Making fundamental changes in how we think about our teens is going to require revisiting the ways we understand many of their behaviors. In this chapter we suggest a specific approach to this rethinking process: a shift in focus that we call “Finding the Inner Adult.” This new focus is a deliberate play on the recent “find your inner child” fad, which implied that adults sometimes simply need to let go of responsibility and return to the freedom and whimsy of their childhood dreams. Not surprisingly, we take quite the opposite tack regarding adolescents.
The overarching principle of finding the inner adult begins with a rather bold assertion: Beneath it all, adolescents are almost always pursuing adult goals even in their most disturbed behavior, and we help them most when we uncover and draw out those goals. This principle suggests that even though teens’ approaches may be highly problematic or even downright disturbed at times, their underlying goals are not so different from those of any of the rest of us: whether it’s maximizing a sense of control, competence, and connection in life, or minimizing pain and discomfort. The problem lies not in teens’ goals, but in the ways they sometimes pursue them.
We can use this perspective to redirect our approach to some of the most challenging, destructive, and seemingly irrational behaviors teens can throw at us. Our goal is not just to understand these behaviors, and certainly not to excuse them, but rather to change them. So let’s take a look at what this means in practice.
When I first present the principle of finding the inner adult to doctoral students in the Adolescent and Family Therapy course I teach each year, their initial reaction is usually skepticism. All adolescent behaviors are intended to reach positive, adultlike goals? That sounds like a stretch. But then I begin by challenging my students to come up with behaviors that wouldn’t fit this principle, and our discussion begins.
“What about teens who smash windows or drive around knocking down people’s mailboxes with a baseball bat just for fun?” someone inevitably asks. “Surely there isn’t any ‘inner adult’ driving behaviors like that.” I then ask my students to draw upon their relatively recent memories to think about just why kids smash windows.
Two reasons emerge. The easiest is also the shallowest: because the kids are angry. And certainly this is often the case, but in these discussions, another student usually quickly pipes up, “Yeah, but lots of kids who do this really don’t seem that angry. It’s more just something to do when they’re bored. I remember doing some stuff like this as a kid and it was more of something we did for excitement.”
“So what’s exciting about it?” I ask.
“Well, a few things,” the student answers somewhat sheepishly. “Partly I know other kids who said it was just really cool to see a huge plate-glass window shatter. Then there’s the excitement of trying not to get caught.”
As we discussed these behaviors further, their link to life in the adolescent bubble became increasingly apparent. There were very few places in teens’ lives where they could have a real impact on the larger adult world; part of the satisfaction of seeing the plate glass smash or of writing graffiti was the sense of having such a strong impact, even if it was primarily destructive. Getting lots of adults to take action, seeing an effect on the physical world that was nontrivial—these are things that adults are able to do, albeit usually in far more constructive ways. One student even recalled hearing friends excitedly describe seeing a bunch of people out the next day repairing the damage these teens had wrought the night before. Clearly we were onto something with this notion of teens’ destructive behavior partly reflecting their hunger to have an impact on adults and the adult world.
To this point my students often counter, “Okay, in theory there might be something to this, but it’s pretty awful behavior and certainly not something we want to condone.” That’s true, of course. So how, then, does this viewpoint help us?
Well, it helps because it gives us a tool to engage in a sort of psychological judo with our teens. Their destructive energy can be tremendously powerful and at times almost impossible to restrain. Just ask any janitor responsible for keeping high school bathrooms free of graffiti. But what if we don’t try to stop this energy, but instead work to redirect it? Might we be able to not only reduce behaviors like vandalism, but also to replace them with something more constructive? Remarkably, the answer is yes, under the right conditions. The staff at the Youth Action Project had this kind of judo down cold, and were able to employ it while working with some of the toughest youth in our society.
Before the summer of 1982, I’d never been to East Harlem. This was a period in U. S. history when crime rates were still on their long upward spike, and gangs were a prominent feature of the urban landscape. I was working on a research project based out of Columbia University across town, and even though it was a bright summer morning, as I walked across 110th Street to the headquarters of the Youth Action Project, I was feeling a bit uneasy.
My colleague and friend Bonnie Leadbeater and I visited the program to speak with the youth workers who had set it up. The aim was to reach kids who were potential gang members before they got fully absorbed into the gang world. As we entered the project’s headquarters building, the impact of the program was literally spread before us. We saw young people hard at work in a huge building-renovation project, handling power tools, hammering, carrying drywall, painting, pushing brooms.
“How did the program get kids so engaged?” we asked the staff. “We get to know kids on the streets a bit over time, and as they get to trust us, we ask them what they want to do. And they typically give us all kinds of outrageous, unrealistic, and crazy answers,” one staff person explained. “Our job is to find a way to say ‘Yes!’ to their requests.”
