“There were some tough times after I came home, I’ll tell you that. I don’t mean with my parents. They were great. I mean with myself. I came home running on empty, at least that’s how it felt. Out of gas, or at least out of confidence, with no map to the road ahead. It’s easy to get down on yourself when you’re old enough to act independent but don’t know how. At first, all I could see when I looked in the mirror was failure. But after about six months, talking with my parents, talking with a counselor, and talking with myself, I started to see how I had learned some good lessons from bad experiences. And how I had been through some truly rough times and had grown stronger for it. So this is what I think now that I didn’t think before: Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s meant to be hard. And what I’m meant to do is struggle with those hardships as best I can. And I have. So now, when I look in the mirror, I see a person who I can respect.”
Hardship isn’t easy. And when an older adolescent returns to live at home after independence has broken down, parents should attend to how the young person responds to this challenging period.
One value of having a son or daughter return home during a time of adversity is that parents can observe how he or she copes with crisis and wrestles with responsibility, restores a motivating attitude, and goes about recovery. Often parents can be of assistance in helping the young person profit from unhappy experience by turning it to good effect.
There are three positive ways in which parents can do this:
The other side of adversity is often opportunity. Adversity creates opportunity in two ways.
First, it poses a challenge that creates an opportunity for growth. Numerous are the examples of people facing great personal difficulty and odds who survive and succeed, in the process developing strength of character and determination, becoming that much stronger when the next adversity arrives. And lest young people think these stories apply only to heroic figures, parents can explain that this experience goes for everyone. Share hard times in your own life when misfortunes, setbacks, and reversals got you down, and how, with resourcefulness and determination, you rose again.
The coaching motto “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” has some truth to it, as does Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Lose a job, and the harder job becomes finding another. With that search undertaken and finally accomplished, the young person is stronger for having met the challenge of finding new employment. Experience in making this transition builds a base of confidence for dealing with job loss the next time it occurs, which it probably will.
Second, adversity almost always comes in the form of a change that upsets and resets the terms of one’s existence. And change rarely closes one door of possibility without opening others. Freedom from old conditions and constraints creates new freedom one did not have before. Lose a loving relationship, and one is freed to date again. The new job may turn out to offer more potential than the one lost.
Here, too, it can be helpful for parents to recount their own experiences with adversity, describing what happened, how they felt, how they coped, what they learned, and how they came out stronger from what occurred. Life is not a smooth ride for most people. When young people learn about their parents’ struggles, they know they are not alone in making mistakes and suffering misfortunes, and they have hope that just as their parents made it through hard times, so shall they. So a mother might confide: “You know, I met your father on the rebound from being jilted and feeling brokenhearted. It took two years of courting to get my trust back, to dare to trust love again, but as you can see we’ve done all right.”
With courage and tenacity, adversity can turn into advantage. That’s the alchemy of change you want to support when your child returns home. Often they feel down or even defeated at first, but after some recovery, young people can leave stronger than before.
The art of recovery from any misfortune or mistake is called resilience—the capacity to rebound from adversity and to try again and carry on. The more resilient a young person is, the more efficiently and effectively he or she can turn one unhappy page of life and proceed more happily to another.
Consider two ways a young person can respond to adversity: resistance and resilience. Resistant behaviors and beliefs slow adjustment to adversity by avoiding or opposing the challenge. Resilient behaviors and beliefs speed adjustment by grappling with the challenge. Consider the differences this way:
| QUALITIES OF RESISTANCE | QUALITIES OF RESILIENCE |
| Escape | Engagement |
| Denial | Acceptance |
| Surrender | Persistence |
| Blame | Responsibility |
| Pessimism | Optimism |
| Fearfulness | Confidence |
| Defeatism | Determination |
| Passivity | Initiation |
| Helplessness | Resourcefulness |
| Despair | Hope |
Parents need to treat a return home as a chance to rebound from adversity and strengthen the young person’s capacity to cope with future adversities in life to come. To that end, you need to respond to both resistant and resilient qualities that your child expresses, but in different ways.
