No mom wants to stand by and watch her adult child struggle.

Everything in us wants to step in and make it better. After all, that’s what we’ve done for most of their lives. We bandaged scraped knees, comforted broken hearts, helped solve friendship problems, and carried burdens that felt too heavy for their young shoulders. When they hurt, we helped.

But parenting an adult child asks something different of us.

Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is resist the urge to swoop in and rescue them.

That can feel almost cruel when you’re a mom. Yet every time we rush in to fix the problem, remove the consequence, make the phone call, provide the money, or carry a responsibility that belongs to our adult child, we may be taking away something they desperately need: the opportunity to discover that they can handle hard things.