The idea sounded a bit off the wall, or at best like a catchy slogan, but the results were certainly impressive, so we asked them to explain further. These counselors had begun a year or so earlier with a group of kids who said they wanted a fort or clubhouse (or perhaps even a future gang hangout, though no one had voiced this out loud). A place where they’d be in charge and no one could bother them. The youth workers’ reply after giving the matter some thought, was, “Sure. But if you’re going to do it, let’s do it right. Don’t just have some spot under a bridge or in an alley that is all crappy. Let’s do something cool.”
And so began the Youth Action Project. What happened next was that these kids (with plenty of adult guidance) decided to try to renovate a small building that had long sat abandoned on their streets. The workers found out how to send in an application for permits, but were told that the city didn’t care about buildings like this and it might well take years to get a reply. The kids weren’t surprised. “No one has done anything with that building for years. No one ever even looks at it.”
Finally, one of the kids said, “Let’s just fix it up anyway. I’ve got bolt cutters, and it’s just one stupid padlock on the front door that’s in our way. No one even cares if we smash windows in buildings like this; they certainly won’t care if we fix it up!” And so, with a bit of trepidation on the part of the adults, that’s exactly what they did.
The staff was nervous at first, but quickly realized that whatever risks were involved in this project, they were far less than the risks the kids faced out on the streets. And it was true; no one cared about the building. So the staff and kids jumped in. The results were gradual in coming, but remarkable nonetheless. The “foreman” on the job, a nineteen-year-old named Jamal, explained the plans with pride. The Youth Action Project parent agency had obtained modest donated supplies (yes, it sometimes takes adults committing resources to help kids pursue their adultlike goals). “We’re going to make the first floor into a youth center that kids can come to whenever they want,” Jamal explained. “The next floor will be offices, and the top floor will be a residence for kids who can’t stay at home.” They also got adults to donate some time to help the teens learn basic construction skills and make sure they were working safely.
So what eventually got produced? Well, as you might expect, the project took longer than expected. And, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell, it lost some of its grandeur coming true. But they did get at least one of the three floors renovated and into quite solid shape, and many months later the city permit did in fact come through. More important, though, numerous teens got engaged in a project that made a real difference in their own neighborhood, all the while learning adult skills. Several had learned a good deal of carpentry. Their “inner adults” were able to emerge, rather than being shunted into smashing windows or forming yet another gang offshoot. It was a small step, but it showed just how eagerly the inner adult lies in wait among our teens. And interestingly enough, this increasingly “new”-looking building had almost no problems with vandalism in an otherwise very rough neighborhood.
The youth workers looking for a way to say “Yes!” to these teens may not have articulated it, but they were doing a masterful job of finding the teens’ inner adults. They took a strong adolescent urge, looked beneath it, and helped teens recast it in the most mature way possible. And the teens were with them every step of the way. For finding the inner adult is not some gimmick for tricking teens into behaving as we might want. Rather, it is a way of taking teens’ deepest motivations and allowing and encouraging these motivations (and teens’ budding adulthood) to come forth. Done right, teens are almost always on our side in this process. We call this principle “Adolescent Judo.” The idea is that if we directly oppose teens’ energies, we’re bound to fail. If we simply try to tamp them down, we’ll at best create low-energy, apathetic teens. But if we flip these energies back in the direction they were originally designed to go—toward making an impact on the world—we can use teens’ own drives to move them more rapidly toward maturity.
Closer to home, our efforts to understand Ellen’s motivations in her sexual exploits with Jake and his friends, as we described in Chapters 1 and 2, provide another example of the value of finding a teen’s inner adult. Ellen’s frustrations and motivations became clear over a number of weeks after that first cold February night. The issue wasn’t so much sex as that she wanted desperately to be able to act and be treated more like a grown-up and find ways to use her near-boundless energy. She had few healthy ways to make those leaps. We chose to address her problem behaviors not by focusing on her precocious sexual behaviors, but on the inner adult strivings they represented.
Our continuing refrain, “Let’s put the adulthood back into adolescence,” applied in spades here. While Ellen had previously spent her summers hanging around the house, her parents, using all the wheedling, cajoling, and persuasive skill they could muster, were able to convince a local stable owner to let Ellen work as an unpaid intern that summer (Ellen loved horses). The owner agreed on the condition that the job be taken seriously (nine to five, and no skipping because other opportunities came up). The owner followed through on her intention to make the job real, and when Ellen arrived the first day, she found herself mucking out stables, grooming horses, and learning all sorts of tasks that she’d never even known went into the upkeep of the horses she loved to ride. But she was a quick learner. She was engaged and challenged (exhausted, actually), her work was valued by those around her, and she was truly acting as an adult in the tasks she quickly learned to perform.
