The older my kids get, the more independent they get. This is normal and developmentally appropriate and everything, but it doesn't address how hard it is to let your kids go and do things and think thoughts that are not influenced strongly by YOU, the all-knowing (ha!) parent.
Learning to trust your tween--is there a book out there with that title? If there isn't, there should be. My children are both growing up, natch, and my son is now 11. Which makes him a tween. He is not a typical kid by many measurements, but he is behaving like a tween when he says he'll clean up his room "in a minute" which means NEVER, and "Hang on" means wait fifteen more minutes than you'd intended to.
You can't live your child's life for you, but nobody told me how hard it would be to let go, or let looser, and see your children challenged and struggling. In Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet", he says you have to let your kids out into the world, they are "yours and not yours". Of course he said this in beautifully poetic language which I am too lazy to look up right now.
But the point remains: we have to learn to trust our children to make good decisions, and when they don't, to allow them to fail, within reasonable limits.
There is no how-to manual for dealing with letting go in your heart and your head.
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