HOW TO LIVE (ALMOST) HAPPILY WITH A TEENAGER!--By Lois & Joel Davitz
Rational Parenting!
In a survey of over 250 parents of adolescents from all over the United States & Canada, we asked the question, "What do you want most for your adolescents?" The answers we received varied a great deal, but the majority of responses fell into two major categories: Happiness & achievement.
How can adults help adolescents reach the two interrelated goals of happiness & achievement? In helping adolescents gain happiness & achieve maturity, parents must do something more than offer tender loving care. This something more is rational parenting.
True to Themselves
Rational parents are genuinely themselves in relation to their adolescents. They are honest, straightforward, authentic & human. Underlying their relationships with their adolescents is a sense of unshakable mutual trust. As a result, regardless of whatever disagreements, arguments & conflicts they get into, their adolescents know that they can count on their parents.
In Touch
Rational parents see the World as their adolescents see it. They experience the World "as if" they were adolescents, at the same time never forgetting they are adults & parents.
Listening & Hearing
Rational parents don't have trouble expressing their opinions, but they also have a talent for listening & hearing what their adolescents have to say. There is no magic in this talent; it comes down to simple skills like paying attention without interrupting, without prejudging what is said, & without trying to out-guess or out-wit their adolescents.
Feelings
Rational parents talk with, not at their adolescents, and in the give-and-take of their discussions they freely & openly express their feelings.
Focusing on the Problem at Hand
When rational parents & their adolescents disagree, they confront the differences without trying to hide them in the family closet. Moreover, these parents stick to the particular problem at hand without generalising to everything else.
Willing to Risk
Rational parents trust their adolescents' abilities to face the normal stress of growing up. The choices taken, the decisions made, may not turn out to be the best of all possible choices in the long run. But more important than almost any specific decision is the parents' trust in their adolescents' capacity to make choices & thus gain the freedom to grow.
Respecting Independence
Rational parents respect their adolescents' need for privacy, individuality, & independence. They fully appreciate the fact that no matter how close & loving the relationship between parent & teenager, each has different needs, different interests, different activities, and to some extent live in different worlds.
Make the process of rational parenting an intrinsic part of your everyday living.
Comparisons
Friends showed us the basement of their home, which their teenage son had converted into a finished recreation room. In one corner was a hi-fi set built by the same boy. In another corner was a completely equipped darkroom for developing & printing films, again the result of their son's efforts. Our admiration was unreserved.
That evening our family's dinner table conversation consisted of a recital of this adolescent's accomplishments. We were honestly praising. Our son agreed that his friend had considerable engineering & mechanical talents.
"Why don't you do something like that?" we asked. "Why spend money on film? If you like your camera so much, why not learn how to develop film? Why don't you do something with our basement?" Our son was silent. Suddenly he got up from the table, & quietly said to us, "Do you feel stuck with me?"
Without realising it, we had slipped into that most unfortunate of all child rearing errors--parenting-by-comparison. Our son's remark brought us face to face with what was really going on. We were making him feel inferior through the comparison. If we had wanted him to build a hi-fi set, we should have come right to the point rather than beat around the bush with the indirect criticism implied by our comparison of him with another teenager. Openly & directly expressing dissatisfaction is the only reasonable way to achieve the goals a parent wants to achieve.
Whenever you parent-by-comparison, remember you are sending the message: "You are inferior." No adolescent ever needs to hear from a parent the message, "You are not as good as someone else."
Instead of comparing one adolescent to another, emphasize the unique talents, the unique abilities, the individuality of your teenager. Above all, keep yourself out of any comparisons.
In many instances of parenting-by-comparisons, parents hold themselves up as idealized figures. One adolescent boy said he always knew when he was going to be in for a lecture on his behaviour. His father would ask him into his study & the opening phrase "When I was your age..." served to introduce a list of his father's own remembered virtues & his son's deficiencies.
By whatever comparisons we make, we are saying to our adolescent, "You are inferior." The adolescents hear the implicit, unspoken message about their own inadequacies, & as one might reasonably expect, they become defensive & increasingly resistant to change.
If you are worried about your daughter's obvious lack of work in school, tell her what you're worried about directly, clearly, & without beating around the bush. If you are concerned about your son's seeming lack of ambition, share your concern with him openly & honestly. Teenagers, like everyone else, find it very hard to deal reasonably with indirect criticism implied by comparison. All of us can respond much more effectively & rationally to direct & honest criticism.
Nagging
A number of years ago, when one of our sons was about 16, he received a tape recorder as a birthday gift. On one occasion, without our awareness, he taped all the dialogue that went on between the three of us. At that time we had been going through some stormy periods. He had been accusing us of nagging.
"Absurd," we told him. We offer advice, suggestions, helpful comments in our efforts to guide his development. Nag? Us nag? Impossible. We dismissed his accusations as a total lack of understanding & appreciation of what we were trying to do as good, concerned parents. Nagging is crude. As psychologists we would hardly stoop to such a practice.
His response was to pull out the tape recorder & ask us to listen to some tapes at our leisure. He told us that he had selected typical days to record--ordinary school days, before he left for school, after dinner, & just before bedtime.
Listening was embarrassing. The tape's content revealed a constant barrage of "reminders". When we recovered from our initial chagrined reactions, we had to admit he had a point. In fact, probably more than 50% of all our disagreements stemmed from our nagging. We suspect this is true with many parents & their teenage children.
To stop your nagging, you must first become conscious of what you nag about & what triggers your nagging behaviour.
In all fairness to ourselves & to other parents, the motivation to nag is benign, & most of us feel that one little reminder can't really do any harm--& might do some good. We are often so caught up in trying to help our adolescents grow up as we think they should that we forget the unfortunate consequence of our earlier nags.
If the nags are so inconsequential, why do most adolescents react with so much anger? We feel it's not the nagging itself that is so disturbing. Rather, it is the lack of trust in the message of the parental nagging. When parents are about to nag, they can sometimes control their nagging behaviour by actually saying "I don't trust you" before commenting about any of the minor problems they have mentioned to their adolescent repeatedly. Thus, if a parent says "I don't trust you, have you done your homework?" or "I don't trust you, are you coming in late again tonight?" we can appreciate the message an adolescent gets from a parental nag.
For the adolescent, the message conveying a parent's lack of trust is by far the loudest part of any nag. It is a low blow to the adolescent, for it strikes at exactly the weakest point of the teenage ego--self-confidence.
It is not at all surprising, therefore, to find that the adolescent's response to most nags is either a defensive withdrawal or a defensive attack--& rarely compliance with the manifest intent of the nag. The adolescent becomes sullenly withdrawn or angrily argumentative; the parent, in turn, becomes increasingly irritated; & before long, a vicious cycle is joined.
Learn to substitute some other behavior for nagging whenever you get the impulse to nag. Parents can use a wide variety of substitutes when the impulse to nag occurs. One parent decided to say something complimentary to her adolescent son whenever she felt like nagging him. At first her substitute compliments seemed forced & artificial to both her son & herself, but they realized that she was sincerely trying to break a long-established habit, & they accepted this initial awkwardness. After awhile, the substitute behaviour became more & more natural, & the frequency of her nagging decreased dramatically.