Ellen ended up loving this farm… and why shouldn’t she? It was providing a good deal of what she’d been seeking so desperately, and so destructively, in the backseats of buses and cars. “I feel like they treat me like the other adults when I’m at work,” is how she described it. Her parents noticed the ways that Ellen seemed almost like a “new kid” when she returned each day from work. “In some ways,” they said, “it was actually more like they’d gotten the old Ellen back,” the one with a gleam of excitement in her eyes, at least when she wasn’t too exhausted to keep them open!
This was only a start, of course. The school year brought new challenges and more boredom and passivity with which to contend. Sitting in school only exacerbated Ellen’s desperation to feel more grown-up, and her parents had to really keep their eyes open for ways to put the adulthood into her life: handing over Ellen’s clothing and entertainment budget in quarterly chunks to help her learn to manage it as an adult would; encouraging her to accept a neighbor’s request to tutor her third grader; and moving Ellen to the adult table at Thanksgiving (three years earlier than when her older brother had made this move). And yes, Ellen’s parents kept a close eye on any potential unsupervised time alone with boys; but frankly, Ellen’s trip to the doctor probably made more of an impact, when her doctor privately explained just what adults need to know to keep themselves sexually healthy.
Often we’ve found that drawing out a teen’s inner adult isn’t even a matter of making huge changes in what he or she is doing. Sometimes it’s a matter of shifting perspectives (ours and theirs) about the tasks they already face. Simply showing a teen that there actually is an adulthood to be had out there can often make the difference. It did with Sam, the teen we described in Chapter 2 who had held out so long against the idea of even talking in therapy.
So just what happened with Silent Samantha? She clearly wanted autonomy. Blowing her way through twelve residences in twelve months was pretty good proof of that, not to mention her four weeks of elective mutism with me. But the ways that Sam was trying to establish her adult autonomy weren’t working very well, and even she could see that. When asked why she had stayed at her most recent placement for five months, when she’d gone through so many in the prior seven, her reply indicated that she was already starting to think about a more mature approach to her life.
“You know, I get really tired of just changing places all the time. And half the time I just end up somewhere worse.”
Sam had the drive to become autonomous (and then some), and she had the recognition that the ways she’d been pursuing her autonomy weren’t working. What she needed now was some vision of a truly workable alternative route to adulthood that would allow her to use her autonomy drives. That became the task of our therapy.
“So Sam, you hate where you’re living now, is that right?”
“Yeah, it’s stupid, it’s dirty, the counselors don’t care, and I just want to get out.” She had a point on all counts, I’d learned, even regarding the “counselors” who were paid just over minimum wage and tended to last less than a year in the job.
“So would you be interested in getting out for good? To a place that you chose?”
“Absolutely.”
“Would you be willing to really work hard for it?”
“I’ve never been afraid of hard work,” Sam replied matter-of-factly, but with just a hint of defiance and pride.
And with that we began. I spoke with her social worker, who had two initial reactions to my suggestion: One, yes it was possible to request a change of residential placements; but, two, Sam would have to show she could actually try to make something work before this social worker was going to jump through any more hoops for her. Burning through twelve placements in twelve months, while brutal for Sam, wasn’t easy on her social worker either. And so Sam began trying to work within the system to change how it treated her.
What’s remarkable is how much this one change in how she approached the problem left her viewing her life differently. Following the rules at her current placement was no longer a matter of giving in to “the Man.” Rather, these rules were just a minor hurdle, almost a stepping-stone, toward Sam getting to choose where she lived and say good-bye to this place forever. Sam no longer saw running away as a step toward freedom, but as a kid’s way of avoiding problems and giving other people an excuse to take charge of her.
Interestingly, after Sam complained for months about her placement, she ultimately didn’t appear all that eager to leave it. Once she tried following the rules, SafeHaven turned out to be less inhospitable than she’d thought.
“My social worker says I could go somewhere else now,” she confided quietly to me one day, “but if I just stay here for another few months, I’ll be eighteen, and my social worker says then she’ll set me up in an independent living house where I can have my own room and come and go whenever I want. It just makes more sense not to make another big switch when I don’t have to.”
Sam was growing up.