When you hear expressions of resistance—like “What’s the point of trying?” “Things are never going to work out!” and “I give up!”—you need to listen and empathize, not dispute or criticize. Responding with negative expressions—like “You’ll never get anywhere talking that way!” “What a lousy attitude!” and “Giving up is giving in to failure!”—only puts the young person on the defensive, adds more negativity to the mix of unhappy thinking, and drives him or her further into resistant thinking and acting.
It is better to accept resistance and listen empathetically: “I know how hard it must be and how discouraged you must feel; tell me more about it.” Responding in this way expresses interest and creates an influential connection that you can build on. You can suggest the benefits of moving to a more resilient position: “Suppose you were feeling confident and optimistic; how would you behave? If differently, why not give those actions a try? For example, rather than give up because you didn’t get what you wanted most of all, you could think about the next best thing you want and go after that.”
Resilience comes in two forms, and both are important. There is reactive resilience, which deals with the past and accepts what occurred, assumes some share of responsibility, and makes one able to learn from mistakes. And there is proactive resilience, which prepares for the future and plans next steps, gets help as needed, and expects conditions to improve.
When you see signs of resilience, you need to recognize and encourage those actions and attitudes: “Good for you for being persistent, so resourceful, and so positive. That’s how you keep yourself in forward motion!” Should your son or daughter proceed to beat up on themselves for choosing unwisely or for life going badly, equating a bad situation with being a bad person and punishing him- or herself accordingly, you should argue against this: “To hurt yourself when you are already hurting only makes the hurt worse. When you’re hurting is a time to treat yourself not badly but well. That way you can motivate yourself to do better.”
As a parent, you should also be on the watch for a significant variable that can erode resilience: the pattern of sleep the young person brings home. Used to burning the candle at both ends on their own or with friends at college, young people often sacrifice sleep for the sake of pleasure and the demands of work or study. “I don’t have time for sleep,” one young man explained. “I’m too busy.” As mentioned in Chapter 9 on stress, almost nothing erodes resilience like sleep deprivation. It runs down the human system with fatigue, reduces available energy, discourages a positive focus, and makes minor ills more common and major ills more difficult to recover from. Thus, one of the best conditions parents can attach to a return home is that their child commit to a healthy regimen of sufficient sleep. Lack of adequate sleep diminishes resilience.
All the eleven life challenges discussed in this book that can come to crisis in trial independence have much to teach. When a young person comes home, parents can play a helpful role in that education, providing they do so in helpful, not hurtful, ways.
To avoid unnecessary hurt, parents must understand that with any form of learning, there are risks involved. What are the risks of learning during this stage? To learn from hard experience requires:
Understanding how this jeopardy works, you must respond to your child in ways that reduce and do not elevate those risks. At a time when a son’s or daughter’s self-esteem is fragile, parents must make the risks of learning safe.
It takes self-esteem to learn. The lower a young person’s self-esteem is, the more fearful the risks of learning can feel, and the greater is the temptation to deny what the experience can teach. So if young people return home really down on themselves for mismanaging some part of their independence, they may not feel immediately able to learn from the errors of their ways. They may say: “I don’t know why it happened!” “It wasn’t my fault!” “Other people are to blame!” or “I don’t want to talk about it!”
At this point, if you become impatient and critical and try to force the education, you will only reduce your child’s willingness to learn from experience. Here are some examples of how parents knowingly or unknowingly discourage or criticize young people during this time:
For parents to encourage learning from experience, they must do what they can to reduce the risks of learning so the lessons from hard experience can instruct. For example, parents can do the following:
Parents who punish a young person for not being able to manage all of independence the first time out may instill a fear of messing up. This fear can inhibit their child’s willingness to risk learning later on and to learn from mistakes when they occur. This would be unfortunate, as challenges provide great lessons when approached in the right way. Consider the life lessons that the eleven challenges of trial independence have to teach:
If you approach each challenge with a positive outlook, giving supportive responses that encourage learning, any life crisis can provide invaluable lessons to your child for creating an even better life in the future.
PARENTING PRESCRIPTION