“She’s 22 years old, for heaven’s sake! We thought she’d be grown up by now. But no, it’s one more crisis after another. And then she calls on us—for emotional support, problem-solving advice. Even money… although we’ve gotten pretty tough about that. It’s like she’s still a teen! Why is it so hard for her just to act like an adult?”
In the United States, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, most older adolescents expect, and are expected, to move out and try to live on their own—maybe sharing an apartment with friends or in some cases with roommates at college.
This is not the case everywhere. At a talk I gave several years ago, a parent from South America stood up and said: “Why do you want your children to grow up, leave home, and live independent of family? In my country, you are expected to grow up, stay home, and become a contributing part of the multigenerational family who all help each other. Why do you want your grown children to go away? Why do you want to break up the family?”
This is true: young people are not obliged to leave home any more than parents are obliged to have them go. And multigenerational families can be healthy, happy, and productive places in which grown-up young people can live. But the reality is that in our culture, the majority of young people in the final stage of adolescence (and their parents) believe that it’s time to move out, so they can be themselves, live on their own terms, and be responsible for their own care. Yet, despite trying hard to do so, many young people falter.
So how do we help them understand themselves and the challenges they face so that they can succeed at living on their own and growing fully into adulthood?
To begin, we need a firm understanding of the adolescent years, how they affect both children and parents, and how they build toward independence. Thus, in this chapter, we will closely examine the following:
When they think of adolescence, most people commonly think of the middle school through high school years (or children age 12–18). However, adolescence actually begins in late elementary school (usually starting around age 9–13) and doesn’t end until the early to mid-twenties. Adolescence typically lasts about ten to twelve years. During this time, young people work to gather sufficient knowledge, experience, and self-reliance to forsake the supports of childhood, to gain more responsibility, to develop a more mature sense of identity, and to learn to manage life independently. This journey to independence through the teenage years is a labored one, because trial, error, and recovery are the halting steps required for growing up. Progress and backsliding go hand in hand.
For young people and their parents, the process can seem unpredictable, creating a certain amount of anxiety for all concerned. It’s like the shortsighted leading the blind. Parents are shortsighted because most of what they know about growing up comes from their own adolescent experience, which was at a previous time, in a different family system, and under social circumstances that are no longer in place. Young people are blind because everything is new to them, and they feel anxious and excited about the discoveries to be made, freedoms to be gained, and new adventures to be had.
For parents, there is more worry than excitement. They often feel they have no option but ignorance as the turbulent teenage years unfold, but this is not true. You don’t have to be governed by confusion, ignorance, and surprise during the teenage years. You can be informed.
The first step in understanding your child’s adolescence is honestly remembering your own and overcoming your own denial about what growing up was really like. The parents I meet who seem to have the most difficulty adjusting when their engaging child transforms into a more abrasive adolescent are those who suffer from three specific types of denial:
Denial is the enemy in hiding. It keeps parents from acknowledging the truth of what did happen, what is happening, or what may happen to their teenager.
Come adolescence, it’s best for parents to face the alterations of adolescence head-on. This means accepting that some unwelcome changes will happen to their child during adolescence. This means admitting that, just as they acted out, experienced hard times, and messed up while going through their own teenage years, their son or daughter will do some of the same. This means understanding how, from one generation to the next, although the social context is not the same as it was in the parents’ youth, the basics of the adolescent experience haven’t changed that much.
So how do you know if you are in denial? I have developed twenty-five points (originally published in my book The Connected Father) that will help you recognize denial. During your own adolescence, do you remember any of the following?
If you answered no to many of these questions, then you may be in parental denial. If you answered yes to many of these questions, then you can now better understand how little adolescence has changed and that many of the ways you felt, believed, and behaved back then, your teenagers will probably feel and think and act now.
So before you explode at your teenager in anger or surprise—“You did what? How could you do such a thing?”—take the time to ask yourself if, while growing up, you ever did something similar. Parents shouldn’t do this to excuse their children, but to see if they can relate to them, their situation, and their state of mind. Instead of getting mad, think of how different it would be to say:
“I never exactly got into this kind of trouble, but I came close on a couple of occasions, so I can remember what that was like. The main thing for you to understand is that there isn’t much you can get into now that I couldn’t get into, or didn’t know about, back when I was growing up. So let’s talk about how you feel, what you learned, and what needs to happen now.”