The key to understanding the progress of Sam and Ellen and the teens at the Youth Action Project is recognizing that adolescents want to grow up. Once we recognize this, and let teens know we recognize it, we stop being seen as adversaries and start to appear more as allies. We gain still more trust and credibility with our teens when we then start outlining paths by which they can fruitfully pursue their desire to become grown-up. Both we and they are often surprised to find that these paths—whether they involve renovating a building, working on a horse farm, or just viewing the rules from a different perspective—can actually leave them satisfied and productive at the same time. Teens come to realize that these adult-centered approaches are ultimately more gratifying than smashing windows, joining gangs, seeking sex with multiple partners, or trying to fight the world.
Often, though, we find it difficult to communicate clearly enough with our teens to get even a glimpse of their inner adult. One of the things that makes it harder to understand teens’ underlying intentions is just how confusing their behavior and efforts at communication can be. At times they can sputter irrationally and behave in remarkably childlike ways that make it hard to see the adult-in-waiting that lies hidden within. For all of our emphasis on finding the inner adult, we aren’t naive: We fully recognize that teenagers are not yet adults and that most of them make this clear to us almost every day in their behavior.
We’ve often told parents that they should think of their adolescent’s age as the teen’s chronological age in years—plus or minus five—to reflect the variability in how they often function. A fifteen-year-old, for example, on a good day behaves very much like a twenty-year-old, and on a bad day behaves in a way that can’t be readily distinguished from a ten-year-old. An eighteen-year-old sometimes acts twenty-three and sometimes acts thirteen. And so forth. This fluctuation may well be partly brought about by living with developing capacities that are near adultlike, while moving about in a world that on a day-to-day basis treats one largely as a big child. For whatever reasons, though, such variation is very much the norm for adolescents today, and any attempt to communicate effectively with them needs to take this into account.
The problem with teens’ immature talk and behavior is that it often draws out instinctive adult responses and teen counterresponses that lead down a discouraging path of arguments, criticisms, insults, and tantrums. The inner adult gets lost in the process. Inevitable as this might seem at times—and we’ve fallen into it ourselves more often than we’d like—there is a different way. Let’s start with an example of the sort of dialogue most parents of teens have had on numerous occasions.
A simple reminder, “Don’t forget you need to do the dishes,” is followed almost instantaneously by an angry tirade. “Why are you always nagging me? You can’t just control my every move, you know. I don’t even have to live here if I don’t want to.”
What do we do when our teens act almost like little children, objecting irrationally and raising the stakes to even the most reasonable requests? There are many ways one could respond here. Taking the bait that is being offered. Getting into a power struggle. Reasserting parental authority. Walking away. We’ve tried most of these at one time or another, and rarely do they go very far. The frustration is that we know our teens have a more mature perspective inside them somewhere because we see it at times, but this greater maturity sometimes disappears completely when we need it most.
There is a way, however, to handle these confrontations and negotiations much more effectively. Perhaps the best way to illustrate it is to use an incident from what may have been the highest-stakes negotiation the world has ever known. Parents often feel like they are on the edge of World War III in their households, but not that long ago the threat was not just figurative.
President John Kennedy faced a negotiating dilemma in 1962 that in some surprising respects was similar to the power struggles many parents face daily with their teens’ erratic behavior. More important, he found a way around it. The dilemma arose during the Cuban Missile Crisis—a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union that historians have called the single greatest threat to mankind’s survival that we’ve yet faced. The crisis was a classic battle of wills. The Soviets didn’t like the United States having nuclear missiles in Turkey and so wanted to put their own missiles in Cuba. Kennedy felt he couldn’t allow that under any conditions. The negotiations that followed crackled with tension and danger.
After nine fraught days of strategizing and negotiation, a glimmer of hope arose when Kennedy received what appeared to be a personal letter from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev suggesting a reasonable basis for resolution and a step back from a path leading to nuclear war. Before the United States could reply, however, a second letter arrived that was far more strident and bellicose, one which offered the United States few options other than military confrontation.
The Kennedy team was distraught and frustrated upon receiving the second letter, fearful that a chance for a peaceful resolution had been lost. Then they hit upon a brilliant response. Why not just respond to the reasonable offer and tone of the first letter and completely ignore the bluster and threats of the second? After much debate, this course was pursued; soon afterward, the Soviets accepted the response and also chose to ignore the second letter. The rest, as they say, is history.
Kennedy’s approach to the Soviet Union provides a lesson we can and should apply daily with our teens: Sometimes responding to the more mature and reasonable side of those with whom we interact pays off and brings that side out, even if it isn’t always visible at the moment. Fortunately, the stakes are usually much lower in discussions with our teens, but the way out is similar. So, leaving our history lesson for now and returning to our far-more-mundane (but equally contentious) dialogue about the dishes, the approach we suggest is to not reply to the childlike portion of what’s being said, but to respond as though we’ve just heard an adult put forth a far-more-reasonable version of what we’d guess our teens might be feeling. We respond to the more reasonable “first letter” statement from our teens, even if we haven’t actually heard them voice it yet.
