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It was just that I wasn't ok with my five-year-old doing what was fine once he got to be seven. The second-grade class, however, then planned a trip to Worcester, MA (a good-sized city), which is 70 miles away; and, again, I wasn't comfortable. When the same child was eleven I was ready to allow him to go on a field trip to Worcester. It was becoming clear to me that there is no need to be "paranoid" about not letting go. Letting go was coming naturally - just a little later than some teachers or other mothers may have thought it should. I know children well and my own children even better. My concerns had been about things like how a five-year-old who gets lost could handle himself as compared to how a seven-year-old who gets lost can.

When my son got old enough to drive I was, as they say, beside myself. Oh, the horror of having a sixteen-year-old out on the roads. As each child got to be eighteen or so I relaxed a little but still knew I had a ways to go. There have been trips out of state, dorm-living, apartment-living in student-housing in the city, subway riding at night, car break-downs, late nights out, and whatever else goes with having kids in their late teens and early twenties; and I have clearly seen that with each year past twenty years old I have become increasingly calm and increasingly able to let go. While when they were younger I had worried about whether or not I was someone who couldn't let go, I have seen that letting go came as naturally as their growing up has. Its true I wasn't as ready to let go as early as some people think parents should let go, but there's at least the chance that my good understanding of my children and of child development actually could have made me realize what was too soon and what wasn't.

For me, letting go has never been a matter of letting them do things without my help. They've always been independent in that way (I tried to nurture that). For me, the problem was in being able to tolerate the level of worry about them that came with any activity at any given age. I found, though, that I wouldn't worry about the eleven-year-old on a field trip to Worcester the way I would a seven-year-old. I discovered that my worry decreased with my sense that they would be ok if something went wrong, like becoming separated from the group. My worry was also related to whether the location would be a big, strange, city or a local suburb.

Letting go, for me, has been a matter of stopping worrying and stopping thinking I had

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