It's time to let them go, but how?

This is the time of year we focus our attention on high school graduates, as across the nation, students have either just walked across the stage or are about to. Words of wisdom, gifts, and prayers -- appreciated and much needed -- extend from us to them, but maybe we should widen our lenses and bestow the same on another group just as needy during this time.

When youngsters graduate from school to the next stage, they're not the only ones who transition. Their parents undergo as great a shock as they do -- in particular, parents whose children are not just leaving school, but leaving home. Despite spending years counting down the days until they "get the house back from the kids," it's not easy for parents to let them go.

I've contemplated this quite a bit lately. I don't have children, but I've certainly released hundreds upon hundreds of students during my nearly two-decade teaching career, so I know how emotional this can be.

On one hand, you're proud of the progress these students have made and excited for their new season. The other hand, meanwhile, tries to grab onto the kids' shirts and not them go (well, unless it was one of those students who made every day a trial and tribulation; in that case, you can't usher them out the door fast enough, but that's a whole 'nother story).

On the last day of school each year, as I said my goodbyes, I would always say, "Now, when you see me in the hall next year, it's okay to act like we spent a whole year together and like we actually know each other." That pronouncement was the result of the few students who always "grew up" so much in the summer, they were too cool to look like they missed last year's teacher.

Yes, even as a teacher, letting go can be difficult. So I can only imagine what a parent endures.

So for those of you who have gone through it, how did you handle releasing your baby -- 'cause we know no matter how old he is, he's still your lil man, and no matter how old she is, she's still your baby doll -- to a world poised to chew 'em up and spit 'em out? What advice do you have for that mom who has to learn a new normal -- realizing now that the mess Johnnie makes that she can't stand cleaning and the eyes Shamika rolls that she wants to snatch out are annoyances she sorely misses.

How do parents drive their children to college campuses, unload their belongings and leave them -- their flesh and blood -- there? How do they see their children head off to boot camp, 18 years old and scared but acting brave because now the roles are reversed and they want to protect their parents and keep them from worrying?

We give words of wisdom, gifts to soothe and prayers to encourage graduates, but it seems to me that parents need them also. There's not much support for the parents who face as much of a life-altering experience as their children -- if not more.

If you've been through it, you have what the newbies do not have: experience. Please take this opportunity to share some tidbits -- some emotional, intellectual, spiritual, maybe even financial advice to those who have found themselves, in what seems to be the blink of an eye, having to release the ones they have spent a lifetime holding on to.

Now, they have to trust that what they poured into their children throughout their lives didn't leak. Now, they have to believe others will keep their children safe after spending all these years being, themselves, their protectors. Now, they have to handle their children becoming the independent adults they raised them to be -- before they realized it would come upon them so quickly.

Adrienne Ross is owner of Adrienne Ross Communications and a former Southeast Missourian editorial board member.