So when our ears hear, “Why are you always nagging me? You can’t just control my every move, you know,” we try to translate this into something that an adult might say if they felt as our teens appear to feel: “You know, I just don’t feel like doing the dishes right now, because I’m in a really horrible mood.”
And so, we respond with, “You sound miserable. Is there any way I can help you out here?”
More often than not we find this kind of reply takes some of the bluster out of teens’ sails in a way that we and they both seem to appreciate. Better yet, they often end up responding in a way that is far more adultlike: “No, I just hate all these chores and I’ve got so much to do and I’m really tired.”
The dishes usually end up getting done (or sometimes we help them out as a favor), but in either case, the conversation proceeds far more productively. And teens appreciate being treated in an adult fashion and often rise to the occasion and raise their game in the conversation, in order to keep this (far-more-gratifying) adult dialogue going.
Humans are creatures of habit and script, by and large. If we present our teens with an adult conversational script, they are likely to follow it. President Kennedy seemed to recognize this implicitly. Of course, part of the trick is to recognize that we parents are also creatures of habit and script. The first task for us parents, then, is to avoid falling into the childlike bickering script that our teens are initiating. Keeping the inner adult in sight when we’re talking to our teens is crucial, but it’s not always easy. Our refrain over and over to parents in this regard is simply: Remember, there’s an adult in there! Once we remember this, it’s easier to direct our conversations to that (often well-hidden) adult, in an effort to bring him or her to the surface.
Particularly during arguments, teens are often verbally overmatched and can be easily made to feel foolish and irrational. Their actual positions may not be so unreasonable, but the ways they’ve learned to argue often leave them looking far more immature than they are. Even if teens ultimately give in, they end up feeling not so much persuaded as unheard. In these cases, finding the inner adult means making the effort to help teens voice their position as clearly as possible. The staff at the Youth Action Project understood this implicitly. We’ve found that at times we need to act almost as a spokesperson for our teens, to help them articulate the reasonable goals that may be hazily formed in their minds, lest they come out poorly and be ignored.
Let’s apply this principle to what may be the most shopworn parent-teen conversational routine of all time. It goes as follows:
PARENT: How was your day at school?
TEEN: Fine.
PARENT: Can’t you say anything more than just “Fine” each day?
TEEN:…
Need we say more? You know this line of conversation almost always goes nowhere, no matter how many times it’s repeated.
Many teens don’t quite have the articulation skills, self-possession, or even mental energy to simply say what’s most often on their minds when they hear this question.
If they could clearly articulate what they were thinking, it would probably be something like: “It’s been a long day. I don’t feel like talking right now. Maybe we can talk later.” Or perhaps, “I don’t like having to give you a report card at the end of each day about what went on at school.” But most teens aren’t able to voice their feelings this clearly.
So we have a choice. We can either beat them up over what a lame response “Fine” is, or we can help them put better words to what they’re thinking, even if it’s not what we want to hear at the moment.
When we try to help them voice their feelings more articulately—acting as their spokesperson might—things almost always perk up:
PARENT: You don’t really feel like talking right now, do you? Maybe later?
TEEN: Sure, I guess. It’s just been a long day. Do we have anything good to eat?
Interestingly, once teens realize they aren’t going to get boxed into a corner and badgered over not wanting to talk, they are often a bit more willing to talk, although still not necessarily right after school. Over and over again in our own household, we’ve found that when we don’t badger our teens at three-thirty, around ten that night they’ll often walk into whatever room we may be in and start talking about their day. Now at first we found these drop-ins—just as we were about to drop off for the night—exasperating (perhaps equivalent to how our teens felt at three-thirty). Then we realized what a gift we were being given. Our teenagers were volunteering thoughts about their day and their lives. They were just doing it—as adults are wont to do—on a schedule that best suited their own moods. We quickly realized it was worth losing a bit of sleep to engage in these often-animated conversations.
When communication breaks down with our teens, it’s particularly easy to then see their behavior as irrational and capricious, even when it isn’t. This is a common human reaction to words or behaviors we don’t understand. Long ago, the popular TV show Bonanza used to occasionally feature interactions of the Cartwright family on their Nevada ranch with their Chinese cook, Hop Sing. In moments that were meant humorously (though with racist overtones that were largely overlooked at the time), Hop Sing would experience some unfortunate kitchen pratfall and go into a tirade in Chinese. The Cartwrights all laughed, as did the audience. Hop Sing just looked so silly and childlike ranting in what sounded like gibberish in a high-pitched voice. Of course, if Hop Sing had been speaking English, the scene wouldn’t have been nearly so funny.
