26 GoodLifeFamilyMag.com MARCH | APRIL 2018 By Dr. Dean Beckloff | Contributor 9 Tips to STOP Codependent Parenting and Let your Kids Thrive Codependency can occur when parents try to live vicariously through their teen. This happens quite often when the teen’s successes or failures become the parents’. Several years ago, a friend who is now deceased, Dr. Paul Warren, co-wrote a book called Kids Who Carry Our Pain: Breaking the Cycle of Codependency for the Next Generation. It is an excellent book that outlines how we get into codependent relationships with our own kids. The title says it all—kids who carry our pain. The problem is that codependency sneaks in un-noticed, in small ways that may not seem wrong at first glance. I don’t believe any parents want to create pain in their child. Parents typically want their child to grow up pain free. However, even that concept can create problems for the child. Pain free living? Is that possible? And so the parent become obsessed with creating environments that are relatively pain free. The child goes out for soccer, and the parent is hovering on the sidelines. What is the child learning? I must not get hurt; I cannot live life without someone to watch over me; I am dependent on others to live fully. Thus, the parents who must not allow their child to feel pain, introduce pain in a new way that harms the child’s development and growth. Codependency happens in many subtle ways. Let’s take for example, a simple thing we counsel parents not to tell their children, especially if they are living in two different homes, and