“My parents keep asking what am I planning to do with my life, as though I haven’t asked myself that question a million times. They even ask how I’m going to get started. Started at what? All I can see is hard times and a low-end job if I’m lucky. College put real independence off for four years, but now I’m not a student anymore. I know my education was supposed to help me advance myself, but for me, all that preparation just created high expectations. I mean, all these years of time and money invested in going to college. I better get something good after that! So I’ve come home for a while to sort out what happens next, to figure out what to do, and hopefully to find a way to do it.”
When older adolescents take independent leave of family, they complicate their lives—wanting life to be both different and the same as it was when they lived at home. They want to move out but not to cut themselves off. They want to relocate but not to disconnect. They want to have a separate living place but not to give up their place in the family. They want to become more self-reliant but not forsake all dependence on parental support. They want to think about their future as a land of hope and promise, but they see it as a place of uncertainty and struggle. Independence is their future, all right, but at best they now realize how it is a mixed proposition.
As the final stage of adolescence begins, the challenges of young adulthood open up. The greatest challenge is figuring out how to sustain all the demands of their new level of independence.
In the way of this are three psychological obstacles:
Without the proper tools and guidance, running into any one of these challenges can persuade young people to return home.
Adolescents are on a collision course with the future. Few young people are entirely ready when the challenge finally arrives. And their attitude toward the future changes as they move through the stages of adolescence:
For last-stage adolescents, fear of the future is normal. The term future shock, coined by Alvin Toffler for the title of his 1970 book, aptly describes the age of anxiety that begins with trial independence. When older adolescents say, “I never thought independence day would come,” they are reflecting a very mixed emotion about the long wait that is finally over and the daunting challenge that has suddenly arrived. So the curse of getting what they have devoutly wished for has come true: they are starting to face life on their own. The future is scary not just for all the unknowns it contains but also because, as one young man put it, “Now I’m supposed to act like an adult. No more age excuses, no one to lean on or blame but myself.”
Part of future shock is future pressure. Both the young person and his or her parents have created future possibilities for the adolescent as he or she has grown—plans and hopes and dreams that can become more daunting to face and meet in trial independence. Now the time has come to measure up to these adult examples, goals, and ideals. And now college adds to future pressure. Educational investment of time, energy, and money raises the expectation of an occupational and monetary return. For most young people, trial independence is when they start to discover how they are going to “turn out.”
Then there is real-world impact. Leaving home creates larger social awakenings in a young person who is not only less physically sheltered from no longer living at home, but less socially sheltered as well. One innocent college student described the disturbing impact of her freshman year experience and a social problems survey course she took: “I never really knew the world was like this. It’s so much rougher and unfair than what I knew in my suburban high school. I’ve met other students whose life stories are different from any I have heard before. I see more daily hardships around me that I was never forced to notice before. And then in class I’m taught about social problems that have always been there but that I’ve managed to ignore. And life ahead of me looks so much more complicated and difficult than I ever imagined!”
Future shock at the end of adolescence is really fear of change, the change that independence brings. Change is that process that continually upsets and resets the terms of our existence. However, some changes, like the last stage of adolescence, are more daunting than others. In trial independence, two fears can create significant anxiety about “the future”:
Because the future is unknown, it can become the repository of many fears, particularly during trial independence. “What will happen if…?” “What will happen when…?” are future questions that can get young people into all kinds of trouble at this anxious age. Like other emotions, fear can be a good informant but a bad adviser, particularly when it encourages decisions that lead to self-defeat.
For example, there is a legion of problems at this age when future fear fosters back-pedaling from grown-up responsibility. Thus, to avoid a professor’s disapproval for not having his presentation ready to give on time, the young man decides to skirt facing the problem by not going to class, thereby making showing up at the next class much more fearful to do, with who knows what penalty to pay. Or there was the young woman who made a serious mistake at her new employment and tried to cover it up with a lie so she wouldn’t get in trouble with the manager. When found out, she lost her job. However, in both cases, painful consequences were powerfully instructive. Better to show up unprepared and admit it than to not show up at all. Better to admit incompetence than get caught in dishonesty about what you did or didn’t do. So both young people learned lessons about the importance of facing future fear of adult responsibility when it is scary to do.
Responding to fear is very complicated. Exercising courage in the face of fear usually builds self-confidence; succumbing to flight in the face of fear usually reduces self-respect. However, not to avoid or flee certain danger can be foolish, and ignoring the warnings of fear can be self-destructive.