Although the teenage years involve a lot of uncertainty, the progression of a young person’s development, and the parenting challenges that it creates, are generally consistent. That is, certain changes, conflicts, and problems tend to unfold in a somewhat orderly progression. If you can anticipate the likelihood of these changes and events, you are more likely to react rationally, not emotionally. An emotional reaction can end up making a hard situation worse. So what follows is an abbreviated road map to adolescent change, a framework based on my observations from counseling young people and their parents over the years.
When parents know what to anticipate, they can ease their response to normal bumps along the way and not be surprised by these unwelcome turns of events. They can respond to changes effectively and not overreact. The best way to keep up with teenagers is to stay ahead. So, let’s take a look at the normal challenges in each of the first three stages of adolescence.
In early adolescence, the main challenge is separation from childhood. Early adolescents cast off childhood by rejecting their old family identity and the role of being a child. In loosening ties of dependency on parents and lessening communication with them, young people become more interested in the larger world beyond the shelter of family, a world they are now more eager to explore. At this time, young people bridle more against parental demands and restraints and develop a more negative mind-set toward parents and toward themselves, while parents mourn the loss of the adoring and adorable little child they will never have again.
Problems that parents encounter at this stage are typically characterized by the following changes in young people:
In mid-adolescence, the main challenge is to begin forming a family of friends. Those friends will support and accompany (and pressure) the young person through the experiences and adventures of growing up. Your child will tell his or her friends much more about what is going on than he or she will tell you. Mid-adolescents are more inclined to keep you in ignorance and even deceive you to protect their privacy and enable their freedom of action. At this time, teenagers are more determined than ever to fight parents for the social independence that they believe is necessary to have time and keep up with their friends.
Parenting problems encountered at this stage are typically characterized by the following changes in the adolescent:
In late adolescence, the main challenge is for teens to act more grown-up. These are the high school years. Although both parents and teenager are in agreement about the need for the teen to act more grown-up, they have very different definitions about what that actually means. For parents, acting more grown-up is about exercising more adult responsibility. For the late adolescent, acting more grown-up is about having “adult” adventures. In addition, the young person has growing excitement and anxiety about approaching independence. The young person does not feel fully prepared to manage the separation from home and to shoulder the responsibilities that will soon come with living more on his or her own.
Parenting problems encountered at this age are typically characterized by the following changes in the late adolescent:
By the time your child has finished the first three stages of adolescence, what has he or she accomplished?
Once these stages are complete, young people feel more ready than not to try putting all that they have learned into practice, to move out on their own. But that does not mean that their adolescence has ended. They are now simply moving on to stage 4, trial independence—the stage when many boomerang kids are born.
No matter how difficult the earlier teen years may seem, the trial independence stage is usually the hardest for older adolescents, who must now spread their wings and keep their footing at the same time. The young person is likely living away from home for the first time (usually with roommates), either working at a job or pursuing further education or both. Although equipped with the desire for independence, the young person often does not possess all the necessary skills to handle it. Trial independence demands more responsibility than most young people can handle, at least right away. As one young person in the midst of money troubles exclaimed to her parents: “But I’ve never budgeted, paid bills, or had a bank account before!”
Consider how the demands of trial independence can pile up:
In the extreme, what young people discover, usually at some cost, is that assuming responsible independence is more difficult than they anticipated: “No one told me it would be like this!” In addition, they may have no clear direction in life, no job path into the future that they want to follow. “I don’t know what I want to do with my life!” is the rallying cry of the age. Not only that, when they do know what they need to do, they end up at war with themselves. “I can’t make myself get it done!” is the frustration that many feel. Anxieties abound in the face of challenges that often feel overwhelming and diminish confidence and self-esteem: “What’s the matter with me?”
Then, they must also cope with the effects of an unhealthy lifestyle. Many young people in this stage do not take good care of themselves, as power of want triumphs over power of will, as impulse overrules judgment, and as temptation overcomes restraint. They suffer from sleep deprivation; poor dietary habits; procrastination; debt from credit spending; nonstop socializing; maximum availability of alcohol and other drugs; and low self-esteem from feeling developmentally incompetent and unable to get their lives together at such an advanced age.
