Written by Elizabeth Cole

My son and his friends are obsessed with Rocket League. So when the creators released a new iPad app, I got the request within hours. “Everyone at school has it, Mom.”

I did what I always do and pulled up the app, read the reviews, checked the age rating, and dug into the privacy settings.  It collected too much data for comfort: His location. His contact info. (Just to name a couple.) I, of course, said no.

What followed was the full middle school symphony: the “But everyone at school has it!” argument, the dramatic sighs, the frustrated “That’s not fair,” and the rotating argument that maybe I just hadn’t understood, and if he explained it differently, I might change my mind. He wasn’t being a brat. He was being a middle schooler who desperately wanted to belong. And I felt that ache deep in my bones. I remembered exactly what it felt like to be the only kid without the thing everyone else seemed to have – to sit with that quiet fear of being left out, different, or somehow less than.

I understood him completely. And I still had to say no. And I felt completely alone in it. 

There have been nights where I’ve caved just to end the standoff because parenting alone means there’s nobody to “tag in” when I’m exhausted. And, there have been nights where I’ve come down harder than I needed to, just to make it stop. Both felt like failures the next morning. This time, I wanted to find the thing in the middle. So this time, I had to be strong. I ended the night by telling him a firm no. He was so mad at me. We went to bed and I felt absolutely awful. I barely slept that night. 

The next morning, he didn’t say another word about it, but I brought it up anyway. I wanted him to know that I am for him. I want him to be part of the group. I want him to be able to join his friends and not feel left out. I looked into whether I could turn off those settings. (I couldn’t.)  I even told him about a time when I felt left out, and that I understood exactly what he was feeling. But none of that changed my answer. Kids are resilient, thankfully. He moved on faster than I did. 

When you’re single parenting, holding the line can feel incredibly lonely. There’s no one to fall back on when you’re exhausted, no one to reassure you afterward that you made the right call. And maybe part of what makes it so hard is that we remember the pain ourselves – the sting of feeling hurt, left out, unwanted, or like we didn’t quite belong. And the last thing we want is for our kids to feel even an ounce of that pain; every part of us wants to protect them from it. On the other side of that pain and disappointment is this: We’re making wise decisions for our kids and having boundaries that are going to have lasting effects well into their adulthood. I don’t get it right all of the time, but I remind myself over and over, I’m not raising a good kid, I’m raising a healthy, wise, strong adult.

I’m on the journey with you, Solo Parents – You’re doing a great job!