My little boy is growing up!

Actually, both my "little" boys are growing up, but the one who gave me a twinge of nostalgia recently is Daniel.

Last month we were down in West Virginia trying to accomplish more cleaning and organizing of our house (which we still haven't sold).  Daniel proposed, somewhat off-handedly, that he would like to stay behind in the house when the rest of us went back to Ohio and see how he felt about living alone.  I started thinking aloud about how it could be accomplished...and much to my surprise, the suggestion started becoming a plan. 

It really was a good idea.  Daniel got to spend more time with his WV friends, and finished off some cleaning tasks that we hadn't had time to get to before we left.  After three days of "living alone" he took the train up to Kentucky, spent the night at my grandmother's house, and helped her with some tasks at her house before we arrived that afternoon to pick him up and take him home with us.  It was nothing extraordinary for a nineteen-year-old to do.

vlogging his ride over the Ohio State Fair

Except.  This is the nineteen-year-old who, just five years ago, followed me everywhere like a shadow.  He would even sit outside the bathroom door demanding a blow-by-blow account of what I was doing inside.  This is the nineteen-year-old who, even a couple of years ago, had to be convinced to go to a friend's birthday party.  This is the nineteen-year-old who had never spent the night away from us since the day we met, not even to sleep at Grandma's house while we stayed in a nearby hotel.  So spending three nights on his own--even with friends' families inviting him over for dinner and generally keeping him company--was a developmental leap.

In adoption circles, many people use the term "family age," meaning how long a child has been in their new family.  When a child is born into a family, they go through well-described developmental stages in their relationship to their parents.  In infancy, they learn that adults can be trusted to meet their needs.  Then they learn to distinguish themselves from their parents and assert their own point of view, always returning to their trusted parents as a safe base for exploration.  And so on.  When a child joins a new family, it makes sense to think that they will need to go through all these same stages, at least in an abbreviated fashion, in order to arrive at a secure bond of a type appropriate for their chronological age.  Thinking of a child's behavior in terms of their "family age" can make sense of otherwise mystifying "immaturity."  Maybe when a newly adopted teenager wants to be with you all.day.long they're not showing a deplorable lack of independence but rather diligently working their way through the infant stage of the relationship.  And maybe the most helpful response is not to tell them to go entertain themselves (although that can be helpful if it preserves parental sanity!) but to playfully fold them up along with the clean laundry they just sat in, or to indulge their desire to have you pick out their clothes for them every day.  At any rate, I have found the idea of "family age" helpful in increasing my patience with behaviors that don't match my expectations for a child's chronological age, or deciding whether or not to push participation in activities that would be typical for same-age peers, or even thinking through what kinds of discipline might work.

Daniel at age 14, hovering

And now?  Now I don't have to think about family age so often.  Our young man is, for the most part, a typical young man, working through the age-appropriate task of becoming independent.  And, like most parents, I find myself looking back with just a twinge of nostalgia.  He may not have done it on the usual time table, but my little boy is really, truly growing up.