Dear LPG, 

Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Once a man, twice a child’?

I have often heard it said like many other idioms and sayings.  It is something many older family members say. Still, it only has a little significance when you are young and so busy with work, family and all the other details of life that need to be held together in the average pre-retirement working lifestyle.  

I grew up in a large family and helped to produce a big one myself, but I am now a retired person at the stage of life where I have a little more choice about what I do with my time.  This means that my income is no longer something I am so focused on improving, and my children are busy working out what is happening in their lives and sorting out all the things that worried me just a few years ago.

All that freedom often comes with a big, lonely home, and one solution to that problem for those who are not naturally happy with long periods of their own company is to join forces with a friend or a member of the family who finds themselves in the same predicament. 

It took me a little while to fill my life with all sorts of activities, but while my schedule was whole again, there was too much space at home.  The answer for both of us was my mum, who also lived alone.  She and I have lived in the same space for over ten years.   I stress that she is a very independent person with her own full weekly schedule, although hers and mine do cross from time to time, and having someone to eat with and talk to in the evenings is good. 

My siblings have visited many more weekends since she moved in, so the house is more used again.  

Those family sessions are just like everyone else’s, no doubt, with lots of chat about many things, family history and differing opinions resulting in lots of guidance offered to each other.   But, as the years have passed, I have noticed that, among all the talking, more and more of it has been about what my mum should and should not do.  One brother, in particular, always advises her on what she should eat, wear and do with her time.  It all started as advice, but over the past few years, I have noticed it becoming a bit more than that and quite controlling.  

Undoubtedly, he wants the best for her, as we all do, but if he has plans to visit her, she will rearrange her schedule and often cancel pre-planned visits to day centres or with friends to fit into his.  His advice on the best breakfast choices has turned into his turning up with supplies of the cereal that he thinks she should have for breakfast, and rather than tell him that she has different favourites, she is pretending that she accepts his to keep him happy.  

I have always felt that it is essential for every parent to have one-on-one time with each child, and what happens is what she tells me rather than what I witness for myself.   I also offer my advice occasionally, but until now, it has not been my place to interfere.  However, I had to draw the line when that brother told me that I should not be ‘allowing’ her to entertain a particular friend who he thinks is not the best influence on her.  I don’t believe that my thoughts on her friend are the issue; it is the fact that because I am the person she lives with, he feels that I should be sanctioning her activities.

That was when I learned the true meaning of that saying. 

As she has become older, there are indeed a few more things that we children all need to help her with. While we sometimes need to let her know that we disagree with some of the things that she prefers to do or eat, she has a mind of her own, and I feel that it is vital that she does what she wants to even if we kids are not sure that it is the best thing for her.  

I will actively dissuade her from sitting on an armless chair for too long in case she has a nod-off moment and falls, and I hope that there is actual logic in that, but it is so easy to take the role of ‘children of an older parent’ to the extreme where we are telling them what to do before we really need to.

It is a fine line but one which we need to observe.  Children have a lot to learn, so control is essential, but parents must work out when to trust them and leave them to their own devices. Still, when our parents get a little older, I think it is imperative not to forget that if they are independent, too much advice can become another way of imposing rules they don’t need to adhere to.

Without trying to invoke a family feud, I would like to ask all siblings to keep an eye on each other because it is so easy to, with the best will in the world, become controlling without ever realising it, and sometimes a brother or sister might benefit from being made aware of what is happening… 

CC, Dulwich