Parents who go through this process of stopping their nagging almost always report certain positive consequences. Perhaps the most important & the most rewarding consequence is the decrease in family stress. The number of arguments drops sharply, & both parents & their adolescents have a chance to learn how to live together without the irritation of petty bickering.
An interesting result we have noticed on a number of occasions is a change in the adolescent's behaviour that had been the focus of nagging. The adolescent, for example, who has been nagged about not doing homework begins to do the work after the parents stop nagging about it. This suggests that sometimes nagging actually provokes the undesired behaviour.
Ups & Downs!
Living with an adolescent is sometimes like riding a roller coaster of emotional ups & downs. At one moment the adolescent may be riding high on a burst of optimism, self-confidence, & carefree joy, & then without warning plummet into the depths of depression, pessimism, & anxious self-concern. From an adult's point of view, neither the ups nor the downs make any sense, but regardless of whether or not they make sense, for the teenager these emotional reactions are undeniably real & psychologically meaningful. Therefore, a parent has to learn to live with these ups & downs, accept them as genuine, treat them with respect & understanding, & yet not get caught in the emotional roller coaster of the adolescent's life. Neither extreme of the adolescent's up-&-down cycle may be easy for parents to take, though living through the ups is certainly less trying than dealing with the downs!
When adolescents are on the upswing, they are likely to make all kinds of exciting plans that may have little to do with reality. Watch your timing; don't throw cold water on their enthusiasms. Learn to go with the flow, & later on when their enthusiasm for a particular plan has cooled a bit, there will be plenty of time for practicality.
As we get older, we tend to lose some of the feeling that we can do anything, and we become cautious. The joy of adolescence comes from the enthusiasm & belief that anything is possible. And sometimes, perhaps more often than we might realise, this turns out to be the case.
Another underlying reason for parents withholding enthusiasm for some of the plans their adolescents propose stems from the fact that a parent's emotional reactions usually don't shift as rapidly or as strongly as do those of an adolescent. As a result, it may be hard for the parent to empathize with the adolescent's intense excitement.
As parents, we may feel we can't keep pace with adolescents who are one day going to open up sandwich delivery services, the next become actors or actresses, & on another day perhaps race track drivers. Not getting in the way, not putting up obstacles, & above all not coming up with the cold water of reality are undoubtedly the best things parents can do if they can't share the enthusiasm.
"My mother wasn't what you could say thrilled," Susan, a 17-year-old, told us, "when I told her I was going to buy an old car & learn how to get it running. But she never stopped me. She was pretty surprised when I got the car to work all my myself. I had a little help but not from anyone in the family."
Guidelines to Rational Parenting (Ups & Downs!)
The best way to prepare yourself to respond to your adolescent's emotional ups & downs is to consider your own emotional experiences & think about the kinds of responses from others that were most helpful to you.
When you've been emotionally high or happily excited, how would you have reacted to someone who insisted that you should come down to earth, be hardheaded, practical, use your "common sense"? Isn't it likely that that kind of reaction from someone else would turn you off, probably even irritate you?
And when you've been emotionally down, really depressed, how would you have responded to someone who kept probing for an explanation, demanded that you keep on talking, & pushed you to make sense of your feelings. When we are feeling low, most of us want a sympathetic ear available, someone who will listen if we want to talk.
The Importance of Being Human!
An important part of every adolescent's growing up is the discovery that parents are not really perfect. They are not the all-knowing, all-powerful, always-right people they might have seemed to be earlier in the child's life. The adolescent learns that, in fact, parents have their own hang-ups; that there are an awful lot of things parents don't know; and that they are far from always being right.
Although one might assume that this discovery is little more than recognising the obvious & the mundane, the adolescent's response is often ambivalent. It is not easy to shake loose from old childhood beliefs about the perfection of one's parents, and in a way, thinking that Mom & Dad are strong, superhuman, protective figures can be comforting. But in the process of breaking away emotionally from earlier childhood dependency, an adolescent can be reassured by the realisation that parents, once thought of in superhuman terms, are really just people like everyone else.
Given the usual concerns, fears, & lack of confidence that characterize the adolescent period of development, there is a good deal of psychological security in having parents who are powerful enough to protect you from any threat. As a result, adolescents may tend to continue the childhood myth of parental perfection, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. At the same time, adolescents resent this mythological omnipotence, because it threatens their own need for increasing independence.
Keep your eyes on reality, especially about yourself, & be careful not to fall into the trap of mythological perfection. If you make a mistake, admit it, not with undue humility but with honesty. Few experiences are more reassuring to an adolescent than hearing a parent admit an error. Recognise & appreciate your own imperfections, & remember that it is far more important to be human & humane than to be always right.
Parents can sometimes be too much of a good thing, & we often see adolescents trying to cut their parents down to size, criticizing them, attacking them, pointing out their weaknesses, faults, & defects in order to establish & reinforce the fact that they are humanly imperfect.
Just as you take your adolescent's positive comments with a grain of salt, also temper your reactions to the negative comments. Don't get caught in a defensive stance of trying to protect your ego from the potshots your adolescent will take from time to time. Don't confuse these potshots with a lack of love or respect; by & large, they reflect the normal growing pains of a healthy teenager who needs a human-sized parent.
Parents who lash back at their adolescents don't accomplish much by it. Shouting matches & exchanges of ridicule won't help matters. A verbal tug-of-war can only hurt & drain both the adult & the adolescent of energy.
The next time your adolescent says or does something that is hurtful to you, respond by saying that you are hurt--but don't become defensive or attack back. Simply report your feelings as you experience them. For your adolescent, discovering that a parent really feels hurt when attacked is an important part of recognizing the parent's humanity.
Overparenting!
Until their children are adolescents, parents have several things going for them. They are bigger, stronger, can shout louder, and, if necessary, they can use force. An 11-year-old who decides to stay at a party past midnight won't get very far if the parent disapproves. All the parent has to do is to go over to the house where the party is being held & insist the child come home. There might be objections, but nine times out of ten the parent will win that contest. However, a parent doesn't go over to a teenage party, ring the bell, walk in the house & tell a 16-year-old that "Mommy thinks it's about time you were in bed."
When your child enters adolescence, be prepared to shift your role as a parent. Don't try to hang on to old patterns of parenting, even though this may mean breaking habits that have been established over many years.
Striving for independence is a major psychological motivation of adolescence, & independence means gaining an opportunity to make choices & decisions, not only about minor matters of everyday life, but also about issues that may have long-term consequences.
For parents, switching roles from decision makers to advisors isn't easy. As one father told us, "It's like being demoted in your job." After a dozen years of making the important decisions in a child's life, it isn't easy to give over this responsibility as rapidly as the child's psychological development warrants. Moreover, many parents become especially sensitive to the potentially negative consequences of a decision an adolescent might make.
Parents face a dilemma. On the one hand, there is a clear-cut, compelling need for adolescents to practice independence in order to mature. On the other hand, there are complicated problems that adolescents encounter, problems which they may not be adequately prepared to deal with. They may not have the knowledge or experience necessary to make the wisest choice in every instance, & their teenage decisions may have unfortunate long-term consequences.
In a discussion with a group of teenagers about behaviors they least liked in their parents, many commented, "Making me feel guilty about how I spend money, the way I look, how I dress, manners."
