Experts: Don’t be parent and friend

“You don’t need to be a friend, you need to be a parent,” Cyrus has been quoted as saying.

Turns out, few in metro Atlanta would disagree. Those who do, said parents, ought to try to at least strike a healthy balance.

Indeed, when it comes to her 4-year-old son Jagger Drinnon, there’s no question in Jessica Pedraza’s mind.

“He is not my friend,” said Pedraza of Sandy Springs.

The 34-year-old mother said she made that clear recently when Jagger refused to brush his teeth. When she insisted, Pedraza said he shot back: “I’m not going to be your friend anymore.”

To that, she told him: “I don’t care. I don’t need you to be my friend. I’m your mom. I’m here to show you what’s right from wrong.”

If there were such a thing, experts would be lining up to give Pedraza a parenting medal.

“Parents should definitely be parents,” said Christy Buchanan, professor of psychology at Wake Forest University and an expert on parent-child relationships.

Robert Epstein, a distinguished researcher and former editor in chief of Psychology Today, agreed.

Epstein said that because parents love their children more than anyone else in the world and want the best for them more than anyone else in the world, they are in a superb position to prepare them for the adult world, to be their guide.

“That’s your main job,” he said. “You can’t do that as a friend because that’s not what friends do.”

Epstein said that doesn’t mean parents should be controlling, authoritarian or adversarial.

“You can’t get away with that too long because eventually they will retreat into their own worlds or the world of their peers,” he said. “If you’re a controlling parent, it will positively fail, and you will become the enemy.”

Is it possible to be parent and friend as some parents say?

“Yes, you can set limits and be very affectionate,” said Epstein, developer of the Epstein Parenting Competencies Inventory, a scientifically validated test of parenting skills.

In fact, that’s a good parenting style, he said.

“But I’m talking about the goal — educate, facilitate and nurture competence,” Epstein said. “Lines of communication stay open, and the respect stays strong.”

That’s been Tawanna P. Brooks’ goal.

Brooks, a single mother of an 18-year-old Georgia State University freshman, described her relationship with her daughter, Jewel Wicker, as both parent and friend.

Even though she and Wicker talk a lot, Brooks, 45, of Atlanta said, “I’m always able to take a step back and say I am your mother first. It’s always from a parental point of view.”

Brooks said her daughter “thinks of me as her mom, but she will often say I am her best friend.”

That simply means, Brooks said, “I trust my mom.”

That isn’t to say, she said, that boundaries haven’t been established or that she wouldn’t apply discipline were it is needed. There are and she has.

“I think first and foremost you have to be a parent and not a friend, but I will be that ear for her,” said Brooks, who described her own parents as more controlling.

“My parents were don’t do this or else, don’t do that or else,” Brooks said. “It put up a wall. I didn’t want my daughter to have that.”

According to Epstein, studies show that teens are subjected to 10 times as many restrictions as mainstream adults, twice as many as incarcerated felons and U.S. Marines.

“As a parent, you don’t want to be part of that system,” said the father of six. “The number of restrictions on teens is increasing, so it’s more important than ever for parents to be outside of that system, to buck that trend.”

Brooks has tried to do that.

“I’ve always told [my daughter] I’m here to listen to you, and as smart as you think your friends are, I know a lot more, and as dumb as you think I am, I still know more than they do.”

There are repercussions for relinquishing the parental role in favor of being “just a friend,” Buchanan said.

Those include increased problem behavior and lower academic and social success.

“Children also will not necessarily appreciate or respect parents who play only the friend role — so although being ‘the parent’ can create conflict in the short term, in the long term the parent-child relationship is likely to be better when parents give children the [loving] guidance and discipline children need in order to succeed in the world,” she said.

Like Brooks, Debra Levy, 47, of Marietta considers herself a parent/friend to her two daughters, Valerie, 22, and Maddie, 15, the exact opposite of her own parents.

“There is a line that they know if they would cross, it would undermine the friendship and the trust I have in them,” Levy said.

As a result, Levy said there have been very few instances when she and her husband have had to apply discipline.

“Even when they make mistakes, we look at them as opportunities,” she said.

Levy said the crazier parents act, the greater the likelihood their children will, too.

“If all you’re doing is laying down rules, they are never going to approach you and talk to you,” Levy said. “You have to remember what it’s like to be young, and so many parents don’t.”