Because the future can be so scary, it takes courage to proceed, and it is tempting to hold back instead. Just consider a few fears of “more” and “less” that the change of being an older adolescent on one’s own commonly creates:
It feels risky to leave home because it is, and tolerance for this risk varies. The high risk takers have little problem leaving home, but they may invite difficulty with their new freedom by taking dangerous dares. The low risk takers may have a hard time leaving the security of home, but they tend to be conservative when it comes to managing their new latitude of choice. For parents, this means that they should let high risk takers know that they will be held responsible for dealing with the consequences of any reckless decisions. And they need to assure low risk takers that communication with home and family will be as frequent as comfort and the need to remain well connected require.
As a parent, you must do a complicated dance between your child’s worries and your own. You have your own transition to make—mentoring instead of managing (see Chapter 1) and not intervening so that young people can learn from the inevitable errors of their ways.
It’s hard for parents to hear about mishaps from bad decisions and broken agreements and not want to rush in and do something to extricate their son or daughter, or at least give vent to anxiety about the young person’s lack of maturity. But parents who encumber older adolescents with help can enable continued dependency, whereas parents who frighten older adolescents with worry or despair can discourage the risks of independence. It’s better to respect resourcefulness and communicate confidence: “You chose your way into this difficulty, and we believe you have what it takes to choose your way out.”
It can be hard for parents to be patient with the effects of fear, especially because fear of the future can disable efforts in the present. But should young people express their fears at this age, it’s better for parents to empathize and not discredit them. Consider a young man who sits around the house all day, afraid of failure and rejection from job applications, who follows fear’s advice to escape those dangers by avoiding applying for jobs at all. Future shock has him frozen with fear. It becomes disabling. Doing nothing feels safer than doing something.
Rather than give way to frustration, how might parents respond to this reluctant applicant? First, they can honor the fear:
“Yes, it’s scary, facing the future on your own, finding a job on your own, supporting yourself on your own, making your way on your own. But scary is not impossible; it’s just scary because you haven’t yet gotten started. Courage in the face of fear builds confidence. Even when you try and fail, you have made an effort that builds momentum. The more you apply, the easier applying becomes, even though you may never really like the process of shopping yourself around.”
Then parents can help the young person ask the four fear questions:
Parents can help their child acknowledge fearful answers to each question, in order to move past the future shock and the self-defeating choices it can dictate. The antidote to fear of the future is accepting it as normal, respecting fear’s warning, questioning fear’s advice, and gathering the courage to act as you would if you were not feeling afraid. Then there is the problem of denial. To not face these truths runs the risk of becoming mired in denial.
One way some young people deal with future shock in trial independence is denial. They simply refuse to accept the harsh terms of independence and the stern demands that it imposes. I had one fun-loving young woman describe denial in terms of what she called the “3 P’s”—playing, partying, and pretending.
Denial is a form of resisting the unwanted, and it has two functions. First, by refusing to acknowledge painful change, young people resist the new reality as they cling to their old views and ways. Returning home, they lapse into old expectations and habits of having their parents, who don’t know what else to do but take care of their needs. The older adolescent exchanges comfort for courage, which frustrates parents who see their son or daughter regressing with instead of growing forward: “She’s twenty-two, and she’s acting like she’s seventeen again, refusing to do for herself, expecting us to do it all!”
A second function of denial is to resist the demands of change by slowing the adjustment down to a manageable rate so that growing up does not feel like it is happening intolerably quickly. Some young people exercise this resistance responsibly. “I’ve just graduated high school,” explained the young man to his worried mother. “I’m not ready to get serious and go to college yet. I want to take a year of so off, get a job, share an apartment with friends, and take some time away from education and relax before the system grabs hold of me and starts to tie me down!”
Then there is the boomerang kid, feeling overwhelmed by future shock, who needs time to get used to this demanding new set of circumstances. In response, parents shouldn’t criticize or punish denial. Instead, they can patiently but firmly insist that their child gradually meet the demands of more independence—more work self-sufficiency, more financial self-sufficiency, more household self-sufficiency. And slowly, but incrementally, their child will start assembling the building blocks of independence.
Sometimes, when a young person lives away from home, fear of the future can become so scary it becomes disabling, as it did for the college freshman who retreated into his room and barely came out, his world shrinking until he felt walled in by fear. A roommate reported concern to the resident advisor, who contacted the counseling center, which intervened to literally help the young man “out.” At worst, future shock can get a young person frozen with fear.
Denial of the future during trial independence often looks like gambling. Young people partly acknowledge the rules of reality but mostly hope or believe that they can ignore them and escape compliance. They can convince themselves of a wide variety of denial, including some of the following:
One young man put it this way: “It’s all risk taking anyway, life is. So why not see what I can get away with? Maybe I’ll luck out.” He was playing with the probabilities. Denial can be the gambler’s optimism at work.