Permitting youngsters to make their own decisions early in adolescence is crucial. Regardless of how minor any decision might be, the experience of being independent is what counts most in the adolescent's development. As the problems an adolescent faces become more complex, more serious, & have longer-lasting consequences, parents should play a more active role in the decision-making process, not as a decision maker but as a major consultant.
The adolescent needs & wants significant input from parents, though the approach adolescents often use to solicit advice can be misleading:
"Hey, Mom, I'm going (Which really means, "What do you think?") to take a job as a waitress down at X cocktail lounge on Saturday nights. The pay is good."
"You're going to do what?"
"I told you, a waitress."
"You will not! You won't dare. If I catch you working down at that place, I'll haul you out. Over my dead body a daughter of mine will work there. What's gotten into you?"
Having a pat answer, a ready "no", is enough to turn the adolescent off, & rightly so. No one likes to be told what to do. Shouting threats won't deter an adolescent from going ahead with plans, but spending time & energy as a consultant can make a difference.
When your adolescent faces important, complicated decisions with potentially serious, long-term consequences, be sure you make clear the realistic limits within which any decision must be made. In your role as a major consultant, provide whatever information, opinions, and advice you can, but remain in the role of consultant; don't take over your adolescent's responsibility for the final decision making.
We all need significant others in our lives who care about what we do. Adolescence, perhaps more than any other time in life, is surrounded with feelings of "No one loves me. I don't count. I'm not really anybody." Adolescents welcome a rediscovery of the fact that their parents do care & care enough to say, in effect, "Okay, you're older now. You're going to do things I don't like to see you do. At least hear me out & know that I care." Instead of fighting against an adolescent's decision, instead of trying to hand out orders, the parent who serves as a major consultant in the adolescent's decision making will probably have a much greater impact on the adolescent's decisions & will strengthen, rather than weaken, their relationship.
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The best way to give your children independence is to teach it to them within a dependent atmosphere. In other words, let them "drive on their own property." Then, when they do have to do things on their own, they'll know what to do & they'll be miles ahead of their counterparts who have never been taught to be responsible for their actions! They won't have been flung out into the World to be independent on their own without being prepared for it. Prepare them for it in a dependent atmosphere.
Supervised, controlled independence, in a very dependent atmosphere, is what they need. Of course, you can start giving them responsibility & teaching them maturity much earlier than most worldly families ever think about it! Even though the World's children supposedly have independence at a much earlier age, their teens simply don't have the maturity or the capability or the training to handle it.
So even if you supposedly pamper yours & supposedly "overprotect" them & keep them dependent on you, you can at the same time be training them better for genuine maturity & responsibility & independence.--And that's how it should be. Parents should want their children to have independence, but they should supervise it as long as possible to make sure the children know how to handle it correctly, that they learn to do things the right way, & to do what they're supposed to do.
Training children & teens to be well- behaved, responsible Christians requires constant supervision, continual supervision over a long period of time, to make sure they're living according to God's Word, until making prayerful decisions becomes a habit for them. You simply cannot achieve that by throwing the kids out on their own & saying, "Okay, here's your car & here's your college & here's your job! Go to it, now you have your independence!"
They have to have been learning this independence for a long time in a dependent, supportive atmosphere before they can actually have their full independence, their complete separation from you & transferal out into another ministry or to a different location. But they can't do it capably & responsibly unless you train them in it for a long time before you actually cut them loose.
Pray & ask God to give you lots of wisdom, love & patience in giving your children good preparation for their future ministries!
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Guidelines for Rational Parenting (Overparenting!)
Rational parenting involves more than passively allowing your adolescent to become independent; it means actively fostering, encouraging, & rewarding your adolescent's growing independence.
To achieve this goal you must identify those areas of your adolescent's life in which it is reasonable to expect independent choices & decisions. As a first step, consider your adolescent's day-to-day life & list the various choices & decisions that must be made. Begin with the most common daily events--what time to get up in the morning, what to eat for breakfast, when to leave for school--& then add to the list those issues that don't occur daily but nevertheless require some decisions, for example, choosing clothes or planning what to do during a vacation. Be as specific as you can.
With your adolescent, go through each of the possibilities you have listed & consider how the decisions are made at the present time. Then, viewing each item on the list as a potential opportunity for practicing independence, consider ways in which the range of independent decisions your adolescent makes can be expanded. For example, if you are now primarily responsible for making decisions about what clothes to buy for your adolescent, how can your adolescent assume greater independent responsibility in making these choices?
Face disagreements together & jointly work towards a compromise that both of you can live with. Having come to joint decisions together, stick to your agreements. There is nothing more important for rational parenting than being consistent. However, from time to time review your agreements together & readjust the balance between independence & interdependence to make it fit your adolescent's growing maturity.
Limits, Privileges, & Responsibilities!
It's hard for an adolescent on his or her way to independence to realise the depth of parental concern. They are often too wrapped up in themselves to really stop & take another's perspective, particularly if that other person is a parent. More often than not, this is a time of self-worry, self-concern, self-interest, & adolescents may even bask in their own feelings of "Nobody cares about me, no one loves me, I don't count for much."
Frances, a 17-year-old, talked about how jarred she felt when she realised how much her mother cared. She realised she had taken her mother's concern as a matter of course.
The recognition of her mother's interest--"almost as if I saw for the first time how much I meant"--came when Frances failed to return home from a date until early in the morning. Her mother was waiting up for her; when Frances opened the door, the first greeting was a strong slap across her face. "I was ready to leave home. I told my mother if she ever hit me again I would hit her back & walk out. She didn't even hear me. She started crying. I never saw her cry like that. I ended up comforting her."
Frances' mother told her daughter how much she had worried, how distraught she had been because Frances failed to come home at a reasonable hour. She had imagined horrible things happening; and when Frances finally appeared, she had lost control of herself--"worry, anger, & relief" was how she put it. Frances promised that from then on she would call her mother if she was going to be later than usual. "We were a lot closer after that. I kept my promise. She told me she just likes to know what I'm doing & that I'm safe."
Many parents have problems establishing and maintaining limits with their adolescents. They may be unclear about what the limits are or inconsistent in keeping to the limits already established. They may not even be sure themselves about what limits are reasonable & as a result be unrealistically severe. Just as a problem might occur from undue severity about limits, difficulty might have occurred with overindulgence. Parents may feel that imposing limits on their adolescents is somehow a sign of lack of affection, & to prove their parental love, both to themselves & to others, they try to gratify any wish or whim that their adolescents might have.
Given the normal instability of adolescence, the need for a stable, well-structured, predictable external World is even greater at this stage of development than at most other times in life. Therefore, for the sake of teenagers' own sense of security as well as the peace of mind of their parents, it is especially important for adolescents to know exactly what is expected of them & the limits of behavior that are acceptable to others. And it is equally important for parents to make clear & explicit the consequences of exceeding or transgressing these acceptable limits. We cannot list the appropriate consequences of breaking acceptable limits because so much depends upon the particular circumstances of a specific incident. But we wish to emphasize that what is of the greatest importance in every case is the explicit mutual understanding between parent & their adolescents.