In consequence, many young people in this last stage are subject to a great variation of unhappy emotions. They may experience despondency, loneliness, stress, confusion, uncertainty, insecurity, disappointment, guilt, shame, anxiety, and exhaustion, for example, and they may resort to substances to escape these feelings and manage their discomfort. The three to five years after high school can be a period of extremely heavy and varied substance use, which disorganizes the lives of many young people at this vulnerable age. Unprotected by family, young people in this stage are more exposed to sharers and sellers of illicit drugs. So if your child gets into serious difficulty from poor judgment during trial independence, always assess the role of substance use in the unfolding of unhappy events. If there had been no drinking or other substance using, would he or she have made the same choices?
All young people will encounter their own unique set of challenges during trial independence. But when you are committed, engaged, settled down, and practical, it can be hard to empathize with a child in his or her early twenties who is uncommitted, disengaged, unsettled, and unrealistic. Plus, with your declining influence, lack of information, and dread that your child might make life-harming decisions, it is easy to feel frightened and to let fear be you guide. But constantly showing worry, impatience, or criticism will only make matters worse for your older adolescent, who is riddled by those same hard emotions themselves.
Instead, you must work to show respect for their right and responsibility to make decisions, confidence in your child’s capacity to make sound decisions and to learn from mistakes, and support for him or her to keep on trying to make independence work. This is the time to change the focus of your parenting, a time to stop managing your child and to provide mentoring instead. The next section describes how to make this shift.
Just because young people are on their own (or trying to be) doesn’t mean that they don’t still need their parents to be involved. In fact, because of the significant challenges that come with trial independence, children need parents more than ever before. Parents are needed, however, in a different way. In this last stage of adolescence, it is essential that parents change their role from being managers (imposing supervision and regulation) to becoming mentors (offering consultation and advice—when asked).
If you barge in and try to control an adolescent’s troubled life at this late stage (when a job has been lost and bills are past due), you risk rescuing your child from learning the life lessons that facing consequences and taking responsibility have to teach. If you are quick to criticize mistakes and shortcomings, you also risk estranging yourself from your child and reducing communication with a child who refuses to be censured anymore. As one angry young person declared: “I would rather have nothing to do with them than hear what they have to say or have to do what they say! It’s my life, and they need to get used to it!” But, of course, when she returns home to recover from a crisis, she invites them back into her life to a degree by depending on their care.
To become a mentor, parents have to shift position in relation to their son or daughter. Up until now, parents have had a managerial, vertical relationship, where authority placed them in a superior or dominant position, from which they evaluated conduct, directed behavior, and dictated terms of living from above. In trial independence, however, young people do not welcome and usually will not tolerate being judged, directed, or having terms of living dictated by parents. In response, they may pull away and communicate less to parents who treat them in these old, controlling ways.
So to maintain a workable connection at this time, when this connection is sorely needed, parents need to establish a mentoring, horizontal relationship, where there is more equity between them, and parents live alongside their children on terms of mutual respect. The mentoring contract states that the parents will respect the young person’s right and responsibility to make independent decisions, and the young person will respect the wisdom of life experience the parents can offer.
Mentoring needs to be a consensual, consultative, and collaborative relationship where, by invitation only, parents help with problem solving, sharing what experiences and ideas they have to offer, and being objective and never evaluative. “Based on the difficulty you describe, this is how you might want to choose your way out of this problem. Of course, this is your life, you know it best, and the decision is entirely up to you.” The parents who have the hardest time shifting from a vertical (managerial) to a horizontal (mentoring) relationship tend to be authoritarian. They want to control, they know best, they are always right, they will be in charge, and they insist on getting their way.
To effectively enact this new parenting role, you must let go of all corrective discipline. You neither criticize nor punish. If you want your young person to come to you and learn from you, you must forsake all expressions of frustration and disapproval, disappointment and worry, impatience and anger. You must respect the young person’s right to make her own decisions, even when you do not agree with those decisions. You are no longer in the business of trying to control or determine choices by bending the conduct of your child’s life to your will. Facing real-world consequences will provide discipline enough. You need to empathize, encourage, and advise or coach when asked.
How can you tell the difference between managing and mentoring?
The mentoring rule is, Accept before advising. If parents cannot accept a young person’s right to independent choice without the respect that acceptance conveys, then the young person will feel disapproval or criticism and will wall him- or herself off from the parents for self-protection. Parental acceptance opens the door for parental advice to get in. Now young people are more likely to be open to parental counsel because they know that their parents have no censure to offer, only their knowledge, experience, and problem-solving help.
