Parent-child relationships are funny things. I don't know about anyone else, but it took me a while to actually consider the fact that parents are three-dimensional people, and the child's perspective is really a sliver of two multi-faceted lives already deeply in progress. I imagine parents go through a similar, but more gradual, realization process with their children. It's probably hard to consider someone a full fledged human being when you quite clearly remember when they were burping up peas.
Because of this, I'm also pretty sure both children and adults have an amazing capacity to underestimate each other. Children, or rather, young adults, assume their parents have their head in the clouds, or lack the rationality they, at 19, so clearly possess. Ask the average teenager if they think their parents know they drink, even suspect they smoke or have sex, or read their oh-so-private online diaries.
Parents more often underestimate the fact that there are usually much easier ways of acquiring the information gathered through their collection of household clues, online snooping, and intuition, involving the radical concept of direct communication.
At the gym today there were a couple of moms exercising beside me who both had children in college. One started telling a story about how she found out (through the internet) that her 22 year old daughter is living with her boyfriend, but she doesn't know she knows, which resulted in a confusing and movie-esque sequence of "he knows she knows" that left me confused and wondering why the lady didn't just talk to her freaking kid.
I lost where I was going with this a while back. I think the gist was that parent and offspring alike need to stop using things like the internet as a substitute and a mask for firsthand knowledge. Ironic, isn't it?
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