We all think it's cute when a 4-year-old in response to an order to go to bed asks "Why?" In fact, we may even encourage the process of questioning in young children. When children are adolescents & engage in the same kind of questioning process, our blood pressure may rise. "Why can't I stay up as long as I want to?" asks the adolescent. "Why can't I smoke pot?" "Why can't I have sex?" The relatively simple questions of childhood suddenly are complex & can't be dismissed with simple, shortcut answers.
A simple no won't work in adolescence, & this is often troubling to parents. Just as a simple no won't achieve results, neither will threats about throwing them out of the house, screaming, or tears do the job.
Firm, fair, explicit consistent limits & expectations provide some of the external structure that adolescents need, & to a certain extent they also relieve some of the stress that parents usually experience during this period of parenthood.
From time to time, review your expectations with your adolescent, & change your expectations to keep them in line with the teenager's increasing maturity.
Just as it is crucial for teenagers to be aware of the limits on their behavior, it is equally important for them to understand their privileges & responsibilities within the family. Privileges & responsibilities go together, & as an adolescent matures, these two aspects of daily living should be kept in balance. An adolescent with too many responsibilities feels frustrated & overburdened; an adolescent with too many privileges acquires an unrealistic view of life & is ill prepared to face the normal demands of adulthood.
Guidelines for Rational Parenting (Limits, Privileges, & Responsibilities!)
In making decisions about your adolescent's limits, privileges, & responsibilities, the way in which the decisions are made is as important as the decisions themselves.
Before involving your adolescent in decision-making processes, make sure you have clarified for yourself your own views. As a first step, consider each of the following questions:
* What are the most important limits you have placed on your adolescent?
* What are the reasons for each of the limits you have placed on your adolescent?
* Do you & your adolescent disagree about these things?
* What happens when you & your adolescent disagree about limits?
* What are the most important responsibilities you expect your adolescent to fulfil?
* What are the most important privileges you've given your adolescent?
* Do you & your adolescent disagree about privileges?
* What privilege does your adolescent want most that he or she doesn't have at the present time?
* What are the reasons for this decision?
After you have clarified your own point of view, ask your adolescent to consider these questions with you. When you & your adolescent disagree, reason together in identifying the basis of your disagreement. Work together on the task of working out rational limits, privileges & responsibilities.
Knowing the Right Situation for Each Adolescent
Just as each of us has particular talents & skills that influence the nature of our achievements, so too there are particular situations in which each of us function best. Some do best in large groups, with lots of social interaction & a high level of stimulation. Others do best when they are alone or with one or two others, in a quiet environment with a low level of external stimulation. Similarly, there are certain kinds of people with whom each of us can get along best, although we have difficulty relating to others. And all of us differ from one another in our preferences.
In short, there are right & there are wrong situations for each of us. If we are in a situation that is right for us, we are much more likely to feel comfortable, to be productive, & to achieve at a level that fits our talents. And if we are in a situation that is wrong for us, we are probably much less comfortable & much less likely to fulfil our talents.
Choosing the right situations & being fortunate or skilled enough to achieve our goals is a large part of successful living. As adults most of us have some degree of freedom in choosing the people with whom we interact most & the kinds of situations in which we spend much of our time.
Adolescents have a much narrower range of choices. In comparison to most adults, the majority of adolescents have a much more restricted range of choices with regard to both situations & people.
To get along in the World, obviously, adolescents cannot expect to live & work only in situations that fit them perfectly; they must learn to adapt to a variety of situations & to different kinds of people. Developing some flexibility, therefore, is crucial for an adolescent's growth. Naturally, some situations are more interesting, more comfortable, more apt to result in productivity than others. And some people are more congenial & compatible than others.
This may seem to be a rather obvious idea that everyone should be aware of & that should need no special attention, but the sometimes selfish perspective of adolescents often obscures the importance of anything other than themselves. When they achieve success, they are likely to assume that their success depended entirely on their own performance; & when they experience failure, they may very well feel that it was a result only of their own personal inadequacies.
Because of their preoccupation with themselves, they frequently lose sight of even the simplest & most obvious facts about the World, such as the fact that the situation makes a difference. Parents, therefore, can serve an important function in their teenagers' psychological development by reminding them of this basic fact of life.
An important aspect of maturity is learning to adapt to situations & to other people even when the "mix" is not personally optimal. But parents should not be rigid in insisting that their adolescents adapt to every situation regardless of how bad the mix might be.
Each Person's Talents!
Professional football teams have players whose only job is to kick the ball; the medical profession has doctors who treat only the ear or the eye; construction companies have carpenters who build only stairways. Specialization characterizes the work of almost all adults, not only football players, doctors, & carpenters.
But for one reason or another, the right to specialization that characterizes the adult World is sometimes denied adolescents. They are expected to be generalists whose achievement is measured across the board. Grades in mathematics, English, physics, shop, music, French, & almost anything else the student has enrolled in are lumped together, & by some simple arithmetic the student is assigned a single number that presumably represents "level of achievement". The student may be a brilliant mathematician, a marvelous musician, or a very gifted mechanic, but if the overall grade average is below a given point, that student is labeled a "low achiever".
By this standard almost all adults would be considered low achievers. A skillful surgeon we know is hopelessly inept when it comes to fixing his car or repairing the plumbing; a friend of ours who is an extraordinarily gifted musician would no doubt flunk most tests in high school math or history.
Adults are expected to specialise, & their achievements are viewed in terms of particular accomplishments. Adolescents, on the other hand, are expected to be generalists whose achievements are viewed in terms of a grade point average or the equivalent.
It would probably be unwise for an adolescent to disregard entirely our society's demands for general achievement. However, some of the frustration that results from this demand can be tempered if the adolescent learns that each of us has certain limited talents, & we achieve most effectively & usually with greatest personal satisfaction when we use those talents.
The opportunity to try yourself out in various activities & in different situations with the freedom to make some errors along the way is an essential part of an adolescent's development into maturity.
Tim excelled in science. He did average work in English, languages, & history. In math & chemistry he completed several experiments, applied for a summer program for gifted science students, & won a scholarship. At the last minute Tim told his father he had changed his plans. Instead of spending summer vacation studying science, he wanted to join a theater group which was giving a series of productions in a resort community nearby.
Until that Spring, he had never shown any interest or desire to perform. He was reputed to be a loner, a serious student who preferred the companionship of books to friends. His shift in focus had been a matter of chance. In April, on his way home from the chemistry lab, he had walked past the open door of the auditorium where auditions were being held for the school's annual production of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. Tim stopped to watch.
The director needed more students for the crowd scenes. With considerable urging from his classmates, Tim, known for his distant reserve & abstracted manner, was pressured to go on stage.
He spent the next months rehearsing. The activity of the theatre group had tremendous appeal for Tim who, until that time, had had little to do with the social life of the school. The show was a success; Tim's small part & his vague stage presence was a hit with the audience.
This success led Tim to consider trying out for the summer theater group. Although the idea of Tim's spending two months with a theater group seemed totally out of his character, his father kept his reservations to himself. He said that it took a lot of self-control on his part to support what he felt was a waste of time, given Tim's talents. He was even less pleased when it turned out that he had to pay for Tim's room & board!
"I must have written him a dozen letters telling him to come home & get a job & drop the nonsense. If he had talent, it would have been another story. The only smart thing I did was to tear up the letters instead of sending them."
