Why You Should Never Tell a Parent to Stop Being Their Child’s Friend
Last month, I stood in my neighbor Lila’s backyard at an end-of-school BBQ, iced tea sweating through my paper cup, listening to a group of parents swap stories. Sarah, a mom of a 14-year-old daughter who lives two streets over, mentioned her kid still sends her three to five silly cat memes a day when she’s at school, and texts her when she’s hanging out with friends to say she saw a dog that looked like theirs. Then Karen, the new high school counselor who just moved onto the block, leaned forward and said, “That’s sweet, but you really shouldn’t be your kid’s friend. You have to be a parent first, or you’ll blur the lines.”
I’d heard that exact line before, three years earlier, at my son Jake’s 10th grade parent-teacher conference. Jake’s 17 now, and after my ex and I split when he was 12, it was just the two of us in this house. We got into the habit of doing everything together: building terrible IKEA furniture on weekends, binging old Star Trek episodes when it rained, stopping for $1 milkshakes after school because neither of us felt like cooking. His math teacher pulled me aside after our meeting, frowned at his file, and said, “Jake talks about you like you’re one of his buddies. I see this a lot with single parents. You don’t want to overstep that boundary—you need to be his parent, not his friend.”
I left that conference feeling guilty, like I’d been doing this whole parenting thing wrong this whole time. For the next two weeks, I tried to dial it back. When Jake ran out of his room to show me a TikTok of a kid falling off a skateboard, I said I was busy paying bills and to go show it to one of his friends. When he asked if we could skip my grocery run to go see a matinee, I said no, we had a schedule to stick to. I stopped laughing at his dumb jokes about how I can’t parallel park to save my life, and started reminding him more often about chores and homework deadlines. Within a week, he stopped coming to me with the small stuff. One night I came home from walking the dog and found him sitting on the front porch steps crying, his hood up. When I asked what was wrong, he just shrugged and said “Nothing. It’s fine.”
A few days later, we were driving to his Saturday soccer practice, and he mumbled from the passenger seat that I’d been weird lately. I finally told him what the teacher had said, that I was worried I was too casual, too much of a friend and not enough of an authority figure. He just stared at me for a second, then snickered and said, “Dude, you’re my mom. Of course you get to ground me if I stay out late. You’re also the only person who gets my Star Trek memes. What’s the problem with that?”
That comment stuck with me. This whole idea that you can’t be both a parent and a friend to your kid is built on a lie—that being friendly means no boundaries, no discipline, no clear role. But that’s not how it works for most people. I can be the person Jake vents to about a fight with his best friend, and still take his car keys for a week when he comes home two hours past curfew. I can laugh at his bad jokes and share my milkshake with him, and still say no when he asks to go to an overnight party with no adult chaperones. Being friends doesn’t mean I’m his equal, or that I dump all my adult problems on him. It just means I’m the person he feels comfortable being honest with, even when what he has to say is messy or embarrassing.
After Karen said what she said at the BBQ, Sarah just nodded and smiled, but I saw her twist her wedding ring around her finger, the way people do when they feel insecure. Later, when everyone else wandered off to watch the kids play cornhole, she pulled me aside and said she hears that line all the time now that her daughter’s a teen. Her husband travels for work three weeks out of four, so it’s just the two of them most nights. She likes that her daughter comes to her first when something goes wrong, instead of hiding it. I told her what happened with me and Jake, and she exhaled and said she’d been worrying about it for months.
The thing is, if you’re wondering whether you’re doing it wrong, you can check two simple, concrete things. First, do you still set clear, consistent expectations that your kid knows not to cross? If you’re okay saying no even when it makes them mad, you’re still being a parent. Second, are you asking them to carry your emotional baggage, instead of the other way around? If you’re not unloading all your stress about work or dating or exes onto your kid, and you’re still the one taking care of them, you haven’t blurred any lines that matter. If those two things are true, what does it matter if you’re also friends?
It’s not the parenting style everyone picks, and that’s fine. Some people prefer more distance, more clear separation between parent and kid. But nobody gets to walk into your life and tell you that you have to push your kid away just to follow some unwritten rule. Last week, Jake and I went to see the new Spider-Man movie. He snuck a giant bag of Sour Patch Kids into the theater even though I told him the concession stands charge way too much, and we shared it in the back row. He told me about the girl he’s been talking to on the bus, and I told him about the stupid fight I had with the home insurance company over a fallen tree branch. We walked out to the car, and he threw his arm over my shoulder for a second, like he does when he thinks none of his friends are around. It’s still working for us. Some days it’s messy, some days I mess up, but I wouldn’t trade it.
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