“It’s a lot to deal with all at once, all that freedom. On the one hand, it was so exciting—acting like rules didn’t matter. That’s how I got into a lot of trouble! I never thought that ignoring parking tickets could lead to a warrant for my arrest! On the other hand, all that freedom was exhausting. More choices than I knew what to do with and no one to look over my shoulder or check up on me. I think so much freedom can be too much of a good thing. I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes I wished for some rules to go by and somebody to make them stick. Freedom turned out to be a big letdown. That’s when I started thinking about joining the military or going back home. I chose home.”
During trial independence, freedom can be extremely challenging for a young person. Being more on their own, last-stage adolescents discover the nature of this new freedom—a world in which there are many more decisions to make than ever before. A lot of management choices that their parents previously took care of—like paying bills, scheduling enough sleep, managing minor medical issues—are suddenly up to them. Gone are the household services, parental supervision, and family rules that took care of so many decisions affecting their life before. As one young person confessed, “There’s so much more to think about now! It’s exhausting!”
This is true. It’s a lot to organize, to keep track of, to take care of, to accomplish, and to watch out for. What I often see in counseling last-stage adolescents is what I have come to call decision fatigue. These young people are simply worn out by all that they have to think about and choose to do or not to do. No longer sheltered by parents and home, they are deluged with more choices than they ever have had before. They feel overwhelmed by alternatives and obligations, invitations and opportunities, and are confused about how to prioritize them all.
And this is how it should be. The hard reality is that it takes a lot more energy to function as an independent adult than as a dependent adolescent. This is why trial independence is the period during which young people get in training, in condition, to shoulder the wearying scope of grown-up responsibility. But without the right guidance, this training can become overwhelming, and young people can boomerang back home.
There are three psychological challenges to managing all this newfound freedom:
Let’s examine each one and how you can help guide your child through each challenge.
The first thing older adolescents discover during trial independence is that the freedom they desired so much isn’t actually free. It comes with a powerful string attached—responsibility.
Younger adolescents often say they wanted independence, when what they really meant was social freedom—freedom from adult direction and restraint. And when they did think about social freedom, it was usually as the freedom of choice to act as they wished, which of course is only half of social freedom. The other half—the string attached, if you will—is coping with the consequence of every choice: enjoying beneficial consequences when the choice is good and confronting unhappy consequences when the choice is bad. The second half of social freedom is responsibility. Because freedom of choice is always chained to consequence, the freedom to make one’s own decisions is never free.
One way to think about the job of parenting adolescents is the process of continually teaching the choice-consequence connection. This is important for two reasons. First, the young person learns what kind of decisions can cause what kind of outcomes (unprotected sex, for example, can lead to sexual disease or unwanted pregnancy). Second, by owning and coping with the consequences of a decision, the young person learns responsibility (she parked illegally, got a ticket, and spends her hard-earned money to pay the fine).
However, this instruction is not as easy to deliver as it seems. Sometimes we don’t want to allow our teenagers to experience the consequences. And sometimes teenagers don’t want to acknowledge that choices lead to consequences at all.
I recall a young person who got involved in shoplifting—not to get anything he particularly wanted but to see what he could get away with. When he got caught with the goods, his parents had the charges legally dissolved so he did not receive the consequence they feared—a juvenile record for theft. Talk to the parents, and they had good reasons for saving their son from this social consequence. “He’s really a good kid, he says he’s learned his lesson, and an active record could hurt his opportunities down the line.” But the young man felt blameless for the entire episode. “If they wouldn’t have caught me, none of this trouble would have happened. Besides, it’s a stupid rule. The store’s not going to miss a couple of CDs.” So the lesson the young man carried forward into the last stage of his adolescence was this: “Rules are made for other people, not for me. If I get into trouble, my parents will get me out. They’ve done it before.”
Young people who enter trial independence having been protected from the earlier errors of their ways by well-meaning parents usually have to learn lessons of responsibility from hard social reality. Once young people are out in the world, it is no time for well-meaning parents to rescue their children from facing the consequences of their ill-advised choices. Writing bad checks, not paying credit card bills, and ignoring traffic fines are common ways that young people in the trial independence stage sometimes treat their exhilarating sense of freedom. Without a parent to rescue them, last-stage adolescents discover that when they run up credit card balances, interest rates just increase what they owe. And if they cease making payments, and act as though debt will go away if they ignore it, collection agencies rudely awaken them to the obligation they have incurred.
Unwanted consequences can help educate about making choices, if parents acknowledge these consequences and allow them to bite. Because so much education during adolescence occurs after a mistake or misdeed, experiencing the outcomes of these actions can have a hugely powerful instructional effect.
