Being a parent of a teen can cure a person of narcissism. When your child was born, you were the center of her world. You were special to her. Now that she is an adolescent, you have become less central. No matter what you do, she continues to invest in the outside world more than she does in the home.
This is as it should be. Teens slowly move away from their parents physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Over time, they change from being “family-centric” to being “friends-centric.” Their interests and activities revolve more and more around their friends. In addition, when children enter adolescence, they begin questioning their parents’ values, ideas, and beliefs and begin formulating their own. This too is as it should be. The dependent nature of the parent-child relationship is designed to end at some point. When your teen grows up, she will still technically be your child, but she should not relate to you in the way she did as a child. In order to become healthy, functioning adults, children must sever the ties to their parents, often transforming the relationship into a friendship.
I’ll never forget the time when our family was talking about our next vacation, and our boys said, “I don’t want to go if we can’t take friends.” My initial thought was, Intruders on our family vacation! But our sons were doing exactly what they should have been doing at this point in their lives: separating from their parents.
Children can’t enter the world if they have not separated from their parents. They can’t be fully engaged in two worlds at once. They must be outward bound in order to learn, focus, adapt, and interact successfully in the world. Don’t try to fight your teen’s desire for separation, because you will surely lose, and you should. She is supposed to leave home and separate from you. You will need to accept that the world is more interesting to her than you are.
This does not mean you will be forgotten, however. Your teen will still love you, go to you for guidance, and want to keep a relationship with you. She will have internalized thousands of experiences of love, honesty, morality, safety, and wisdom from you over the years, and she will take all those experiences with her as she engages with the world. She will use them to achieve goals, find love, and make her place. Again, this is as it should be.
So the issue is not whether your teen should separate from you, but how, for there is a right way and a wrong way.
What Is the Right Way to Separate?
As a parent, you’ll help your teen enormously if you know the right way to separate, because then you can help him leave home in the healthiest way possible. Let’s explore the primary differences between the right way to separate and the wrong way.
Within relationship versus outside of relationship. Your teen faces a challenging task. He needs to leave you while staying connected to you. He needs to know he can talk to you about people, thoughts, and events that don’t have anything to do with you, because he needs your grounding and support. Your “being there” plays a huge role in helping him have the necessary tools and courage to safely enter adult life.
Sometimes, however, parents resist this process, to the detriment of the teen’s well-being. Some parents inhibit separation by reinforcing only those thoughts and activities that are about family closeness, and they withdraw emotionally when the teen wants to explore other things. This presents the teen with a dilemma: leave home and lose his parents, or keep his parents but stay at home. Neither choice is the best for the teen.
Other parents withdraw when the teen has a negative, angry, or different viewpoint or emotion. This too puts the teen in a no-win situation. He must keep himself and lose his parents, or lose himself and keep his parents.
So what can you do to help your teen separate the right way?
Be a supporter of your kid’s extra-family world, as long as that world is one that is reasonably safe and supports your own values and beliefs.
Talk to your teen, ask questions, and make him feel like it’s okay to have interests outside of you.
Stay connected, even in differences. Don’t let conflicts and differences alienate you. He needs you in his world, even when he says he doesn’t. For example, rather than saying, “I don’t want to hear about your friends drinking,” say, “Tell me what you know about who is drinking. I may not agree, but I want to know whatever you’ll let me know.”
Do these things and you’ll help your teen remain inside the relationship and separate in the right way.
Toward versus away. Ultimately, your teen should be separating from you because she is excited and interested in the people and activities in the outside world. She is moving toward a good world that she can become part of. It appeals to her likes, beliefs, interests, and goals. Something else is slowly replacing you.
However, some adolescents separate from their parents for the sake of getting away. Perhaps they want to escape from a great deal of conflict in the home, or maybe they feel miserable, angry, or constantly hurt because of something going on at home.
Separating for these reasons can be developmentally devastating. When teens are more invested in getting away than in finding happiness and a good fit in the world, they risk attaching to the wrong things for the sake of escape. For example, some teens get married at a very early age because their home is so bad that they just want out. Marriage gives them that escape, but since these teens didn’t live in a loving and safe home, they have difficulty creating what they didn’t get. Leaving home doesn’t change a miserable person into a happy person. Instead, it creates a miserable person who is on her own.
So what can you do to help your teen separate the right way in this area?
Understand that her desire to get away from you is normal. Accept that she is getting tired of your control, rules, and restrictions.
