It’s so difficult to know when to let your child have more independence. Too soon, and they risk getting into more scrapes. Too late and you risk stifling their development, and – with it – your relationship with them.
It’s inevitable that you won’t get this right all of the time. But if you can learn to separate which emotions belong to you and which to them, you’ll stand a good chance. It gets unhealthy when either one of you is irritated by the other’s needs. You might annoy your child by asking what they’re eating, insisting they see a dentist or wear a coat, or by thinking you can do a better job than them of getting a better answer from a GP than they have managed.
Equally, your child might get in the way of your life by constantly calling when things go wrong, handing their emotions over to you to try and fix.