A NZ Herald columnist has written a refreshingly honest piece about what happens when your grown-up kid goes through a rough patch — and why the instinct to swoop in and fix everything usually makes things worse. It's not a travel story in the traditional sense, but it lands hard for any parent whose child has moved overseas or is navigating adult life at a distance.
The setup: her son was in the middle of a painful, spiralling situation (the details stay his), and she was a mess. Sleepless nights, imagined worst-case scenarios, fantasy rescue plans that ranged from rallying his friends to, briefly, delivering a pig's head to the person she blamed. The problem, a psychologist relative pointed out, was that her son needed a calm parent on the other end of the line — not a ragged, panicked one.
The toolkit she was given is simple enough to remember anywhere: name the emotion, check whether the person is actually safe right now, and thank your problem-solving brain before switching it off. Underlying it is a neat piece of physiology — intense emotions typically pass through the body in 60 to 90 seconds, and it's the rumination that keeps them going. Worry, she notes, isn't an emotion at all; what she thought was love turned out to be fear.
The second half of the lesson comes from researcher Brené Brown: people in distress can tell the difference between someone sitting with them in their suffering and someone who just needs them to hurry up and get better. The columnist admits she was projecting her own past heartbreak onto her son, trying to yank him out of trouble before he was ready. Her job, she concluded, was to sit alongside him while he crawled out himself — assuming he wasn't in genuine danger.
Practically, it changed how the phone calls went. She shifted the conversation to the near future — tomorrow, next week — and to her confidence that he could handle it, rather than broadcasting her fears about everything that might go wrong. He came through it, made good decisions, and is, in her words, solving the puzzle of his own life.
Why does this belong on a travel site? Because distance parenting is its own category of worry. When your kid is in another city or another timezone, you can't drop round with soup, and the urge to over-manage from afar gets stronger, not weaker. Whether they're on a gap year, studying abroad, or emigrating, the takeaway is the same: be curious, not obsessive — calm, not frantic. Check in, listen, trust, and resist the urge to charter a rescue mission. As the writer puts it, it's not our life; it's theirs. Hard to hear, useful to remember.
