"Refusing to disappear into the background has set me up for a full life, and I'm ready to step into it."
One morning last week, while sipping coffee in bed and scrolling on my phone, my social media feed presented an article about parenting teenagers using the "potted plant" method.
"Get this," I said to my husband Chris, next to me in the bed. "This article says that teenagers don't want to engage with their parents, but they still want them nearby, hovering quietly in the background -- like a 'potted plant,'" I said using air quotes.
Chris looked up from his phone. "So first it was helicopter parents, then snow plow parents, and now potted plant parents?"
"Apparently."
He rolled his eyes and went back to Wordle. However, I was interested enough to read on.
The concept was introduced by clinical psychologist Lisa Damour in a New York Times article in 2016.
"While normally developing teenagers seek new levels of emotional and physical distance from their parents perhaps they, like toddlers, feel most at ease when their folks balance active engagement with detached availability," she writes.
The research cited in the piece is convincing: physical proximity alone, whether or not you're actually connecting, does appear to improve adolescent well-being.
Maybe, I thought to myself as I got out of bed to begin my day. But at what cost to the parents' well-being?
My children are now 18, 20, and 22, technically past the teenage years the potted plant method targets. But they are not quite out of the nest, and so the article still landed. I recognized the instinct: that parental tug to stay nearby, available, just in case. I also recognized the trap.
I know so many parents on the verge of an empty nest who don't know what to do with themselves -- who have been so busy being parents that they've forgotten to build a life of their own. The potted plant method gives them permission to keep delaying that reckoning. When the baseball games end, and the rides stop, what's left? In retrospect, refusing to disappear into the background has set me up for a full life, and I'm ready to step into it.
Do you remember that scene from "The Goonies" when Mikey Walsh gives that pivotal speech and declares, "It's our time"? I'm ready to give that speech to myself. After 22 years of parenting, it's my time. I am done. I know, I know. Older parents are already typing their responses: "You're never done parenting, blah blah." I respectfully cry bullshit. The late, great radio psychologist Dr. Joy Browne used to say: "Your job as a parent is to give your kids roots and wings. And the wings are the hardest part." If you've done your job, the wings are what they're using right now. Let them fly.
Here's the thing. I actually was a potted plant for the first seven years of my parenting, present in body, not fully there in any other way. I suffered from the disease of alcoholism, and although I could check the boxes (packed lunches, PTA, tooth fairy), a layer of vodka acted as a barrier between my kids and me. I got sober through a 12-step program when my kids were 7, 5 and 3, and what followed were 15 years of genuine, engaged, present motherhood. However, I never gave up all of myself as these parenting trends seemed to suggest you should.
During those years, while the kids were at school, I worked part-time and took a memoir-writing class. As my children grew more independent -- when they no longer needed rides and their math classes became so advanced I could no longer help with the homework -- I joined the workforce full-time and dedicated more hours to my writing. My hard work paid off. My debut memoir, "Sober Mom," is being published this summer. Should I skip the writing conference because my daughter might want me in the room while she watches TV? Should Chris and I cancel our weekend away in case one of my adult sons needs someone to explain how the washing machine works?
What I want -- what I've decided my kids actually need -- isn't my quiet presence on the periphery of their lives. I want them to see a woman who finished her memoir, who went to the writing conference, who kept showing up for her own life the same way she showed up for theirs. I want them to witness what a marriage looks like when two people still choose each other after 20-plus years -- two people who still go away for weekends alone. And I want them to learn, by watching me, that parenting doesn't have to mean disappearing.
So, if they pick their heads up from their phones and wonder, Where's mom? Good. That's the point. I'm not a potted plant.
It's my time now.
Elizabeth Jannuzzi's debut memoir, "Sober Mom," will be published by She Writes Press in July 2026 and is available now for pre-order. Her work explores themes of loss, motherhood, and recovery from alcoholism. Her essays have been featured in Under the Gum Tree, The Rumpus, WOW! Women On Writing, and more. Elizabeth earned a Best of the Net nomination in 2023. She is the program director at Project Write Now, a nonprofit writing organization. She engages with her audience through a weekly Substack newsletter.