Hey there, Jen here, and this is a happy bit.

My second oldest is now the tallest kid in our family.

I'm 5-11, and we just, moments before I started recording this, stood back to back

and found out that we are equivalent.

I couldn't believe it.

He's 14 years old, which means he could grow another 5 or six inches, making him six, four, or five.

And yeah, I'm just shocked and still getting over the shock as I record this. But the whole thing

kind of made me start thinking about parenting and adolescence and growth. And they thought back

to what I learned in grad school about parenting.

One of the things that sticks out in my mind that I really remember is this diagram that my

professor, Sedalia Kras, showed us on the blackboard. And it was like this funnel. And the bigger

side was on the left of the page. And then the funnel got

smaller and smaller and smaller on the right side of the page. Now on the left, it was the age of

the child and the measurement was control. So essentially this diagram, if you can picture it,

is showing that the most successful outcomes for kids

happen when they perceive that control from the parents is gradually decreasing. Reverse that

and the kids who perceive control is getting greater with age have worse outcomes. So what does this mean for us who are

our parents? Well, obviously as our kids grow, they want to feel like they have more freedom.

And as long as they consistently feel like there's more and more and more freedom, the outcomes are

great. So remember in grad school thinking, okay, we've got to be really controlling when they're preschoolers

so that when they're in high school, they'll have this perception of, you know, increased freedom,

but we'll still have a little bit of control. Well, of course, real parenting that all backfired.

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