Consider the young man who experiments with more dangerous substance use when he is out on his own. Promised a “great trip” by his buddies, he has a harrowing experience with hallucinogens. In this case, the bad consequence teaches a good lesson. “I’ll never drop acid again!” he resolves, and he means it.
Thus, instead of rescuing children from consequences, parents should help them learn to think about the consequences beforehand. For young people, the secret to managing more freedom is taking the time to think before they act. And I’m not talking about a lot of time—just time enough for young people to take what I call the three-question test. They can ask themselves and answer these three questions in a matter of seconds, and their answers can save them from a lot of grief:
Parents can advise: “If your companions won’t give you the fraction of time required to think and take the three-question test, you can be pretty sure that you are facing a bad choice.”
“Accidents” are another problem that arises when young people deny responsibility by claiming, “It couldn’t be helped,” “It wasn’t my fault,” “It was bad luck,” or “It was an accident.” Accidents, which are unwanted occurrences that are not considered or foreseen, are part of adolescence, because with more freedom comes greater risk of mishaps. For example, drive a car; and you risk collisions; have sex; and you risk sexual disease or pregnancy; or have a credit card; and you risk overspending.
Come trial independence, when capacity for responsibility is the only real protection a young person has against the risks of freedom, the parenting guideline needs to be that pleading “accident” is not acceptable. Some of the common pleas you’ll encounter are the following:
Such statements make it seem like accidents occur when adolescents are victimized by an unintended, unexpected, unpredictable, uncontrollable, or unfortunate occurrence. And in one way, this is true. In another way, it’s not. The concept of accident, particularly during adolescence, is a tricky one. It’s true that an accident is an unanticipated, usually unwanted, event. However, no accident ever really happens accidentally, because there is always cause for consequences that the teenager did not foresee.
The problem with accidents is not only the damage they can do but also the tendency of young people to disown responsibility by blaming them on bad breaks, other people, faulty workings, or a host of external agents and conditions. In doing so, they cast off their own complicity in what occurred. It’s true, for example, that after the party, the young couple didn’t intend to become pregnant, and they placed blame on the defective contraceptive they clumsily used. But they did choose to have sex.
Labeling an event as “accidental” can be a way of escaping one’s share of the responsibility. After all, if young people gave more thought to their choices, better control their impulses, exercise more care, consult their foresight, they might avert many such accidents.
In any case, come adolescence, more accidents of one kind or another will happen. So, how parents should deal with accidents is the question. The answer is that if the returning adolescent, by way of excuse, claims, “It was an accident,” then parents can sometimes agree and say, “Yes, we believe it was.” Then they can go on to explain what an accident really is—an unwanted outcome of some identifiable causes that surprisingly came to pass:
“Of course we know that you were not planning for this accident to happen, but being in the wrong place at the wrong time for your own reasons was a function of what you decided to do. And where there is choice, there is always a measure of responsibility. Let’s talk about your share of responsibility so that by owning it you are less likely to have this accident again.”
There are no accidents. There is a cause for everything. That’s how events occur.
For parents, during the last stage of adolescent growth, there is another guideline worth mentioning. Although bad consequences can discourage young people from making bad choices, good consequences can encourage them to make good choices. So the question for parents during this crucial training period for adult independence is, “Do you regularly give affirmation of and appreciation for all the good choices your last-stage adolescent makes?” If not, you’re missing a good bet. Many times, discouraged last-stage adolescents who feel that they are “totally failing to catch hold” can benefit from the parental perspective that identifies those independent challenges that they are managing well. For example:
“It’s true that by partying and not going to class you did fail out, but there is some good on the positive side of the ledger. You were able to leave and live away from home. You were able to make friends in a strange place. You were able to get and hold a part-time job to make your spending money. And you’ve learned some very good ways not to ‘do’ college if that opportunity arises again.”
Then there is this hard reality to remember: Although all choices have consequences, good choices never guarantee that good consequences will follow. Freedom to go for what you want doesn’t necessarily extend to the freedom to get what you want. For example, a young woman did all the work and studied very hard to go to college but didn’t get into her first-choice school. Despite all her good decisions, the desired consequence did not occur. Yet disappointment aside, she gained some benefit. The consequence she sought was a goal, and the conscientious effort in pursuit of that objective just made the adolescent’s determination stronger. During counseling, she makes a wonderfully healthy response: “I’ll just pick the next-best college I want to attend and apply for that!” A positive outlook can create world of opportunity.
The main lesson is that it takes anticipating and learning from consequences to successfully manage freedom during trial independence. And it takes something more: self-discipline.
