Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Easier with each milestone?

It's tough being the first child, and I think I just figured out why.

When you're the oldest child and something happens to you for the first time, your parents are dealing with it for the first time as parents. And they rarely know what to do.

I speak from experience.

I'm the first child in my family, which means my parents had never set a child's bedtime before. For me, they chose 7 p.m. I have no idea why.

Finally, when I turned 12, my parents pushed my bedtime back an hour. It was a major milestone in my life, until I learned that my little brother, who was 10, would also be allowed to stay up until 8 p.m.

And so it went: I got to trade in my Toughskins for Levi's, my brother got to trade in his Toughskins for Levi's. I got to watch "Starsky and Hutch," my brother got to watch "Starsky and Hutch." I got to drive the truck on the farm, my brother got to drive the truck on the farm.

That's when I figured it out: I wasn't reaching milestones in my life because I'd obtained a certain maturity level or somehow earned it. I was reaching them because my folks had finally become comfortable enough as parents to allow me to do them, or experienced enough as parents to give me the proper guidance.

As a parent, I haven't been as strict or as careful as my parents, and that hasn't always been a good thing. For example, when my first child went to school for the first time, I dropped her off at the front door, leaving her to lug her own book bag and find her own classroom.

When my second child went to school for the first time, I parked the car and walked him to class and met his teacher, and I did the same thing with the next child and the next.

No pain, no gain. The first child felt the pain, while her siblings reaped the gain.

I think back on all the milestones my first child experienced: Elementary school, middle school, high school, learner's license, driver's license, prom and graduation, just to name a few.

With each child, it's gotten easier.

And with my daughter still three years away from graduating college and joining the real world, I thought we were done with major milestones for a while.

But then Bess and I took our daughter to Athens for her sophomore year.

Last year, she lived in the freshman girls' dorm, where she had a resident advisor and a security keypad on the front door and a stern-looking older person guarding the stairwell.

On Thursday, we moved our daughter into an off-campus townhouse complete with leaky water heater, rickety front steps, four other teenage girls who've never lived in a house by themselves, some scruffy-looking fellows next door drinking beer while jumping on a trampoline, and a landlord with nothing to do but manage a thousand other places exactly like this one.

Nothing could go wrong here.

But it'll get easier. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com

This story was originally published August 14, 2015 at 9:43 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Easier with each milestone? ."