There’s a parenting philosophy out there that claims parents should be the people in control. A parent is someone who has kids, tries to keep them out of danger, deals with their shenanigans, and raises them to be productive citizens so they can eventually be set free into society. They love their kids through this process, but always as a somewhat despotic, distant figure.

In this way of thinking, “friendship” isn’t the word you would use to describe the relationship between parents and a child, since it fails to capture the wide crevasse that lies between them. This is one illustration of the train of thought I have in mind, found floating around the Internet:

Now I’ll admit, some of this does indeed ring true, and many movie plots revolve around the stereotypes that result from characterizing the parent-child relationship in this way. For example, on the one hand you have the “cool” parent who tries way too hard to be friends with their kids. These are the parents who hand out beer and pot at house parties. They provide absolute license for their kids in an effort to be cool, or perhaps more accurately, in absolute terror of what might happen if they set boundaries and tell their child, “No”.

On the other hand, you have the detached-but-well-meaning parents who are bogged down with work (or some other more important thing) and have no time for family life. But for some reason, they also want their kids to be productive and respectable citizens. As they become more and more distant from their kids, they make sure to yell at them and ground them every now and then to keep them in line. For these parents, children are primarily a burden, yet another business transaction to itemize and manage. “I’m your parent, not your friend,” is the predominant line.

We all waver between these extremes, but there’s a weak link in both: These approaches fail to see that striving for true, meaningful friendship with your kids (and your spouse, but that’s another blog post!) is essential for healthy family life.

What Is Friendship?

In college, I was a philosophy major, and one of my senior year classes was a seminar on the philosophy of friendship. We spent the whole semester trying to figure out what the heck friendship is. In the end, we walked away with the realization that friendship is a lot more complicated – or as philosophers will often note, perhaps more simple – than we had initially believed.

But what was clear by the end of the semester was that friendship, in its highest and truest form, is something to aspire to. True friendship is about seeking the good of the other, and in so doing, coming to realize the good within yourself.

St. Thomas Aquinas carries this line of reasoning pretty far, characterizing the highest of the virtues – charity – as the friendship of man and God. The whole goal of life is to be a friend of God. Obviously, this challenges the idea that parents shouldn’t be friends with their children.

Who better to develop a deep and true friendship with than the people who you spend each day with, and who know you inside and out? If the goal of life is to be friends with our Maker, the one who knows us most intimately, we can and should strive for true friendships with the children we have been entrusted with.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean we relinquish authority and responsibility over our kids. It actually means taking radical responsibility for their lives and making every decision we do out of love for them.

True friendship, then, the kind we want ourselves and our kids to aspire to, makes demands on us and is not pure license. But it’s also difficult to say exactly what that looks like, and I’m still learning.

Here are some reflections on friendship learned through my children:

Friends Challenge Each Other: As a homeschooling mom, I make it a goal to challenge the kids on a daily basis. But the funny thing is, they do the same for me! For example, I can’t count the number of times I’ve been ready to postpone my workouts over the past six months (I’m working towards completing my first sprint triathlon this summer). The kids have this amazing ability to see when I’m just trying to get out of it and when I really need to take a night off. There’s no way I would have been able to meet my goals without them.

Friends Assume the Best of Each Other: This has become a bit of a mantra for our family, and it’s made a huge difference in the way we treat each other. For example. If my son is sick and has been up coughing all night, we can give him some grace during the day if he gets snappy. We can assume he’s just tired and needs to rest. There’s no dark and dismal anger management issue going on. He just needs food and sleep. Of course this can go too far, and if he starts to make it a habit when he’s well-rested there will be an intervention! But generally speaking, I’ve found that this approach is great for keeping fighting at bay and solidifying trust between family members.

Friends Communicate Openly: Our family assemblies provide an opportunity to step back and evaluate our goals and habits on the larger scale, but it’s also crucial to take time to foster open communication with each child. Having a big family can make this challenging, so we try to take as many opportunities as we can to have one-on-one time with the kids. This might be something as simple as taking a walk around the block! It doesn’t have to be complicated, and I’m always amazed at how much I can learn about my children in a small window of time.

Friends Love Learning Together: Some parents might say their lives ended when they had kids, but I feel my life only just began with the birth of our children. My favorite way to learn with them is to encounter the world through new adventures and experiences. In the last year alone, I’ve had so many new adventures with the kids, including snorkeling and kayaking for the first time, a surf trip to Cocoa Beach, training for a sprint triathlon, and taking many exciting road trips.

The Family As a Unit of Friends

Friendship faces a new challenge in this digital age: the use of technology to form and maintain relationships. Social media platforms in particular use the language of friendship – “friend requests”, “friending” and “unfriending” – and have the power to create an illusion of social connectivity. But study after study shows that the more people rely on these platforms for human relationships, the more unhappy they become. This is especially true of adolescents and teens.

Now more than ever, parents need to be friends with their kids. We have the opportunity to show them what it means to be a friend, not just to people outside our family unit, but most importantly, to those we live with day in and day out.

Being a friend to our child means helping him or her develop a sense of self that isn’t based on avatars, but instead on a true experience of themselves as humans striving, first and foremost, to love others in a deep and meaningful way. It means challenging them to grow beyond their own self-limitations so they can become the people they are called to be, but always in dialogue with the world that is given to them.

When our kids bicker and argue with each other, we always ask them to step back and realize something simple and beautiful: That brother or sister you’re fighting with is your best friend. That person has been entrusted to you. He or she will be there for you in your darkest moments, when you feel completely alone and afraid. And they know the best side of you in a way that no one else does.

My wish is that one day – maybe even today – my kids will be able to step back and see me in the same light. To realize that the honor of being their mother is also, in the deepest sense, the joy of being their friend.