Toward the end of the summer Tim called his father & said he thought he might come home. He had had minor parts in a couple of plays, but most of the time he had sat around & found that way of life boring.
Regardless of how Tim's experience turned out, his venture into the theatrical World had been an extremely important step in Tim's development. Through his association with the theater group, Tim had acquired social self-confidence. For the first time, his father realised, Tim had made a few close friends, including a first girl friend. Furthermore, Tim could now make a real commitment to his work in science.
Given a chance, adolescents go through their trials & errors without any prompting from parents or teachers. But adults can interfere with this natural process of growth, & we should avoid it. Without taking chances now & then, without running the risks of making some mistakes, a teenager's process of growing into maturity is inevitably distorted. All too often parents & teachers consider only a narrow range of conventional achievements such as school grades or athletic accomplishments as worthwhile. Parents have told us, "I know my daughter is wonderful with young children. People tell me she is the best baby-sitter they've ever had. I could do without such praise. It would be far better if she brought home a good report card once in awhile."
Parents must go beyond the conventional in appreciating their teenagers, recognising that life is made up of much more than school grades or athletic performances. Whatever an adolescent's talents might be, parents must recognise them & be sure their adolescents know their individual talents are truly appreciated.
Your Own Values!
The basic psychological problem of adolescence is establishing a secure sense of identity. From the adolescent's point of view this is essentially the answer to the question "Who am I?" Prior to adolescence, children see themselves in terms of their roles as sons or daughters, students in school, members of a club or an athletic team. During adolescence, however, there develops a fundamental, inner sense of self.
In the course of developing their own sense of identity, adolescents often try out a variety of points of view, sometimes swinging from one extreme to another in a very short time.
Philip astonished his parents with plans to go West & work on a ranch. They didn't feel that working on a ranch was intrinsically wrong; however, considering the fact that Philip was born & raised in an urban environment, the choice didn't make much sense. His father thought that at best Philip's wish was for a romantic escape.
"I know if I tried to stand in his way, we were going to run into a problem. I told him how I felt. All I asked him was, if he was set on going, could we check it out first."
Philip's father helped him make inquiries, & the week school was over Philip left for the ranch. After a few weeks of living above a stable, he wrote home telling his father he wasn't sure whether he wanted to "stick it out" for the summer. Ranch life turned out to be somewhat different from Philip's imaginative picture.
Part of growing up is learning what one wants to savor as an experience & what one wants to live. Although Philip's mother felt she could have predicted that ranch life would be a disappointment, she recognised that the best thing she did in terms of a long-term relationship with her son was to share her beliefs & then let Philip discover for himself what life was actually like. Because she did not fight his idea, he was willing to let her share in the planning, & as she stated, "At least I knew he was safe & well, & that was very important to me."
Most parents realise that their teenagers are going through a stage in which the beliefs & values of childhood, once accepted without question, are being re-examined & re-evaluated. And sometimes parents become worried that their teenager will entirely reject the parents' values & way of life. This often leads to arguments that rapidly grow in emotional intensity & rarely resolve anything. The parent becomes convinced that the adolescent is on the road to perdition, & the adolescent usually ends up feeling misunderstood, rejected, & angry.
In view of this often highly charged emotional situation, it is perhaps ironic that adolescents, during this time of their life probably more than at any other, need to share their views with others. Many adolescents do a lot of this sharing with their friends in informal, everyday conversations that give them a chance to find out what others their own age believe & feel is important. But no matter how much they share with their peers, they also need to share their feelings, their beliefs, their tentative hopes & ideals with significant adults in their lives. Equally important, they need to learn about the values, beliefs, ideals & hopes of these adults, not merely to imitate them but to discover what others who have lived through adolescence have come to believe & value.
Expect adolescence to be a time of changes, a time of experimentation, of trying out new points of view, new interests & activities. Don't forget that this pattern of exploration & changeability is an important part of normal adolescent development & provides a foundation for a secure adult identity.
Staying cool when one's adolescent flirts with potential dangers is a challenge. As parents we may feel hostility at being forced into a position of rational control when inside we may be boiling with resentment & quivering with concern. A superficial interest on the part of an adolescent can become a whole lifetime in the eyes of parents.
This is precisely the time when we need to stop for a moment & ask ourselves if our whole lifetime up to that point has been blameless, faultless, conforming, without ever a gamble with the forbidden. Shifting perspectives when the going gets particularly rough or touches on very sensitive areas can create a totally different atmosphere. To express disapproval, to inject our personal reactions is a parental right, but it is often the parents' strong emotional reactions to their adolescents' initially superficial interests that lead to a counterreaction, with the adolescents becoming much more committed to a position opposing their parents primarily to defend their own integrity as individuals. Parents' emotional outbursts are rarely helpful to the adolescent facing real & very significant choices in life.
Guidelines for Rational Parenting (Your Own Values!)
In discussing your own values, goals, hopes & ideals with your adolescent, remember that adolescents are usually in the process of developing their own sense of values. Therefore, they are likely to be somewhat unsure of themselves, even though this may be covered up by a blustering, overly confident manner, & a highly critical view of other people's opinions. In most instances, this bluster & critical hostility is a defensive reaction stemming from the fact that the adolescent has not yet established a secure sense of confidence in his or her own point of view.
To minimize your adolescent's defensiveness in these conversations, rational parents take a stance of equality rather than superiority, they are open-minded rather than dogmatic, & they share their views rather than try to convince the adolescent that parental opinions are best.
Response to Crisis!
Crises are inevitable in adolescence. They seem to be an intrinsic part of every teenager's life. One parent commented, "I feel like I'm living on the brink of disaster. I never know what's going to happen next!"
Recognise & accept the fact that some crises are normal & to be expected in every adolescent's life.
Sometimes parents' emotional reactions lead them to overgeneralise about their adolescent, & those overgeneralizations add further fuel to the emotional fire set off by the crisis. One of our sons took the family car for a Saturday night date. The next morning he slept late. We had to use the car, & when we went outside, we discovered a scratch & a small dent on one of the fenders. When did this happen? We studied the dent & the scratch, trying to remember if either one of us had damaged the car. There was no question in our minds that it had happened the previous evening. We hauled the youngster out of bed.
"Why didn't you tell us about the accident?"
"What accident?" Still half asleep, he denied having been in an accident.
"Did you see the car? Go out & take a look at the fender."
He did as he was told.
"Did you see it?"
"Yes."
"A new car..."
"It's six months old," he interrupted defensively.
"That's a new car as far as we're concerned. You get the chance to use a new car, & you bring it back a wreck."
"It's not a wreck. I can hardly see the scratch."
"Hardly see the scratch!" we exploded. We took him outside with us & pointed to the dent.
"How did it happen?"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know? You get in an accident & you tell us you don't know you were in an accident."
"I wasn't in an accident," he argued.
"So the car got banged up just sitting all by itself."
"No."
"Then something happened."
"I was parked."
"Where were you parked?"
"Near a building."
"You drove past a building & scratched the car?"
We had him on the defensive. The garbled story finally came out that he had been parked behind the gym at his school. As he drove out of the lot, he cut too close to the edge of the building & scratched the car.
"Didn't you hear what was happening?"
"Yes, I heard something."
