Your Mom Is Not Your Friend: Here’s Why!
The idea of being best friends with your parents is easy to think about, especially if you’re a teenager with seemingly cool parents. It’s important to remember that although you can talk to your Mom about absolutely anything in the world, there needs to be a line drawn in the sand the separates her parenting from her friendly advice. Even kids who are incredibly close to their parents can find it easy to think that they’re more of a friend than a mentor, but that’s simply not the case.
Below are just a few of the most important reasons as to why your Mom isn’t able to be your friend.
1. Teaching You to Make Safe and Smart Decisions
Trust us, we’ve all been in a situation where we wish that we had made better decisions. Whether it was taking more time to study for exams or deciding to not go out to a party on a weekend where we made a few mistakes. It’s easy to do things that you think are a good idea at the time but once you get your head screwed on straight, you realize just how big of a mess you’ve gotten yourself into.
Unlike your mother, your friends would be with you every step of the way making all of the same mistakes you’re making only to (hopefully) learn from them in the future. The job of your mom is to make sure that you don’t have to go through all of these difficulties in order to understand what the lesson would be at the end of the path you’re on.
For example, if you want to get yourself involved in some underage drinking it may seem like a great idea to your friends, but it can lead to a variety of problems for yourself in the future. The best part about having a mom? She’s been down that path already and knows everything there is to know about where it’s going to lead you. It is her responsibility to sit you down and talk to you about how your choices are going to affect the rest of your life.
Even though we’d all like to assume that our parents would be okay with every choice, we made in our lives, that’s simply not the case. Some of us still have to explain our adult decisions to our parents because they may not understand how they make sense!
The best advice you can get is to try to listen to your parents because their advice isn’t coming out of thin air, it’s because of things that they’ve done in their past and regretted. Allow yourself to learn from their mistakes so you don’t have to deal with the difficulties on your own.
2. Giving You Insightful Advice to Make You Better
Much like helping you to understand the importance of making smart and safe decisions, your mom is also there to give you insightful advice that will help to make you turn into a better person. Every decision you make in life is either going to have a consequence or a reward and although your mom may not be able to protect you from everything, she can help guide you through situations to help you become a better version of yourself.
It’s far too often for parents that to have a friend-based relationship with their children. This can lead to kids looking at their mother’s advice as something that isn’t important when in reality; it could prevent you from making the biggest mistake of your entire lifetime.
When your mom makes the decision to have a child, it is her duty to ensure that she raises that child to the best of her ability in order to create a contribution to society: you.
3. Enforcing the Concept of Discipline
Take a few moments to think about how you would receive your best friend grounding you or punishing you for something you’ve done. You’d probably just laugh it off and never learn a lesson from your poor choices, right? Well, as a parent that is friends with their kid the exact same thing might happen.
Your mom is also responsible for enforcing disciplinary action in the event of you making a bad decision, such as skipping class or failing to finish projects on time. The entire premise behind discipline is that it prevents you from doing the same thing in the future, in fear of being reprimanded.
If your mom is more of a friend than a parent, you’ll never have the ability to understand the concept of being punished for doing something that either harms yourself or others.
5. Telling You What Friends Won’t
Above all else, your parents are the one group of people in your life that are going to tell you things that your friends typically wouldn’t. Sure, children are typically candid and have the tendency to be more honest than most but as you get older, your friends become increasingly supportive. Having supportive friends is great, until it starts to cloud their judgment to where they can’t tell you the truth about certain things anymore in fear of hurting your feelings.
A great example would be to think about if your mom tells you to change your clothes if they’re dirty. Your friends would probably let you go through the entire school day smelling like dirty laundry, whereas your mom would be willing to make sure that you look as presentable as possible.
If you’re looking for honest advice that is not only going to help you to make the best decisions but to also avoid negative situations, your mom is the best person to turn to because she’s only looking out for your best interests.
As your growing up, it’s important that you don’t expect your mom to be your best friend simply because she can’t. When you get older, you may have the ability to establish a more friend-based relationship, but while you are still developing into your future self your mom is going to be more focused on ensuring that you turn out to be the best person you can be. At the end of the day, all of her advice is only there to help guide you and make the best choices possible.
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