Think of the challenge of self-discipline this way. Self-discipline is the willpower to make yourself do what is good for you when it doesn’t necessarily feel good to do it. Or, self-discipline is the willpower to keep yourself from doing what is bad for you when temptation makes it hard to refuse.
Come the onset of adolescence (around age 9–13), young people break the boundaries of childhood to create more room to grow, because they don’t want to be defined and treated as “just a child” anymore. The room to grow opens up an enormous amount of choice, some of it resistant and some of it exploratory.
At this stage, young people have grown out of the age of command and into the age of consent. In childhood, they thought that parents had the authority to dictate what they must and must not do, but now they realize that parents can’t make them do things or stop them without their cooperation. It’s an exhilarating feeling for an adolescent to know that even though setting conditions and constraints is up to his or her parents, the most powerful people in his or her life, freedom of choice is now in his or her own hands.
The age of consent, however, brings a sobering realization, as well. Young people have to manage much more freedom than they know what to do with, more than they can comfortably manage. This is partly because they lack the capacity to constructively structure all this freedom. Knowing this, they give their parents their consent to partly “run” their lives, to help keep them organized and on track. From here on, parents do not strive for control (which they never really had); they work for consent—to get their child to agree to go along with what the parents want and believe is best.
So, for example, although a daughter might complain about and protest parental discipline, she also accepts the necessity of it, of doing what parents want when she knows she doesn’t have to. After all, she lives in a family, not a prison. “All right, I’ll stay home, but I won’t forgive you for not letting me go!” She resents her parents for providing the order that she knows she needs and still depends on, but is not yet mature enough to provide for herself. This is why parenting during adolescence is often a thankless proposition.
The most long-lasting contribution parents can make with their discipline is to teach their children to internalize it as self-discipline. The greater purpose of parental discipline is to teach the adolescent sufficient self-discipline to responsibly govern his or her life. Developing self-discipline is how the adolescent keeps his or her increased freedom of choice within constructive limits. Those young people who enter trial independence with insufficient self-discipline are more likely to come home after freedom has gotten the better of them and they have fared for the worse.
When young people’s self-discipline breaks down, it usually happens in one or more of these six ways:
It is only by managing to become self-organized, self-directive, self-instructive, self-supervising, self-motivating, and self-corrective that older adolescents will be able to claim successful independence as self-disciplined, freestanding adults.
Thus, when parents see a breakdown in self-discipline as responsible for their son’s or daughter’s return home, they can help their child identify some parts of this essential skill that they need to work on. They can suggest how their child can constructively pay attention to becoming better organized, directed, motivated, instructed, supervised, or corrected, and they can ask whether they can help mentor their child in doing so. They can describe, for example, techniques for organizing personal and job life that have proved useful to them. Learning specific techniques that parents have developed to discipline their own lives can be powerfully instructive.
An obvious opportunity for young people to learn some self-discipline while still growing up with their family (and one that becomes extremely important in college) is homework. Doing homework is usually not how teenagers want to spend their free time. But the primary value of homework is that consistently managing one’s studies in high school teaches a work ethic; doing homework helps develop the self-discipline to do work. Young people who develop a work ethic will have the benefit of that self-discipline when they are on their own.
Other common sources of self-discipline are training for sports, holding a job, and saving money. In sports, trying to keep up with and do better than the competition can teach a work ethic through dedication to practice, conditioning, and playing hard. Holding a part-time or summer job in high school teaches one to commit to work, even when it doesn’t always feel congenial to go. And saving money teaches one to deny temptation and delay gratification to meet some future goal or objective.
In their own adulthood, parents have internalized self-discipline as part of the necessary labor of daily life. For growing adolescents, however, this self-mastery can be hard to learn. Consider homework again. In many cases, high school adolescents may still have to depend on the supervision of their parents for discipline to get homework done, through their parents’ reminders and checking in until it is accomplished. By junior year, however, parents may want to turn the matter of homework over to their children and let them struggle to impose this self-discipline on themselves. So, to a college-bound adolescent in high school, I’ve heard parents say something like this: “How consistently you do homework shapes the study habits you will take to college. From here on, maintaining that consistency is no longer an issue between you and us; it is up to you. It is now a matter between you and the self-discipline you will need to responsibly manage your future studies when you are more on your own.”
For many young people, treating senior year as a time to take easy classes, let down academic effort, and party hard with friends for a long goodbye can undercut the self-discipline needed when starting college. In effect, they enter freshman year out of training, and it can cost them. Young people don’t understand that the work ethic, or lack of it, practiced near the end of high school is the work habit that they will take to college or into their work life. Self-discipline is the mainstay of a successful trial independence. It takes self-discipline, for example, for college students to get themselves up to go to class, to do assignments, and to turn them in on time. It is easier to sleep in, put off assignments, and turn them in late or not at all. It also takes self-discipline at a party with friends to keep one drink from leading to another and then to drunkenness.