"Then why didn't you stop? Why did you keep on driving?"
"I had to go forward. If I had gone backwards it would have been worse. Last night I looked at it. It didn't look bad. I thought it was dirt."
"You thought it was dirt! You shouldn't have cut close to the building. It was careless. You weren't thinking. That's the trouble. You weren't thinking. We've told you a car isn't a toy. You don't deserve to drive a good car."
And then, while our youngster was obviously beginning to feel utterly miserable, we stepped up the attack. We managed to drag up a long series of incidents stretching back 16 years that demonstrated his lack of respect for property. We really had him this time, guilty without doubt, & we prosecuted him for all (and even a good deal more than) it was worth.
"Okay," he told us bitterly, "I'll never drive again." He threw down the car keys & stormed out of the room. Clearly, we had "won" our case. But when we had calmed down & gained some perspective on what we had been saying, we realised that our over-generalisations were obviously irrational.
The incident of the previous night did reflect poor judgement. But then how many times in our driving careers had we scraped tires against curbs when we misjudged distances? How many times had we managed to put in some small dents & then never talked about them? We learned later that he had been in a hurry because the girl whom he had taken to a school play had to be home by 11 p.m. When the play ended at eleven, she had been anxious about the time, and he had become tense about his driving.
In any event, the damage to the car was trivial, and our emotional reaction was entirely out of proportion to the reality of the situation. In the heat of the moment we dredged up incidents from the past that were entirely irrelevant, overgeneralizing to make our case even stronger. We played the role of prosecutor, & nearly managed to make a crisis out of a very unimportant incident. Fortunately, even we were shocked by some of our more melodramatic statements, & we stopped the prosecution before it got out of hand. The experience didn't do our son much good, but at least it sensitized us to the danger all parents feel from their own emotional reactions.
It certainly isn't easy for parents to control their emotional reactions when they discover their adolescent might be using drugs, or when their teenager comes home obviously drunk. These are not trivial issues, & parents must face them & deal with them. Parents cannot & should not behave like nonemotional robots, but some degree of self-control can reasonably be expected. If you feel that you must explode when a crisis erupts, by all means do so--but go off on your own, as far away from your adolescent as you can.
The prime responsibility of parents when their teenagers meet a crisis is to provide immediate & unconditional support. More than at any other time in their lives, when adolescents are in a crisis, they need to feel totally accepted & sustained by their parents, regardless of what has gone on before & without any conditions attached.
Providing adolescents with support is not necessarily easy, even when parents control their emotional reactions & inhibit their tendency to "teach a lesson." When adolescents confront a crisis, they are likely to be very touchy, ready to explode or withdraw, & parents may not be aware of the cause. Adolescents are caught in a dilemma: On the one hand, they are striving to be independent from their parents, & on the other, they need to depend on people they can trust. Thus, when problems occur, they are in a conflict between the need to be independent & the need to be dependent.
At a time when your teenager is undergoing a great deal of stress, there are probably few other things you can do that are as important in the long run as paying attention to your troubled child.
The actual time demanded may not be very lengthy, as Patricia's parents discovered, but that time was crucial & well worth whatever else they had to give up. Patricia wasn't invited to the Junior dance. Her friends were going, and as is typical with these events, the planning went on weeks ahead of the evening. Patricia's parents could not help her. When they tried to explain that she would have lots of social dates later on in life, she turned on them in anger, "You don't understand how I feel."
"Of course I know how she felt," said Patricia's mother. "One look at that long face was enough. The dance was on her mind constantly. There was nothing I could do. I thought of asking one of her cousins to take her, but she yelled at me when I hinted at that solution."
On the evening of the dance Patricia became extremely withdrawn. She went to her room & turned on her record player. Her parents were getting ready to go out to dinner--a long-standing engagement with friends. Patricia's mother recalled standing outside her daughter's door, listening to the music. She was just about to tell Patricia they were leaving when she decided instead to tell her husband they should stay home.
"I changed clothes. Patricia came into the bedroom & asked me why I had changed. I didn't lie to her. All I said was we didn't feel like going. She went back to her room. Later that evening she came down to the kitchen, & we sat around the table talking. We must have talked until three that morning--about everything. No one mentioned the school dance. It's been a long time since she kissed us goodnight. That evening we got hugs & kisses."
Guidelines for Rational Parenting (Response to Crisis!)
When a crisis occurs with your adolescent, keep in mind some "Dos" & "Don'ts" of rational parenting:
* Do give your adolescent undivided attention.
* Don't overreact to the problem.
* Do stay focused on the immediate problem at hand.
* Don't generalise to other situations or other times.
* Do provide as much psychological support as you can without attaching any conditions to that support.
* Don't multiply the stress by adding your own anger to the problems your adolescent must face.
* Do strive to understand how your adolescent is feeling, & convey to your adolescent your sense of empathic understanding.
* Don't moralize.
Accentuate the Positive!
In the long run, reward works much better than punishment. Frankly, most of us don't use praise nearly enough in our everyday lives. Particularly in our relationships with our children, we tend to be much more sensitive to what they are doing wrong than to what they are doing right. Thus, we are much quicker to criticise than to praise.
When you see something good, something desirable, no matter how small or trivial it might be, seize the opportunity to express your honest praise. We emphasize the importance of honest praise. Insincere praise is worse than no praise at all, so don't fake it. You don't have to go overboard & artificially gush over some trivial thing your adolescent has done. The gushing will probably embarrass your teenager more than anything else, & sooner or later your adolescent will realise that your positive evaluations can't be trusted. But a simple, honest, straightforward word of praise can have tremendous effects.
We asked a group of adolescents to write down all the things their parents had found wrong with them in the past week. The list of critical reactions was lengthy. On the following day we asked the same group to write down any compliments or praise their parents had given in the previous week. Many of the group had trouble responding. Several boys & girls flippantly wrote, "Are you kidding?"
Whenever you can, hold off your criticism. If you can't say something honestly positive, or at least neutral, it's probably best to keep quiet. When you see something that you disapprove of, assuming it's not really dangerous to anyone, remember that adolescents are extraordinarily changeable, & if you wait a little while, chances are that the behaviour you disapprove of will disappear.
Sharon's mother curbed her obsession about her daughter's weight by using selective vision. Rather than bombard her daughter about curbing her appetite & dropping her newly discovered hobby of cake baking, Sharon's mother made up her mind to concentrate on her daughter's good points. "I stopped seeing any of her between her neck & her knees," said Sharon's mother. She encouraged Sharon to let her hair grow long because the girl had lovely hair.
"I bought her barrettes, hats, fancy shoes & stockings. Every time she arranged her hair in a different way I noticed. I saw everything good about her. The one subject I refused to bring up was her weight. I remembered the times I had kept after her about losing weight, & all she would do was reach for another piece of cake."
Without exception, every teenager, boy or girl, goes through times of great concern about physical attractiveness. Sharon's bravado, reflected in her comment "I don't care if they call me fatty," masked her very real concern about her size. Through selective vision on her mother's part, Sharon could feel that she had some redeeming physical features. The pressure was off. Thus, when Sharon's mother finally made the comment that Sharon had so many attractive qualities, & she could be even more attractive if she lost weight, Sharon was the one to ask for help in going on a diet.
