10 Lessons to Teach Your Kids Before They Go Out Into the World

It was one of these moments in life where you realize, "Oh… this is how my parents felt when I was the kid." This post is going to be a little more personal for me because, well, frankly, we’ve been going through some heavy changes in the Papola household. We’re empty nesters now.

A little while back I put my son on a plane and sent him off to college. He’s more or less on his own. And so are we. I hope we prepared him like my parents prepared me. These kinds of inflection points make for a good opportunity to look in the rearview mirror and marvel at how far you’ve come. Raising my son and teaching him to be a man has been the highlight of my life, and also exceedingly difficult. Stressful, even.

On that note, apparently, the federal government sympathizes with me over this… for whatever reason. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared in 2024 that raising children in America is causing an unsafe level of stress for parents. Chew on that for a moment. His report showed that half of all American parents describe their stress level as completely overwhelming on an almost daily basis. As a father, I can relate. There are bad days and we can all relate to feeling overwhelmed—but not just about being a parent.

Our jobs can be overwhelming. It’s especially overwhelming when something happens that we don’t anticipate, like getting fired or having a health emergency, especially for ourselves, but for our own parents or for our kids. Life isn’t easy, and it isn’t without stress.

It concerns me that our larger culture does very little to emphasize this. Instead, the message is always infantilizing and downplays our duties as adults.

10 Things That Define a Real Adult

So, what does it mean to be an adult? A real adult.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this with the absence of my son in the house. Here is what I have so far, in no particular order… and I’d love to hear what YOU think about this list.

#1: You take primary responsibility for your own actions and choices rather than blaming others. You’re less inclined to blame your family origins or society or your boss.

#2: You’re able to admit when you’ve made a mistake and then learn from it. This is really important and takes practice, and I think it’s the cornerstone of being an adult. The whole point of being a kid and possibly touching the hot stove just once is to begin learning about cause and effect, and how not to repeat harmful errors.

#3: You don’t allow emotional reasoning and snap judgments to win out over more thoughtful deliberation. I think if you want to be a bonafide adult, you have to be emotionally regulated.

#4: You recognize that the world doesn’t exist to make you happy. It doesn’t care about your feelings. The world doesn’t have a mind or a heart or a soul and it’s totally indifferent. So you had better go cultivate your own happiness. I don’t think you have to go through life alone in this. Viktor Frankl talks about this in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, that happiness is something we shouldn’t pursue, but it’s something that presents itself on the path toward purpose. When we can be of service to others… that is when we end up finding genuine happiness.

#5: You put the needs of others above your own and make sacrifices. Ideally in service of immediate family. To be a parent is to become a servant to the life you’ve created, and there’s nothing more magical than that. Plenty of people reject their parental duty and walk away from it, and they are not being adults.

#6: You are capable of delaying gratification when it’s necessary to achieve bigger-picture goals. The demand for instant gratification (now, now, now!) is what babies do. That’s childish. Adults have to grow beyond this.

#7: You don’t hold trivial grudges or spread rumors designed to hurt others. That doesn’t mean you forget bad behavior or set yourself up to be abused by others, but you’re not petty.

#8: You keep your promises, act with honesty, and value integrity. Don’t lie or cheat. This is Adult Life 101, very Ten Commandments-type stuff. But as you know, kids lie all the time. So the importance of being honest just can’t be overstated.

#9: You are capable of taking care of yourself independently. That doesn’t mean that you always do. All of us are dependent on others to varying degrees, but the capability is there and ready to be relied upon if needed. I think that is almost the definition, at the most basic level, of being an adult—that you can take care of yourself.

#10: You are in comfortable control of your own identity. You don’t primarily see yourself in terms of how you believe other people see you. We can detect this when we encounter people or watch them come into their own. When we meet a young adult who we’ve known as a kid, and they suddenly have this new posture and strength. They’ve found themselves, and you can see it. They are who they are.

I’m curious what you have to say about this, and I’d like to hear from you about what should get added to this list. We all have this shared goal of being successful adults ourselves and raising young adults who love life and fulfill their responsibilities.

Leave your comments below and I’ll address them in a future post!