It’s hard, as a parent, to avoid doing too much for my child.  For one thing, I hate watching her struggle.  It’s difficult to not step in and “right the ship” whe she can’t complete what she has set out to do, no matter how big or small the task.

It’s also tough for me as a perfectionist.  I’ve tried over the years to back away from a tendency to “tuck in the corners” of other people’s beds (speaking metaphorically, of course; I hate making beds).  I’ve forced myself into accepting the reality that life consists entirely of things that aren’t quite up to the highest standards.

I sat in church Sunday listening to a guest speaker named Johnny Evans speaking about encouragement, and he started down a path I thought I could complete before he did.  As he spoke of watching his daughter struggle running a race, I felt as if he was going to say that he ran out on the track, scooper her up in his arms and ran the end of the race with her in his arms.  That’s not where he went, though, and I’m glad to hear it.

How the story ended is unimportant to what I’m going to eventually get to in this post.  What stood out to me wasn’t that his young daughter was in a race, or that she was falling way behind everyone else, or that her partner in the race ultimately became an encouragement to her by jogging next to her and speaking words of encouragement to build her up for a relatively strong finish.  What stood out was the realization I came to: we, as parents, should never, ever attempt to finish the “race” for our children.  We are the trainers.  We prepare them for the journey, but a good parent knows when his or her role stops, and the child’s role starts.

If we weren’t all forced to learn how to do things on our own, we’d all still be getting fed by our parents.  We’d have a bunch of six-foot-tall, post-pubescent adults being carried around on our parents’ hips.  Instead, our parents equipped us for the future, but let us live through the highs and lows on our own.

So we tie bibs around our kids’ necks.  We show them how division works.  We give them a helmet, knee pads and a push down the street.  But the line between good parenting and coddling exists at the point where we hand them the spoon for the first time, or tell them to do their homework, or let go of the bike seat.

The fall will hurt, and we can’t absorb the pain for them.  But, once they learn to balance the bike, they can ride on their own.

Back to the race, and the metaphor that jumped out in my head: as parents, we run the first leg of the relay, not the last.  We do not take the baton and try to make up ground; we give it our all to give them a good lead, and let God take them to the finish line.