If you find that you have somehow slipped into a critical negative stance, that everything your adolescent does seems to be wrong, there is only one thing to do--stop the criticisms. At this point, criticising can't do anyone any good; it can only make things worse.
You can't expect adolescents to break the chain of criticism; they're too busy defending themselves. Therefore, if anyone is going to break it, it has to be the parents. There isn't any secret about how to do this. If you find that you have slipped into a critical rut with your teenager, stop criticising immediately--no matter how important you might feel the next criticism is going to be.
In most instances it's best to simply overlook whatever minor things might seem wrong to us at the moment & try to focus on the positive. If you wait just a while, many of the little things the adolescent does that seem wrong to you will probably disappear without your saying anything about them.
Soap will go in the soap dish instead of lying over the drain melting away. Hair gets cut. Torn jeans & frayed sweaters are eventually discarded & replaced with jackets & slacks. (When the clothing bills arrive, you may even feel a bit of nostalgia bout the good old economy days.) You can count on the natural changeability of adolescence to take care of most minor behaviour problems.
Psychological Immunisation!
In talking with teenagers about the forms of parental instruction they received, the most frequently mentioned technique was lecturing (another form of nagging). Specifically, this meant that at some inopportune time, such as when the teenager was ready to leave the house or right after dinner when plans had been made to meet a friend, a parent corners the adolescent & demands to emphasize a point. The voices rise, & when the teenager gives the slightest hint of making a comment, the parental voice booms, "Don't interrupt me. Wait until I'm finished, damn it. You're going to listen. Then I'll see if you have anything to say." What was the reaction of the teenagers? "I turn off," one boy told us.
Parents get carried away by the sounds of their own voices in these lecturing sessions. They use every dramatic technique; their voices may never have been so resonant. Unfortunately, the captive audience, the teenagers forced to listen, have an escape route--their own private fantasies. And they waken only at the final lines.
"Were you listening?"
"Sure, Dad."
"Okay. What did I say?"
"About what?"
None of us likes to be lectured at, even when it is ostensibly "for our own good," & adolescents are no different in this respect from the rest of humanity. To achieve a psychological inoculation against the potential evils that will have a meaningful effect over time, there must be a give-&-take between adult & adolescent, an honest sharing of information, opinions, & points of view. If there is disagreement, there should be freedom to disagree openly, without the threat of later punishment.
Your first step in psychological inoculation is selecting which specific dangers you most want to protect your adolescent against. If you tried to protect your adolescent against every possible danger he or she might run into, the process of psychological immunization would become a full-time enterprise, & you would discover that its effectiveness rapidly decreased. So focus on a problem that you are sure is real & one that will be meaningful to your adolescent.
Remember that effective inoculation must be solidly based on facts. Do some research. Don't rely on what you've heard in casual conversations or gossip. Take the time & energy necessary to learn the basic facts relevant to the problem. Use your local library as a resource to find out what information is available. If the problem you're concerned about concerns drugs, alcohol, driving, sexual activities, or smoking, seek out local organizations concerned with each of these issues & ask for any printed information available. Talk to a qualified expert on the matter to discover what is known about the problem. However you go about it, get the facts. (Editor: Look it up in God's Word!)
In beginning to discuss the potential problem with your adolescent, select a time which is convenient to both of you. You don't want to feel hurried & you don't want to be interrupted, so be sure you both have plenty of time.
In presenting the problem, don't pussyfoot around it. Be straightforward & matter-of-fact. Express your concern directly & present the facts--all of the facts you know, not just those that happen to support your view.
Then listen. Give your adolescent plenty of opportunity to react without getting into a debate. If you present the facts without attacking your adolescent, more often than not you will discover that he or she is also aware of the possible dangers & has probably thought about them. Listen empathetically, trying to get a sense of how your adolescent sees the problem.
In the course of talking with your adolescent, make your own opinions clear & explicit, but be sure you present them as your opinions, not as the only right answers. Take special care not to slip into the role of either prosecuting attorney or moralizer.
After you & your adolescent have had a chance to review the facts & share opinions, let matters rest. Don't push for a promise or a neat resolution. Take a chance on your adolescent's own sense of values & potential for maturity.
Remember that no matter what you say, if your behaviour contradicts what you say, the chances of your achieving successful immunisation with your teenager are likely to be greatly reduced. If adolescents sometimes fail to pay attention to parental words, they rarely fail to notice parental behaviour, so what you do is likely to have greater impact than what you say.
Expectations!
All of us are influenced by the expectations of other people. In schools, for example, researchers have found that if teachers expect their students to perform poorly on various learning tasks, by & large the students will not learn as much as when their teachers expect their students to perform well.
Exactly the same process operates in relations between parents & their adolescents. A parent who expects a teenager to be immature demands less from the teenager, sets relatively low goals, & probably rewards less mature behavior. Even more important is the unspoken message that is conveyed to the teenager. Without coming out & saying it openly, the parent with low expectations is nevertheless communicating to the adolescent a message that says, "I don't expect much from you because you are immature, a child, a person who is not grown up." As a result, adolescents treated this way by their parents learn to see themselves as immature, & indeed tend to behave immaturely.
Fortunately, expectations work both ways. Just as expecting immaturity often leads to immature behavior, expecting maturity may lead to more mature behaviour.
Justin's parents were divorced when he was 15. His mother was awarded custody of Justin & his ten-year-old sister. Because of the age difference between the two children, Justin & his sister had led completely independent lives. Justin had never participated in taking care of his sister. He had his own friends & his own social life. There had been no demands on his time for baby-sitting, or taking his sister out for an afternoon. His mother had always relied on outside help.
The divorce radically changed the home situation. Justin's mother returned to work. She could no longer afford the luxury of sitters, & there were days when she couldn't get home for her daughter after school.
As she reported, Justin discovered his sister at age 15. To save his mother worry, he made it a point to meet his sister at her school & bring her home. On weekends, realising his mother was tired, he took his sister to the movies. In any number of small ways, his mother reported, Justin made an effort to be an older brother & to help out.
Don't just tell teenagers to grow up & act like adults. Instead treat them more like adults & you'll be much more successful in helping them mature.
Simply telling a teenager to grow up & act like an adult has little or no effect, except perhaps to start an argument. But if parents actually treat teenagers as mature people, chances are that teenagers will come to see themselves as mature & consequently behave more maturely.
The problem of expectations is reflected most dramatically, perhaps, by family labels that some people carry with them. Labels get assigned surprisingly early in life. "He's my serious child," a mother told us. "My daughter is the happy one." And thus, practically from infancy on, this mother had two children clearly labeled--one serious & one happy. No wonder their mother was shocked when later in childhood her "serious one" acted up & the "happy one" regularly dissolved into tears. Many of us recall labels assigned to us by parents or members of our extended family.
Be careful of labels & nicknames. If you do choose a descriptive nickname for your child, be sure to pick out one that emphasizes an attribute that will be desirable later on in the child's life.
Mutual Enjoyment!
When our children were growing up, we took photos all the time & put together many photo albums. As the children grew older, though, the pictures grew fewer & the albums grew smaller. It seemed we spent less time together & there were many fewer photo opportunities.
