives learning things from us that they didn't know, why not let them take their turn now? I'm guessing they would love to show you.

Questions
How do you relate to younger adults?
When you discover that younger adults know more about something than you do, how does that make you feel?
How willing are you to ask for help from a younger adult, or your child in teaching you something you don't know?
Have you given any thought to what kind of parent to your adult child you want to be?
 What do you want your relationship to be like? How are you going to go about developing the relationship you want?

Exercise: Be aware of your attitude towards younger and older generations

Post Script: This post would not have been complete without the loving thoughts I have towards all of the twenty somethings that are in my life who would not likely read this blog because they are not in their fifties!