They Don’t Need You Like They Used To

By Derek Colvin, LPC-S, CGT - The Giant Therapist

Real. Raw. Unfiltered reflections on the ache and the beauty of letting our kids grow up.

The Moment You Realize Something Has Shifted

There’s a particular ache that settles in a parent’s chest long before anyone calls it grief. It doesn’t arrive with milestones or dramatic changes. It shows up quietly, almost innocently, in the empty spaces where certain moments used to live. Maybe it’s the afternoon you realize your house is unusually quiet and no one is asking what movie you want to watch. Maybe it’s the birthday your teenager spends with friends instead of gathered around the dinner table. Or maybe it’s the slow awareness that no one races to sit beside you on the couch anymore. These aren’t catastrophic moments; in fact, they’re completely normal. But they carry a tenderness that can catch you off guard, because you don’t usually know it’s the last time they reach for your hand or the last time they run toward you with unfiltered excitement. You only realize it in hindsight, once that chapter has already closed and the next one begins without your permission.

When You’re No Longer the Center of Their World

When kids are small, your life is filled with the constant hum of being needed. You’re the one who has the answers. The one they look to for comfort, reassurance, guidance. Your identity is woven into their everyday needs - scraped knees, bedtime stories, endless questions, the predictable chaos of a house full of growing personalities. But as they step into adolescence, something shifts that you can’t quite prepare for. Their world expands beyond the walls of your home, and suddenly you’re no longer the gravitational center of their universe. Friends, peers, ideas, and experiences start shaping them in ways you can’t control or fully understand. It’s not rejection, it’s development, but it can easily feel like loss. That’s often where parents struggle, because the role that once felt so clear becomes blurry. You move from being the authority they depend on to a presence they occasionally turn toward, and that transition can stir up old fears and hidden insecurities you didn’t realize were still living inside you.

The Fear That Shapes Us More Than We Admit

Looking back, I can see how much of my early parenting was powered by fear. I became a dad at seventeen, raised by a mom who were also too young when they had me. My dad was barely around. Generational fear was already in the room before I even knew what it was. So when my oldest daughter became a teenager, I tried to control her world in ways that had more to do with protecting her from my past than supporting her future. I wasn’t trying to limit her; I was trying to save her from repeating the story I still carried shame about. But fear-based parenting doesn’t land as love. It lands as restriction, judgment, pressure, and mistrust. It took me a long time to see that. With my younger kids, I’ve been able to lead with more openness, more dialogue, and more trust. And while I’m grateful for that growth, I’m also aware that my oldest carried the weight of my unfinished story far more than she ever should have. This season of parenting, where kids become adults and old patterns surface, invites a level of honesty most of us don’t reach until life forces us to. But it’s the honesty that makes repair possible.

Repair Isn’t an Apology, It’s Presence

One thing I’ve learned as both a therapist and a father is that repair isn’t about delivering the perfect apology or explaining your intentions. Repair is about creating space for your child, no matter how old they are, to share their experience without you rushing to defend yourself. It’s about saying, “I may not have understood what it felt like for you then, but I want to understand it now.” It’s about listening long enough that you can see your part clearly instead of trying to rewrite the story in a way that feels more comfortable. For those of us who carry our own wounds, unrepaired or dismissed by the generation before us, the desire to offer something different to our kids becomes even stronger. And yet that desire requires a humility that isn’t easy. Owning the ways we got it wrong, even when we had the best intentions, is uncomfortable. But refusing to own it creates a distance that grows larger with every year. Your kids don’t need you to have been perfect. They need you to be someone they can come to now without fear of being dismissed or misunderstood.

Loving Them Without Making Them Carry Your Grief

One of the hardest parts of watching your kids grow is learning how to hold your own sadness without expecting them to hold it with you. They start choosing their friends over family dinner, or celebrating milestones away from home, or building a life that doesn’t revolve around your presence, and even when you applaud their freedom, a part of you still feels the sting of what’s changing. That sadness is real, and it deserves space, but it isn’t something your kids should be responsible for softening or fixing. They shouldn’t have to dim their excitement or adjust their plans to protect you from the ache of transition. Healthy parenting in this stage is the ability to say, “I’m proud of the life you’re building, and I’m also a little sad because things look different now, and I can hold both without placing that weight on you.” That kind of emotional differentiation keeps the relationship tender and open. It gives your kids the freedom to grow without feeling guilty for the distance that naturally comes with adulthood. And it allows you to grieve honestly without losing the connection you’ve worked so hard to build.

The Unexpected Gift of This Season

As painful as the shift can be, this stage of parenting also offers something beautiful. When your life is no longer shaped by constant urgency, you begin to notice your partner in a new way. You have time to talk without being interrupted. Time to reflect instead of react. Time to remember why you chose each other in the first place. Some marriages struggle here, because all the unresolved tension that was easy to ignore when the kids needed everything from you suddenly stands exposed. But for others, this becomes a season of reconnection, a chance to rebuild intimacy, laughter, rhythm, and softness that got buried under years of exhaustion. You also get to know your kids as adults, which is its own kind of joy. The conversations become deeper, the humor shifts, the relationship grows less hierarchical and more mutual. You get to see who they are becoming without needing to orchestrate it. And if repair is needed, this season gives you the space and clarity to pursue it with intention instead of defensiveness.

Learning to Let Them Go Without Letting Yourself Disappear

Letting your kids grow up demands something from you that childhood never required: the ability to redefine your identity outside of being needed. Many parents don’t realize how much of their worth has been tied to showing up for their kids until the kids stop needing them in the same ways. Suddenly you’re left with versions of yourself you set aside years ago, wondering who you are now and what life looks like without the constant busyness of parenting. This can feel disorienting, even painful, but it can also be freeing. It gives you space to pursue your own growth, to deepen your relationships, and to expand into parts of your identity that were waiting quietly for the right time to return. You don’t stop being a parent, you just become a different kind of presence. Less instructor, more companion. Less supervisor, more safe harbor. Less daily necessity, more enduring anchor. And that shift, when embraced instead of resisted, can deepen the bond rather than diminish it.

If You’re Feeling the Weight of This Season

If you’re noticing this transition in your own life, if your kids are growing up, pulling away, or carving out their own path, and you’re feeling both proud and heartbroken, I want you to know that nothing is wrong with you. You’re not overly emotional. You’re not weak. You’re not failing. You’re simply confronting the truth that loving your kids deeply means letting them go a little at a time, over and over again. This is the season where your heart has to stretch in new ways, where grief and gratitude walk side by side, and where your own story becomes louder again because there’s finally enough quiet to hear it.

If this reflection stirred something in you, maybe a longing, a regret, or a hope, you don’t have to sort it out on your own. You can walk with us by following @themajopodcast on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, and other podcast platforms for ongoing conversations about parenthood, partnership, and the emotional lives of men.

And if this season is bringing things up that you want to process more deeply, or if you’re navigating repair with your kids or rediscovering yourself in the process, you can book a session with me at www.thegianttherapist.com. You don’t have to carry the weight of this transition alone,

your heart is allowed to take its time catching up to the season you’re in.