Hanging on Too Tight – Setting Boundaries Without Guilt

I don’t know about you, but I can spend a lot of time wondering how my children and grandchildren are doing. They all live out of town, and I wonder if they are safe…if they are doing well…if they are happy. I find it easy to become so preoccupied with these thoughts I am not thoroughly present. I can be distracted, unaware of the people who are right in front of me.
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When we were in our 20s and 30s many of us learned to say “yes” to everyone and everything. We didn’t wake up one day and decide to become the family’s on-call chaplain, chauffeur, and crisis manager. It happened one small “yes” at a time, until “yes” became our entire identity.

There is a sacrificial love, giving beyond the realm of imagination, which comes with parenting. You can’t really imagine or explain the love you experience for this little person you birthed. But it’s a love that supersedes so many things as you seek to keep them happy, healthy, and whole.

But one day you wake up and realize they are adults. Or if you don’t realize it, it’s probably time you did. They now make their own choices, and you pray that all you invested in their lives bears fruit as they navigate God’s very unique life for them. You can’t be their “yes” woman any longer or you are as the psychologists say, “enabling them.” You may be hindering them from being able to take responsibility for their own lives if you are always “filling in the gaps.” You may be the person they lean on rather than God.

Suddenly, somewhere in our 40s, 50s, or beyond many of us quietly discover a different calling: the holy art of saying “no.”

When Motherhood Becomes Our Security Blanket

Here’s something worth considering honestly as well. For many of us, staying deeply enmeshed in our children’s daily lives, even as they become adults, isn’t really about them anymore. It’s about us.

They can become our preoccupation. If our kids text back quickly, if they still call, if they still need us for something, it feels like proof. Proof that we didn’t fail. Proof that all those exhausting years of carpools and homework and midnight fevers actually meant something.

But here’s the truth and I speak it tenderly to myself as well to you: our worth was never meant to hang on whether our grown children check in. When we quietly need their presence to validate our years of sacrifice, we’ve made them our security system instead of God. And that’s a weight no child, however loving, was ever built to carry.

Even Our Children Can Become an Idol

And here’s another truth. (Trust me, I evaluate everything I write here as relates to me as well.) It might sting a little to hear, but it’s worth saying plainly: anything, even something as beautiful as motherhood, can become an idol when it takes the place that belongs to Christ alone. If our children’s attention has become more central to our peace than our intimacy with Jesus, we’ve shifted our anchor.

Jesus modeled something radically different. Surrounded by crowds who needed Him constantly, He regularly withdrew to quiet places to be alone with the Father (Luke 5:16). He didn’t measure His worth by how many people stayed close. His identity was already secure, rooted in being the beloved Son, not in being needed.

And do you remember when Matthew shared what Jesus said while he was still talking to the crowd, as his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. “He replied to him, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers.” For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother,’” (Matthew 12: 47-50).

Having boundaries is a healthy thing, not a failure of love. It’s an act of faithful stewardship, protecting our hearts and the intimacy that places Jesus first assuring our identity is in Him, not our children. I know this may be hard to hear and digest…but it is true.

5 Ways to Love Your Children Without Losing Yourself

1. Know your identity is in Christ first before you check your phone. Start your day in the Bible and prayer before you check for a text message. Let your first sense of “I’m okay” come from God’s Word, not your notifications.
   “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).
2. Practice pausing before you rescue. When your adult child hits a rough patch, ask God, “Is this mine to fix, or theirs to grow through?” Sometimes love looks like stepping back.
   “Each one should carry their own load” (Galatians 6:5).
3. Say “no” to good things so you can say “yes” to God’s best. Not every request deserves an immediate yes. Pray and ask God if this is something He desires you do as part of His plan for your life. A kind, clear “I can’t this time” is a complete sentence.
   “Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No'” (Matthew 5:37).
4. Reinvest in the people right in front of you. A spouse, a friend, a neighbor… someone in your actual today is waiting for the attention you keep pouring into a phone screen.
   “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have” (Hebrews 13:16).
5. Name your worth out loud, regularly. Say it until you believe it: “I am not a failure if my children don’t call today. I am beloved because He says so — not because they need me.
   “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3).

Maturity doesn’t mean loving your children less. It means finally loving them from security instead of for security. And that shift? It’s where real freedom begins. Trust me. I am learning this with you. It takes time and practice but provides you with new freedom to enjoy God, the plan He has for you, and each day as He creates it. The precious new people He places in your life stand waiting for you on the other side!