At a time when many of one’s peers are out having a good time, though, self-discipline may not seem like much fun. It does, however, offer lasting rewards. When young people set themselves a task or make a resolution, mobilize determination, assert self-control, apply effort, and successfully meet the challenge, they build self-esteem for having accomplished what felt very hard to do. Now, they feel empowered for having achieved their goal and for doing it on their own. And in the process, through practice, they have further strengthened the willpower or work ethic on which self-discipline depends.
Two reasonably common life decisions that arise at this age in response to feeling that self-discipline is lacking are to take a gap year to develop the self-discipline necessary for college, or to join the military in search of the self-discipline that regimented life has to teach. If a young person wants to take a gap year, agree on conditions that he or she will be responsible for providing a significant amount of self-support. This way, the self-discipline of holding a job and paying at least part of his or her expenses will create a more grown-up experience. As for joining the military to lead a more disciplined life, help the young person evaluate the serious time commitment and risks involved. Whether coming from family or (less commonly) from military life, external discipline must become internalized for self-discipline to grow. Now the young person must become his or her own authority. This last part, though, can be very hard to do.
For the last-stage adolescent, two aspects of authority can be problematic— external authority and internal authority.
Be it external or internal, authority limits freedom by making demands and by imposing restraints. In situations of external authority, the problem adolescents frequently encounter is that they, feeling more grown-up now, are less tolerant of adult authority, such as a manager at work, an instructor at college, or a police officer on the street. In the words of one young man, “The more grown up I get, the less I like being told what to do.” For some young people, trial independence is a time when they tolerate external adult authority less than ever before.
Case in point: consider the very personable twenty-two-year-old who interviews well and has no trouble getting jobs. The problem is that he has a terrible time holding them down. He feels too independent for a manager to order him around, so he argues back, and he doesn’t like bending his life to a work schedule, so he often arrives late. The combination of both of his issues with authority has contributed to his losing many jobs. He rebels against external authority, at his own cost.
Then, of course, there are the battles of a young person who feels like this is a time to play by his or her set of rules and not the ones that society sets. For example, a young woman who preferred to spend her rent money on more immediate pleasures for several months comes back to her apartment only to find it locked against her, with all her belongings unavailable inside. “I guess I didn’t think the rent terms were that serious,” she says. Sometimes it takes the enforcement of the consequences of such violations to teach what no amount of warning can convince.
Trial independence is also a stage during which a lot of law-breaking can occur. It’s like the limit testing that goes on early adolescence to see which adult rules are real, but now there are more serious consequences. Young people (particularly under the influence of substances) can be charged with, for example, assault, public disorder, and selling drugs. With respect to money, they can be arrested for nonpayment of fines, writing bad checks, charging things on other people’s credit cards, shoplifting, and pawning what does not belong to them. Some charm artists who are very smart, good with words, and likable can talk their way out of a lot, but not forever. For parents, if their son or daughter gets caught in some kind of lawbreaking during trial independence, it is usually best to let the young person deal with the weight of the consequences to discourage his or her bid for illicit freedom from happening again. From here on out society will treat them as adults, not juveniles.
To move from battling external authority to compliance, young people must learn to work with the social powers that be. This means following the rules and requirements that social institutions set. Learning to respect and work with internal authority requires learning to work with the personal power within. It requires establishing one’s own rule-making authority (which is partly reflective of external authority), telling yourself what you must and may not do, and obeying your own personal commands. Some extremely rebellious older adolescents actually rebel against their own authority, refusing to do what they have told themselves to do or not to do. For example, there was the young woman who kept sneaking into the kitchen in the middle of the night to steal her roommate’s groceries. “I know I shouldn’t take my roommate’s food, but I’m hungry so why shouldn’t I?” Or there was the angry young man in counseling who declared: “I refuse to be ordered around, even by me!” It took working through some hard consequences for him to learn to work with and not against himself.
In trial independence, young people have to socialize themselves to follow so many of society’s rules. For example, yes, you have to show up at work on time if you are to keep the job. Yes, you have to pay for electricity on time if you want to keep the lights on and the TV running. Yes, you have to pay your rent if you want a place to stay. Yes, you have to pay for traffic violations to avoid worse consequences if you don’t. By taking on the authority for these decisions, young people come closer to responsibly handling the freedoms that independence brings.
PARENTING PRESCRIPTION