Children grow up and become more independent these days than they were in earlier times, but surely independent does not mean disconnected, or does it? Why do some parents lose their children to the passage of time called the generation gap? How do we maintain the bond between parent and child? How do we hold on to our children?

The first thing to do is to examine your own relationship with your parents. How your relationship is and quite likely it is going to affect the relationship between you and your children. One common connection which could be shared love for music, you might built a connection that forced you to look back into the past even as we craned our necks forward to take in the furiously approaching future. Your children will step into your childhood and you have to step into theirs. In essence, you are likely to build a bridge over generation gap.

There are children who adamantly refuse to attend family gatherings; who come to the dinner table with their headphones on; who insist on dressing wild for mum's best friend’s birthday dinner;  and the list goes on. This disconnectedness stems from a lack of interest in each other’s lives. Detachment can creep insidiously into a parent-child relationship as concurrent interests start diverging in the tangled woods of generation gaps and peer pressure. As our children grow older, our lives seem boring to them, while theirs seem completely incomprehensible to us.  Their games, both real and virtual, totally beyond parents understanding of what is fun. Their music seems loud and often, meaningless. As far as their dress sense is concerned, the less said the better.

Language, now that is a challenge for even those of us who have a penchant for foreign languages. Whether it is through our festive celebrations, our daily routines, our customs, our religious practices or quite simply, any of those things that define who we are, our children need to feel a connection that transcends age. We need many roads that lead us to our children, and they could do with just as many to walk back to us when the need arises.

Your fears about losing your children to their future is not in any way linked to your feeling threatened in your role as the beacon in their lives. Their focus will shift, as it should, and that should be completely acceptable to you. What should not shift is respect for each other and the knowledge that the relationship adds to your lives rather than taking away from it. It would be so easy to switch off those aspects of our children that we find strange and almost otherworldly. The truth is that their world has leaped ahead with a gap that most of us find daunting to overcome, to say the least. It does not mean that we should start speaking the way they do, dress the way they do, listen to their music and eat their chosen cuisines, it’s just accept that times have changed and appreciate their tastes too. Show interest and be willing to take to address this concern. In short try to be open-minded about purple-dyed hair and multiple body piercings.