When Your Kids Are Smarter Than You Are

There comes a time in every parent's life when their child realizes that the child is smarter than the parent. A time? Ha! Try every hour from the age of 8 through about 80. In the college years, the challenges change from dealing with a precocious but malleable child to guiding a new adult.

With college student kids, or kids who have gone to work and are making their own way with or without higher education, you have to give them the respect they deserve. They are learning a lot every day, about things that didn't even exist when we were their age. They want to test their knowledge, and even when they come across as extremely self-confident, they want to know whether they've got it right, in their parents' eyes.

As with younger colleagues at work, the college-aged kid can be both fascinating and irritating sometimes. It's a good sort of irritation, provided you can remember not to feel threatened. We aren't used to being shown up by our kids.

Now is the time to realize that we are not in competition with them. We are still their coach. The coach doesn't run as fast or jump as high as the athlete and isn't expected to. She is there to pass along guidance and to let the young person continue to develop to their fullest.

Photo: Indian_Rhinoceros, by Kristof vt, on Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License.