This is the kind of thinking that often gets young people into circumstances in which they can no longer support themselves. So parents earnestly explain: “When you bet that basic rules aren’t real or don’t apply to you, you are gambling with your life, because for most everyone else they mostly do apply.”
One parental strategy that usually does not work with denial is arguing against it, because young people, in fear’s defense, will usually become more wed to that resistance. What parents can do, however, rather than arguing with denial is explain how it can often make matters worse. They can explain how denial is the enemy in hiding:
By not arguing against their child’s denial but stating how defeating it can be, parents may be able to better help their child move past that denial and start accepting reality instead of resisting it.
And what denial of the future resists more than anything else are the responsibilities that come with independence. That resistance eventually erodes young people’s feelings of competence and lowers their self-esteem. Most children who return home as a result of denial face significant self-esteem issues that they must address before they can effectively return to life on their own.
When the young person confronts the daunting reality of independence and feels overwhelmed and diminished by future shock, a major drop in self-esteem occurs. In counseling, I hear such statements as the following:
Feeling disappointed in themselves and down on themselves, their self-esteem frequently suffers. Thus, it’s important for parents to understand enough about self-esteem, how fragile it is, so that they can be supportive of their son or daughter at this difficult time. To face down normal fears of the future, a young person in trial independence needs the support of strong self-esteem and parents who can help support it as well.
So what is self-esteem? It is not real in the sense that it can be visually examined, physically touched, or directly observed. Like intelligence or conscience, self-esteem is an abstract psychological concept that describes part of a person’s human nature. Self-esteem is two words compounded into one. Separate them, and the meaning of the larger term comes clear. Self is a descriptive concept: by what specific characteristics do I identify who I am? Esteem is an evaluative concept: how do I judge the value of who I am? Self-esteem has to do with how a person identifies and evaluates his or her definition of self.
Although it is ever present, over the course of anyone’s life, self-esteem will fluctuate and vary. A person’s self-esteem can rise or fall depending on wellness or illness, success or failure, gain or loss, freshness or fatigue, fortune or adversity, or a host of other changing circumstances and conditions that are a normal part of human experience. For example, an older adolescent leaves for college with self-esteem buoyed by the pride and hope inspired by gaining admission. After getting kicked out, however, for repeated violations at parties of college rules, the young person is burdened by a sense of personal disappointment, defeat, or even social stigma for not “making it” and having to return home. He or she feels like the future has been destroyed, or at least deferred: “Living back at home again just shows I wasn’t grown up enough to make it on my own.”
At this juncture, parents can help young people learn to take responsibility for recovering the self-esteem that they will need to deal with the inevitable changes and challenges of independence that lay ahead. To do so, parents can attend to how young people define and evaluate themselves.
Consider the definition side of self-esteem first. The concept of self means little until it becomes connected to specific dimensions of a person’s life—what he or she does, how he or she is, what he or she has, for example. So being a college student, majoring in a certain subject, and preparing for a certain kind of work provide so much identity that when young people flunk out, the loss causes them to feel as if they have nothing of worth left. Or when a young man, in a two-year romantic relationship with a young woman—with whom he was socially identified and with whom he was planning a future—is suddenly jilted, the loss causes him to feel as if there were nothing left of himself. Or consider a young woman for whom job is everything, who on the way to a promising career is let go as tough times cause the business to downsize. She hasn’t just lost a job; she has lost the majority of her valued definition.
“Self” is like a mansion with many rooms of definition in which a young person lives. In general, more rooms of self-definition are better than few. If a young person has only a single room of self-definition, and that room is suddenly taken away or becomes uninhabitable, then the loss of self-esteem can feel devastating. When future hopes are dashed, fear of the future comes true, and for a time, self-esteem diminishes dramatically.
As a parent, you should become concerned when your child’s self-esteem seems to shrink, when you son or daughter has fewer and fewer “rooms” to live in. The less diversified one’s self-definition is, the more risk of damage to self-esteem there is, and the more recovery will rely on building other rooms. In counseling with young people, I see such esteem collapses all the time. If friends are everything and a move severs those friendships, if sports are everything and injury ends one’s athletic dreams, if career is everything and one loses a job, one must work to reconstruct new bases of definition to support adequate self-esteem. Low self-esteem can result from a restricted or diminished definition of self.
