Can a parent be a friend?

Okay.... I had this vision of parenthood the other day when I was thinking so much about family as the best friends.

I've heard often from parenting "experts" that a parent should not be a friend--he/she must parent. And I've always felt vaguely guilty about that because I WANT to be friends with my children. Now that I've been thinking about it all, I've come up with an idea that supports my desires (those are the best kind of ideas. In fact, pretty much all my ideas support what I already think. Why else would I claim them as mine?) :) So, you can see what you think.

I think that there are 2 main phases of parenting, one phase much longer than the other.

The first phase is the real PARENTING part. This is when your kids are young and you must instruct, guide, reprove, protect, set boundaries (and defend them), etc. This is what we do from almost the beginning of parenthood.

The second phase is the FRIEND part. This is when your kids have grown out of the lectures, the rules, the punishments. They no longer want/need the protection and they have already set their own boundaries (which will inevitably vary from some degree from those which were set by their parents). IF a parent attempts to parent during this second phase, they will push their children away. Adult children do not want lectures from their parents. If a parent persists with lectures, boundaries, rules, etc, a child will avoid encounters with parents. These are the situations so often parodied in our sitcoms. The kids belittle the parents behind their backs (sometimes in front of them). The parents look ridiculous because they are providing parenting rather than friendship.

Once you've identified this situation and the cause behind it (i.e. the parent fails to move from parenting into friendship), it seems obvious, right? When does your mom bug you? When she's giving you advice you didn't ask for. It seems like she's not allowing you to be the adult, that she's pushing you back into childhood, maybe? She's not being a random pain, though, she's just being the parent--the same parent that you really needed when you were little. The same parent that you practically worshiped then. She's doing what she's always done only now it doesn't work the same way it did and she wishes she knew what she was doing wrong. And you, the poor child, are so busy pushing her away and defending your own adulthood, that maybe you don't realize what is going on. Plus, as a child, it's easy to stay in childhood roles too and it's hard to make the effort to actually contribute in friendly way to your relationship with your mom. It's just habit to make her to all the work in the relationship and something you may not think about changing. One way or another, the transition to friendship is never made and the relationship can never reach its true potential.

The parent can actually be the best friend: the SUPERFRIEND. A loving parent-child relationship has already all the right ingredients for a great friendship: true caring, unconditional love, shared history, common interests (to name a few). And, this phase is the LONGEST phase of parenting. The rule-setting phase only lasts for a few years, but the friendship phase lasts for the rest of life and on into forever. Therefore, making this phase work is essential to eternal family relationships.

The tricky part is where the two phases collide. When does the first end and the second take over? This is where the mess-ups happen. I'm thinking this transition would be smoother if the parent has been a friend all along. You can add friend characteristics to parent characteristics as you go along from the very beginning, can't you? While still being a parent? I'm thinking YES. But I'm still pretty foggy about details. I have some more thinking to do about this. What do you think?