When we don’t understand someone, it’s easy to belittle their complaints and their feelings. We see them as childlike and capricious, silly even, simply because we don’t understand. As a society, we’ve (mostly) learned not to do this with those who speak a different language than we do, but we haven’t made nearly as much progress in listening to teens whom we have trouble understanding.
How easy it would have been to misinterpret a teen’s afternoon reply to, “How was your day?” as “just” adolescent obstinacy. We would have been viewing them as fundamentally immature and unhelpful when in reality they were just acting as fledgling adults learning to negotiate when and where they wanted to engage in conversation. Further, by getting angry, we might well have poisoned the atmosphere and made those later-in-the-evening conversations impossible. Alternatively, by looking past the way our teens talk and the language they use, we can glimpse the more mature, reasonable side of their thinking and their behavior. Such glimpses not only change our views—and provide some real basis for optimism to parents in the trenches of adolescence—they also tend to bring out the best in our teens, who appreciate someone recognizing that they’re trying to pursue reasonable goals with their actions.
This idea of finding, guiding, and aligning with a teen’s inner adult also suggests a different way of handling battles over rules and privileges.
As parents, it’s hard not to be drawn into protracted battles about when teens are old enough to get which privileges. There’s a way around this, though, and it doesn’t involve just talking to our teens differently, but thinking differently about what we ask of them.
Antonio’s parents were engaged in a classic argument over curfews, for example, and as we worked with this family of strong-willed individuals, they provided a great illustration of what we mean. The conversation in our office began as follows:
“Look, guys, my friends all get to stay out till twelve on weekends, so I really think my curfew should be later.”
“Sorry about that, big fella, but your curfew’s eleven. We’ve told you that when your birthday comes around in nine months, we’ll raise it, but till then, you’re stuck.”
“Why do I have to be in by eleven? That’s just lame! What’s so bad about being out a little later on a weekend night?”
“Because it’s too late at your age, and we’ve been through this a million times and we’re not going to go through it again.”
“You guys are just impossible!”
The parents here are certainly not unreasonable in having a curfew, sticking to it, or even in limiting debate about a topic that has clearly been debated much before; yet clearly things aren’t going well. It’s a bind many good parents find themselves in.
What Antonio’s parents are not yet doing, though, is trying to find and talk to the adult lurking beneath Antonio’s angry complaints. Let’s replay this as Antonio’s parents eventually learned to do:
“Why do I have to be in by eleven? That’s just lame!”
“Okay. You hate being in by eleven. We get that. And we know that in not all that long you’ll be off at college and won’t have any curfew. So we want to be helping you not need a curfew as well.”
Sounds good, but where do we go from here? Well, at this point it’s not just a matter of how we talk to our teens, but of how we’re actually going to treat them. Moving away from strictly age-based rules and limits turns out to be a great place to start. As we’ve taught many parents over the years, to draw out and indeed to reward the inner adult means to stop tying limits and rules to specific ages and start tying them to demonstrated signs of maturity (that is, to becoming an adult). With Antonio’s parents it worked as follows:
“So here’s the deal. Instead of saying we’ll raise your curfew by an hour at your birthday in nine months, let’s talk about ways you can show now that you’re responsible enough that you can handle being out later.”
“Like what?” Antonio asked uncertainly, but with increasing interest.
With a little prompting, they all quickly agreed on several things:
Adult responsibility meant meeting basic commitments. In Antonio’s case this meant getting at least all B’s in school, doing chores almost all the time without being asked, staying out of trouble, and managing the existing curfew successfully.
Teens are usually willing to come on board with these ideas, but are typically most eager to hear about the time line. The time line is simple… as soon as the changes happen and have shown they are going to stick, the curfew can change, but no sooner. Framing a later curfew as a reward to be pursued can be quite motivating to teens. Putting this in place, though, requires keeping our nurturing instincts in check. For there’s a temptation to set this plan up as an agreement going forward (“Okay, we’ll raise your curfew but you have to promise to get all B’s”). Adulthood rarely works this way, though. Paychecks come after work has been done, and meals don’t get eaten until after they’ve been cooked. Further, if we give our teens the reward before they’ve shown the adult behavior, then we’re forced into a monitoring/punishing role, because all that’s left is the option to take the later curfew away if they don’t follow through. Whereas teenagers tend to like to think about future rewards and like working toward them, in contrast, punishments often breed anger, resentment, and a desire to focus attention elsewhere. This is actually a human principle more than an adolescent principle, but it’s one that’s worth taking full advantage of here.