Family life as represented in our albums revealed the disturbing but very real fact that parenting an adolescent had taken on a solemn note. We're not "caught on film" splashing in the lakes, riding sleds down snow-covered slopes. We're not cuddled together on a blanket on the beach. When our adolescents wanted to enjoy themselves, they sought out their own friends as companions.
Relationships with our adolescents, for the most part, involved chores, responsibilities, problems, conflicts--all the business of living without an equal amount of enjoyment. Obviously this didn't mean that we suddenly stopped doing things together; however, the times for carefree fun & games which were plentiful in their early childhood became less & less frequent. We didn't plan our lives this way. The natural aging process of both our children & ourselves was responsible. After all, when a boy is six, playing baseball with a parent is still a challenge. But when he is 16, playing catch with a parent will hardly strike him as the most pleasurable way to spend a Spring afternoon!
Many parents, like ourselves, slip into a pattern of serious, heavy-handed interactions with their youngsters without being aware of a change. Nevertheless, this shift has emotional consequences. When the relationship between parent & adolescent becomes focused primarily on the business of living, to the exclusion of anything that might be done together just for enjoyment, the relationship cannot help but take on a serious tone. After a while, without thinking about it, both parent & teenager automatically slip into a sober emotional stance in relating to each other. They become problem-oriented, ready to interpret whatever occurs in terms of an "issue", a difficulty, a responsibility, a duty, a chore--almost anything but a source of enjoyment.
To change this stance, parents must do more than make a general resolution to enjoy themselves with their teenagers. These kinds of general resolutions usually get lost very rapidly in the shuffle of everyday life. Therefore, parents & teenagers have to plan together specific activities that both of them genuinely enjoy & that they can share together. This means sitting down with your teenager & talking honestly about what both of you enjoy doing, deciding how & when you'll do it, & making sure that you actually follow up with your decision. Furthermore, you have to do things together just for the sake of enjoyment on a more or less regular basis, not just as something highly unusual, extra special, or unique. It has to become part of your way of life together to shake loose from a solely problem-oriented focus in your relationship.
The key words are share & enjoy. The adolescent who earns spending money while working for a parent on a Saturday afternoon with the parent in close supervision isn't sharing or necessarily enjoying the experience.
Parents often just fall into the role of advice giver, sounding board, or just plain listener. This kind of give-&-take has value, but the shared moments of enjoyment that were characteristic of earlier years may still be missing.
When we have suggested to parents that they ought to do things with their adolescent just for sheer enjoyment, some parents respond by saying that their teenagers don't want to do anything with them. According to these parents, their adolescents prefer spending time with their friends, & when their parents propose some activity, they either refuse or comply begrudgingly--thus taking the enjoyment out of whatever is done together.
To a certain extent, this kind of response is probably characteristic of many teenagers. After all, for the adolescent, the peer group is of prime importance. But parents must be careful not to use this as an excuse to avoid getting involved with their teenager in a mutually enjoyable activity. When you suggest to your adolescent that you would like to do something together, don't expect to be greeted immediately by unequivocal enthusiasm. If you haven't been engaged regularly in some activities together, it is not unreasonable for the adolescent to be a bit reluctant to jump in enthusiastically without really knowing why you are trying to change your pattern of interaction. So go slowly in making the shift; don't push it. And be absolutely honest about it. Explain why you are making the suggestion, & when the two of you talk about what you might do, make sure the activities you choose are genuinely enjoyable to both of you.
No Bed of Roses!
Help your adolescent learn that life is no bed of roses, that frustration is a normal & inevitable part of living.
Parents' efforts to guard their adolescents from frustration are without doubt motivated by general feelings of love & caring. In the long run, however, these efforts do more harm than good.
Don't try to overprotect your teenager from the potential frustrations of the real World. Remember that the home & family provide a relatively safe environment in which the adolescent can learn how to react to being frustrated. The way an adolescent will deal with frustrations met later on in the outside World will partly depend upon how that adolescent has learned to respond to problems within the family situation.
When your adolescent is frustrated, in most instances the most important thing you can do is convey the message that you have confidence in your adolescent being able to handle the problem in his or her own way. Offer whatever practical help might be necessary, but don't take over the problem solving.
When your adolescent reacts to frustration with anger, recognise these feelings as normal & legitimate. You can say, "It's okay to feel angry. What's important is how you deal with it."
Be clear in your own mind about acceptable ways of expressing anger, & then make sure your adolescent knows your views.
Once you've decided, make sure your adolescent knows what these limits are, & stick to them. They are your views, the limits you can tolerate, the ways of expressing anger that you can live with. The best time to talk to your adolescent about acceptable ways of dealing with anger is when neither of you is angry. Yelling about limits when your adolescent is in the middle of an outburst of temper will probably only fan the flames of anger. So, talk to your adolescent about what is & is not acceptable to you.
On Being an Individual!
Because of their need for the acceptance & approval of other adolescents, being different can sometimes be a threatening & stressful experience. Parents can't "talk away" the stress their teenagers might feel, & it does no good to make believe that the stress isn't real. But parents can help by letting their teenagers know that they understand & appreciate that going their own way, regardless of what their friends say & do, can sometimes be very rough. And at the same time parents must convey a sense of trust in their teenager's judgement, the belief that their teenager has the personal strength to see the tough times through.
Our goal as parents should be to help our adolescents discover their own individuality & develop the personal strength needed to resist the pressures of group conformity. If parents can achieve this goal, & can learn to respect & appreciate their adolescents' individuality, they will have given their teenagers one of the most valuable gifts any person can give another--the opportunity to genuinely become one's own self.
Epilogue
Our sons have emerged from adolescence. Now that they are in their early 20's, the luxury of reminiscing about their adolescent years can be done without tensions. Both agreed that at times it was rough & confusing for them as well as for us.
We asked them to tell us the one thing, above all, that they felt made a difference in their lives during that time. Without hesitation, both said that it was the fact that "the door was always open". Despite what they did or what they said, despite the turbulence of the moment, they knew the bottom line was that we cared; we were available to talk and, even more important, listen.
As parents, perhaps the best legacy we can hand down to our adolescent children is just this sense of caring & communication.
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From the very beginning, strive to promote an atmosphere of honest, open communication with your children. Encourage each child to feel free to honestly share what is on his heart with you. Of course, it's very important to avoid reacting in a critical, condemning or condescending way to a child who is pouring out his heart, confessing a mistake or sharing a fear etc.--If your child meets such a negative reaction from you, he will probably have second thoughts before sharing his heart with you next time.
We have found that "special times" of open-hearted discussion, combined with lots of loving embraces, greatly assures young children of our love & genuine concern, as we strive to intently listen to & understand them. Your child will never forget such special times spent with you. In most cases, these are the moments we treasured most when we were children: When our parents invested their love in the form of personal time & attention with us, just talking about things together.
Of course, before we can expect our children to be honest with us, we must be honest with them. It greatly encourages children to know that their parents are not exactly perfect. (Besides, you can be sure they've noticed!) By your own honest admission of your mistakes & weaknesses, you are setting a good example for them of what honesty & humility are all about, & your children will love you the more for it!
By the act of simply listening, you are telling your child, "I want to understand & help you. I think you are worth listening to, & I want you to know that I have faith in you. You can always talk to me because I love you!"
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