Another common blow to self-esteem occurs when returning young people, who feel as though they have failed their future, identify who they are with the problem they have. Painfully preoccupied with the problems that drove them home—homesickness, job loss, lost love, flunking out of college, indebtedness, or what-ever—it is easy for young people to fixate on the problem and in the process identify with it to the exclusion of unproblematic parts of their lives. So when a daughter says to her parents, “I’m nothing but a problem, a bunch of problems,” the parents need to disagree: “We know it’s easy to let problems become the total picture of yourself, but that’s not so. Everyone is greater than the sum of whatever problems they have. You also have a lot to be grateful for, a lot going right in your life, a lot of positive parts of yourself to keep going, a lot of potentials to build upon.” Then they can specifically describe what those parts and potentials are.
In one case, the young woman, despondent over a broken romance, had chosen to become passive, solitary, and disengaged while dwelling on her painful loss, treating that ended relationship as the repository of everything worthwhile she was—her total definition. To recover her lost self-esteem, she needed to be encouraged to expand and diversify that definition, which is what her parents encouraged: “Get active, start exercising. Start spending some time socializing with old friends. Maybe now is a good time to revise some interests, like making your music.” Just as a restricted or diminished definition of self can lower self-esteem, a diversified and expanded definition of self can raise self-esteem.
Now consider the evaluation side of self-esteem. Self-evaluation often becomes an issue in response to an experience when impulsive or unwise decision making has led to error, disappointment, or trouble. The following are some evaluative steps that can systematically lower a young person’s self-esteem:
So a young man rants to his parents: “I really made a stupid choice when I was drunk. I made a mess of my life! It’s all my fault! How could I have done such a dumb thing? I’m never going to show my face with friends again! I really got what was coming to me! My future is done for!”
Although this self-castigation may feel obligatory (he pays penance by punishing himself), it does his self-esteem no favors, driving it down at a time when he needs positive motivation to recover from what occurred. So parents have this to say: “To downgrade yourself when you are already feeling bad about yourself only makes dealing with a hard situation worse. When you are already hurting is not a time to treat yourself badly but to treat yourself well.”
This positive, productive approach is crucial for parents to hold firm to during this time in their child’s life. If a child is already suffering from low self-esteem, adding criticisms will not do him or her good. Your job is to encourage strong self-esteem, not to weaken it. So when your son, for example, gets back into staying out late with friends and getting up late the next day, and you see this behavior as getting in the way of looking for a job, you need to be nonevaluative in expressing your concern. Rather than succumbing to frustration and saying, “This is just the same kind irresponsible behavior that got you in trouble in the first place,” you can make a nonjudgmental response instead. You focus not on criticizing conduct or censuring character but on discussing the decisions he is making: “We disagree with the choice you are making about the schedule you are keeping, here is why, and this is what we would like to talk about with you.” As when you are feeling frustrated or critical, remember that your child is already feeling far more frustrated and critical of him- or herself than you are, more than you can ever know.
Parents also need to appreciate how a young person’s negative self-evaluation can hamper constructive efforts at this point. Their view of themselves affects the possible future they see for themselves. Now young people can be caught in a powerful ambivalence—wanting to commit to a future course of action but at the same time discouraging themselves from doing so. In counseling, these statements of ambivalence come in many forms. In each case negative predictions contest positive possibilities:
Ambivalence creates an internal conflict between desire and dread, between should and shouldn’t, that young people must overcome if they are to be able to engage with the challenges future independence holds. Young people can’t progress if, after every proposal or resolution to do something constructive, they shoot it down as not worthwhile because feeling not worthwhile is how they evaluate themselves.
So how do they overcome the negatives? It takes making affirmative effort to maintain self-esteem. This is why, when a young person returns home and lapses into a state of disengagement, parents need to provide encouragement. The intent of parental encouragement is to help give their child the bravery required to take positive action in the face of inertia, to dare risks they fear to take, and to overrule their pessimistic attitude.
One problem with fear is that it focuses on negative possibilities, on the bad that might happen. Fear is infectious in this way. It can influence evaluations, including beliefs about oneself, interpretations about what happened, and predictions about what will happen, in ways that diminish self-esteem and lower confidence in the process. So young people returning home in the wake of what feels like a failure to make it on their own have lost some faith in themselves and have fears for themselves.
Negative evaluations of this nature flow from fear, and they drive down the evaluative side or self-esteem.
The antidote to fear is confidence. Because many young people come home frightened by having lost their footing on their path to the future, their confidence needs building back up. Parents can assist in this process by expressing affirmative beliefs, interpretations, and predictions. They need to speak up in support of their child’s self-esteem:
It is worth remembering that, for everyone, young and old, the future can be scary at times. So when your young person returns home, this is the time for you as a parent to communicate faith, optimism, and confidence.
PARENTING PRESCRIPTION