“But what about safety?” parents usually ask. “It just isn’t safe being out and about really late in our town.”
Here again our overarching goal of getting our teens to engage in the world of adulthood helps chart our course. Most teens, like most adults, have no inherent interest in being unsafe. And, as we explain to teens, even if they don’t agree that being a bit safer is worth coming home early for, in the adult world people often have to negotiate with other adults who have different opinions than they do.
And so the negotiation proceeds, but the tone has become far more reasonable, allowing for some thoughtful give-and-take.
“How about if I come home at eleven if I’m going to be out at a party or something, but if I’m at Andy’s, or Tyler’s, or Steve’s, I can stay till twelve? Because there’s really not anything dangerous going to happen at their house and it’s a short drive home.”
“Okay, but can you call us by ten-thirty to let us know what the plan will be?”
Both teen and parents have bought into a good deal. The parents are only offering to partly give up a bit of a curfew that they were going to give up in nine months anyway, in return for better grades, better chores, and a more responsible teen. Their teen may or may not follow through, but at worst, the parents have now gained a simple lever—framed in the language of adulthood—for getting their teen to take school and chores more seriously.
Are the parents simply giving in? Not if the adulthood conditions they set are real. Most parents base their rules for their teens at least implicitly on their sense of how their teens are managing their lives. If we’d asked Antonio’s parents at the outset how they would feel about a later curfew if they were raising a teen who was getting good grades in school, not getting into any trouble, handling the existing curfew well, and being responsible around the house, most likely they would have felt much better.
Teens, on the other hand, are getting a chance to gain what they most want—freedom—and all they have to do is follow guidelines that they know are probably good for them anyway. And they can always choose not to do it and be no worse than they were. But now the choice is theirs. And choices are a powerful thing to have! We give the teens the adult freedom they want, but do it gradually, with supports and with the expectation that they acquire adult-level maturity in the process.
We’ve got years of research findings showing that when parents use this negotiating approach, the results extend well beyond the home. For example, in a long-term study we conducted looking at peer relationships in adolescence, parents who used the approach we just outlined had teens who were viewed as the most socially competent within their peer group. Similarly, our own research as well as that of our colleagues has found that these effects extend to improved academic performance as well. Teaching teens to negotiate like adults, while still respecting parents’ ultimate decision-making role, pays many dividends.
The signpost we ask parents to follow here is quite simple: Freedom should be linked to behavior. Once one starts down this path, numerous routes begin to open up and tense negotiations tend to become less personalized and based more on the objective realities of adulthood. Privileges come not with parental whim and not because other teens have them, but based on mastery of adult tasks. School, for example, is viewed as a trial form of adult employment. Yes, it’s boring at times (far too often, actually, but we’ll get into that later), but so is work sometimes, a fact the college graduate who asked, “Will I have to be bored?” when I was interviewing him for a job had never learned. And chores and homework and similar tasks need to be handled well because in adulthood the analogous tasks such as paying bills, doing taxes, and meeting work deadlines all leave little margin for error. Adults need to learn to manage such tasks, and adolescence provides a place to gain practice and experience when the stakes are still relatively low. Being treated like an adult should go hand in hand with learning to function well as an adult.
A big part of the parenting approach we’re describing relies upon a clever principle that’s been studied with younger children but hasn’t yet been much applied to adolescents. It’s called scaffolding. The concept was first identified by Lev Vygotsky, a marvelously creative Soviet developmental psychologist from the early twentieth century who sought to challenge the notion that there were ironclad, intrinsic limits on what youths of a given age could and could not master. Vygotsky noted that even young children could often manage complex tasks that seemed far beyond them if adults provided what he called “scaffolding” to support them. Like the scaffolding that surrounds construction sites for tall buildings, Vygotsky’s notion was that adults could and should provide just enough support to allow youth to reach otherwise unattainable heights through their own efforts.
Scaffolding is perhaps our single best answer to the question of just how we can bring the adulthood back into adolescence while still recognizing that our teens aren’t yet fully mature. We can easily imagine, for example, contexts in which our teens would be all too likely to fail to behave maturely and potentially meet with catastrophic consequences, from work in life-and-death medical settings to 4:00 A.M. curfews. And given the “plus or minus five” rule, even far more modest tasks appear outside the reach of our teens at times. But with proper guidance, limits, safety nets, and support—that is, with scaffolding—it turns out that there is little that teens can’t do. To treat them otherwise is to massively underestimate their capacities.