Provide her with some positive and happy experiences at home.
Work with her on establishing a reasonably happy and functional environment at home. Compromise when you can, love always, and be strict when you need to. For example, you might say, “Tammy, I don’t want you to think your whole life with us is about rules and consequences. I’d like to do some things that are positive for you too. Why don’t you invite a couple of friends over for Friday night, and I’ll grill steaks for you and you can rent a movie.”
Accept that your teen is being drawn toward something rather than away from you, and help her be as content as possible at home so that she wants to leave for the right reasons, not just to escape you.
Prepared versus unprepared. If you have ever done any financial planning, you have probably looked at savings and retirement timelines or graphs. These graphs usually have two lines. One represents your income; the other your savings. The purpose of these timelines is to help you save enough money so that you can retire and live off your savings and investments. So the two lines on the graph intersect. At that point, your income will drop, but your savings will take over, so you are okay. At least, this is the plan!
You also need a “leaving home” graph in mind for your teen. One line represents your involvement, support, and resources. You provide your teen with love, care, safety, wisdom, and structure that he cannot provide on his own. The second line represents your teen’s growing independence, readiness, and maturity. Over time, the “parent” line should be dropping, and the “teen” line should be rising. As he becomes more competent, responsible, and confident, he is able to take on more and more life responsibilities and functions — and you back off. You give less advice and wait for him to ask for it. Or you warn about a problem once, then leave it be.
Ideally, the two lines should intersect in your child’s late teens or early twenties. At that point, he is on his own, more or less, and can meet most of his own needs and handle his own problems. Your child is prepared and ready for life. See the graph below.
Some teens separate the wrong way in this area because, while they may be the “right” age for leaving, they are not mature enough to do so successfully. For example, perhaps they can’t find and maintain healthy relationships. Or perhaps they can’t control their behavior or set and achieve good goals. When teens like this leave home, it’s a recipe for disaster.
So how can you help your teen be prepared to leave home?
Help him grow in his character, not just his age. Concentrate on his insides and maturity, helping him grow. Henry Cloud and I wrote a parenting book called Raising Great Kids in which we define character as “the sum of our abilities to deal with life as God designed us to.”18 The final goal of parenting is to equip your child with a toolbox of abilities and capabilities that will enable him to meet life’s demands successfully. (See the sidebar on pages 88 – 89 for a list of those abilities and capacities.)
Be a parent who helps your child leave home with the optimum tools to make it in the world. For example, if your teen has angry outbursts, talk with him about those outbursts and how those may severely compromise his life. Anger can help us protect ourselves, but tantrums aren’t productive. If your teen persists in his outbursts, establish some consequences that will help him understand that self-control is a better way to go. In doing this, you are equipping your teen for a world that most likely won’t put up with outbursts.
Aid, Don’t Resist
Yes, your teen is on the way out. Most parents are struck by how adolescence accelerates the leaving process. It goes quickly. Don’t fight the separation. Instead, help your teen stay connected to you, interested in what is good and healthy in the outside world, and prepared for the challenges ahead. This is the right way to separate.
QUALITIES TO PUT IN YOUR TEEN’S
TOOLBOX OF RESOURCES
Adults who successfully meet the demands of life have the following qualities:
Relational, not alienated. They can connect emotionally with others and have a support system of healthy people. They know when to ask for help. They can be vulnerable and open. And they can love others back, deeply and generously, in an unconditional way.
Responsible, not immature. They take ownership of their life, behavior, and attitudes, and do something good with them. They shoulder what is theirs to shoulder. They follow through. They can be relied on.
Self-controlled, not impulsive. Responsible adults make decisions based on their deliberate judgments rather than their impulses. They refrain from risky behaviors. While they can be fun and spontaneous, they make their choices count.
Values-based, not peer-driven. They have a set of standards, ethics, and beliefs that are true and transcendent. They have worked out their values and follow them. Neither their peers nor the culture owns them. They are their own person.
Autonomous, not dependent. They are able to live freely and on their own. They do not need anyone else to carry them emotionally or financially. They like making their own decisions, solving their own problems, and setting their own goals.
Focused, not lost. They have found and developed their talents, passions, and gifts. They know what they want to do and what contribution they want to make with their life. They are actively engaged in that process.
Spiritual, not separated from God. They have found transcendence by learning to love, follow, and obey the Lord. They humbly trust him to take care of them, and they go to him as the source of all good things for life.