Many adolescents in this last stage before young adulthood lose their independent footing and must be encouraged to learn after the fact, from sad experience, what they did not learn before. They must learn the hard way, by making mistakes and taking responsibility for their recovery. Even mature adolescents can lose their footing in trial independence, because maturity cannot make up for inexperience. The job of parents, through mentoring, is to support their child’s will to keep on trying and to be accessible so that he or she can benefit from the experience and understanding that parents have to offer.
As mentors, your role is not to tell young people what to do or to “make” them do anything. Your role is not to bail them out of difficulty. Your role is not to express disappointment, criticism, frustration, anger, worry, or despair. Instead, listen empathetically; advise if asked; let go of any responsibility for fixing whatever is going wrong; and offer faith that young people, having chosen their way into trouble, have what it takes to choose their way out.
Obviously, the willingness of a young person to come to you when confused, undecided, in need of counsel, or in difficulty depends on there being comfortable and trustful communication. To that end, you must not evaluate or interfere, and you must be affirmative, constant, and loving. Being an effective mentor means being emotionally approachable. Mentors express
If you do provide help, do so only after you see evidence of self-help in your child first. And be cautious about the amount of help you give, because the downside of any help is that it protracts dependency—the young person depends on you to do what he is unable or unwilling to do for himself. For example, if you help a college student with projects or papers just as you did when she was in high school, it may enhance her performance, but it will disable her independence.
All the while, you must be aware of your child’s self-esteem. There is a major drop in self-esteem during trial independence, a painful sense of developmental incompetence: “I’m old enough to be adult, but I keep messing up!” If you hear this from your son or daughter, you can say, “Most young people don’t find their independent footing without first making some slips, because there are so many new responsibilities to learn and so many new commitments to keep.” As a mentor, experienced with your own trial-and-error education, let your son or daughter know that mistakes are a foundation for learning throughout everyone’s life.
In fact, one of the most important parts of being a mentoring parent is to encourage learning through mistakes. In childhood, the age of dependence, a conscientious parent is often the best teacher. In the last stage of adolescence, confrontation with hard consequences from poor choices is usually the best teacher.
Trial, error, and recovery mark the adolescent learning curve of growing up. This can be hard for parents to accept. The older their children grow the less tolerant parents typically become when errors occur. A two-year-old’s mistake is easier to accept than a twelve-year-old’s mistake, and a twenty-two-year-old’s mistake can be frustrating for a parent who expects more maturity. (But remember, because the last stage of adolescence is the hardest—and involves coming to grips with responsible independence—that you should anticipate mistakes from your child during this time.)
Unfortunately, sometimes parents who wish to protect their teenagers will intervene to prevent this invaluable instruction. They will intervene to get them out of trouble; they will quash consequences; and by doing so, they lose an opportunity for education. “He didn’t mean to,” “She promised never to do it again,” “He just wasn’t thinking,” and “She’s really a good kid, so give her a break.” In the long run, this kind of parental help can really hurt.
It’s better to support mistake-based education and let young people encounter the errors of their ways. For example, consider some of these reasons not to rescue. By dealing with the consequences of
To support this after-the-fact instruction, parents not only need to act tough enough to let consequences happen but also need to honor learning the hard way. One of the best ways to do this is to talk about “the great school of life”:
“In the great school of life, you and I will never graduate. We’ll always be students because we’ll never experience it all. We’ll never know it all. We’ll never master it all. We’ll never pay enough attention. We’ll never be careful enough. We’ll never remember all we should. We’ll never get it all right. We’ll all do some foolish things. And neither one of us will get all A’s. The best we can do is try our best, keep trying when the going gets hard, learn from the errors of our ways, and credit ourselves for doing what works out well. I may not have made your mistakes growing up, but I sure made a bunch of my own. I still do. And I always will.”
One father put it well when his twentysomething adolescent was in despair over messing up once again. “Son,” the man said, “as far as I’m concerned, if you’re not making mistakes in life that just means you’re not trying hard enough.” And with that opinion, or blessing, a father lifted a world of self-recrimination off the shoulders of his beleaguered son.
The sign of a parent who is a successful mentor to a son or daughter struggling through challenges of trial independence is the ability to help put mistake-based education to constructive use. And in trial independence, there is an enormous opportunity for missteps as young people make their way across the minefield of challenges that separates the last stage of adolescence from entry into young adulthood.
PARENTING PRESCRIPTION