So how does this work in action? To find out, let’s return to the argument about teen driving described in Chapter 3. It’s been our experience that while most parents with whom we’ve spoken recognize that teens used to take up driving earlier and with more eagerness, they also wonder whether we fully appreciate what’s at stake. The answer is that we appreciate it all too well, which is precisely why we argue for trying to give our teens their licenses earlier than we do now, but with more scaffolding. Before we set off a panic among parents of midteens with this statement, let us explain what we mean.
When I had my discussion awhile back with my colleague who did research on teen driving, it turns out there was one solution on which we could both agree. And this solution involves scaffolding. The answer—the “graduated license”—is already being implemented more and more widely, but we believe it could be extended even further with good effect. In this approach, teens have to begin by spending significant amounts of time driving with an adult in the car with them. The idea is to let them gain driving experience while piggybacking on the greater experience (and extra set of eyes) of a knowledgeable adult. Remarkably, while accident rates for unsupervised teen drivers are frighteningly high, rates for teen drivers operating under a restricted license with an adult in the car look much closer to rates for older, experienced drivers. We’re simply arguing for extending this period by getting teens to begin it a bit earlier.
This approach could address the one consistent problem with the graduated license as it’s currently implemented: Parents don’t always take advantage of it. The Commonwealth of Virginia, for example, requires forty hours of driving with an adult over a nine-month learner’s period before a teen is allowed to drive alone. But our experience is that many parents don’t use this time to drive with their teens. Rather, they let their teens drive occasionally, but often as not do the driving themselves. Having been through the process ourselves, we understand the temptation. It’s easier for parents to drive: less stressful, quicker, and theoretically safer. And there’s a threshold effect. Until our teens become reasonably adept, we don’t want them handling more-complex drives; yet our daily lives don’t always provide much natural opportunity for the easier drives necessary to gain this skill. We don’t have hard data, but anecdotally our sense is that many parents who sign the form documenting the forty hours of supervised driving time have spent far less time than that with their teens behind the wheel.
So why not start a bit earlier and let teens drive with their parents longer? The idea of teens behind the wheel at fifteen certainly gives us pause, but not that long ago fourteen-year-olds could get unrestricted licenses in cars that were far less safe. And yes, the roads were less crowded then, but what if we use the scaffolding principle to mimic that? What if fifteen-year-olds (or even younger teens) drove with their parents, but in daylight, in good weather, and only on uncrowded, easy roads? This could happen gradually, with little pressure to “get practice time in” before a real license loomed. Our own experience is that after enough time driving with parents, many driving habits become firmly engrained, and many rare but dangerous hazards have been handled, thus puncturing adolescents’ sense of invulnerability while still keeping them safe. We are not saying teens should get their unrestricted licenses any sooner than they do now, only that this approach might make them more ready for those licenses when they do come.
An equally important type of scaffolding is emotional in nature. Teens, for all their independence, very much need adults’ support, encouragement, and even cheerleading as they take on new task after new task. Learning to manage adultlike tasks is not just cognitively challenging, it can also be emotionally trying and leave even competent teens feeling discouraged at times. Close, supportive relationships are crucial to bucking teens up under these circumstances and allowing them to reach their full potential. In the next chapter we’ll consider in more detail the kinds of relationships that can maximize the healthy support we can provide teens, but for now we just want to make clear that the kinds of scaffolding teens require are not just practical but emotional.
Day-to-day examples of scaffolding abound, and indeed our principle of putting the adulthood back into adolescence couldn’t be applied without it. Ellen could not have handled her work on a horse farm without the owner taking time to show her exactly what she needed to do and looking over her shoulder the first few times she did it. The young people at the Youth Action Project would have gotten nowhere without adults willing to set up a reasonable, doable plan for their building renovation and providing guidance and training along the way. Sam needed and used our therapeutic interactions to overcome her angry impulses enough to see the path to adulthood and freedom that was before her. Antonio would still need limits on his curfew in order to manage it safely.
It would have been far too easy to just decide that each of these young people was simply not ready for the tasks they were taking on. Or to simply get tangled up responding to the immature rants of each teen’s inner child and not even consider sending these tasks their way. But with a combination of heightened expectations for our teens, a willingness to look not just at the “minus five years” behavior, but at the “plus five” potential, and some scaffolding, we can bring out the best our teens have to offer.
This leads to our next escape tip for teens and their parents: With enough support, anything is possible! A few generations ago we had no choice but to take this approach with young teenagers. An extended adolescence was a luxury few families could afford, and so parents naturally saw their fourteen-year-olds as individuals who should be well on their way toward handling adult tasks and responsibilities. And by and large those teens managed reasonably well. The good news is, if we adopt some of the same attitudes, we can also move today’s teens into adulthood far more quickly and effectively. We might even find ourselves more often enjoying the time we spend with them.