My Turn: Parenting as Hospitality
Hinesburg mother offers insights on developing love and understanding by treating your child as an honored guest.
By Peggy Laro
For The Hinesburg Record
Yesterday something landed in me in a way it never had before.
I was reading Henry J. M. Nouwen’s “Reaching Out” – a book published in 1975, the year I was born – and he writes about hospitality and parenting. One passage stopped me cold:
“It may sound strange to speak of the relationship between parents and children in terms of hospitality, but … children are not properties to own and rule over, but gifts to cherish and care for. Our children are our most important guests who enter our home, ask for careful attention, stay for a while, and then leave to follow their own way.”
He goes on to say that children are strangers at first – with their own rhythm, their own style, their own capacity for good and evil – and that parents must learn to love them as they grow into themselves. Love isn’t automatic; it deepens through curiosity, humility, and relationship. And that children are not possessions we are responsible for, but guests we are responsive to.
I’ve been aware of this idea for years. But yesterday, it truly landed.
When my son was born, I’ll be honest: I looked down at this tiny quivering alien latched onto my nipple and thought, What the hell is this? I had a fierce instinct to protect him, yes – but the love I feel for him now, at almost 10, is entirely different. It’s not just the animal drive to keep him alive. It’s a growing love for him as a fellow human being.
I was raised inside a very different paradigm – one where parental guilt and responsibility were heavy, constant, projected. I’ve been carrying that in my own parenting, often without realizing it. That sense that everything he does is somehow a reflection of me. That if he struggles, I failed. If he resists, I should have prevented it.
But the more I try to control out of fear, the more I feel myself pulling away from him.
The more I surrender into curiosity, the more I feel myself moving toward him.
Nouwen uses the Latin root of education – e-ducere, to lead out – to describe how a child’s hidden promise can be drawn forward. I’ve been thinking about that in the moments when he seems lazy, resistant or impossible. When I pause and sit with my own frustration instead of projecting it, something softens. And in that space, what is already inside him, emerges.
When I treat him as a guest – an honored one, who will eventually leave my home and hopefully return by choice – something in me shifts. My expectations loosen. I can still guide him. I can still have boundaries. But I don’t have to resent his resistance, or take his autonomy personally, or clamp down in ways that sever connection.
And the paradox is this: The less I try to control him, the more humanity comes forward in both of us.
Maybe that’s the hospitality Nouwen was talking about.
Maybe that’s the kind of home I want to offer: A place where we discover each other, not through power, but through presence.
And maybe — just maybe — that’s where love grows deepest.
Peggy Dippen is a longtime public educator, writer, and Real Dialogue™ specialist living and workingin Hinesburg with her son. A Courage & Renewal® facilitator and Psychedelic Guide, she explores themes of compassion, presence, and transformation in her work. Peggy won the Moth StorySLAM at the Town Hall Theater in Middlebury this September and will take the stage at the Flynn in 2027. She is currently writing a memoir and a book of daily meditations.