Psychology: Lost in Translation
Adolescence is not about letting go. It’s about hanging on during a very bumpy ride.
Have They Lost Their Minds?
If you’re reading this chapter, you’ve reached those dreaded teenage years. In the words of one mother, “I remember my friends with older kids saying, ‘You think the terrible twos are bad; just wait till adolescence!’ Now I’m here and feel both overwhelmed and clueless.” It’s a turbulent and confusing time when your child may still conform at school but acts out and resists the rules at home. The child your teacher says is a delight has developed a major attitude, and you find yourself in conversations where you inevitably end up saying the wrong thing. These are the years when you have a foot permanently in your mouth.
While you feel a loss of control, so do your teenagers. Life for your teens is moving very fast, with hormones raging, physical appearance changing, friendships shifting, and new expectations emerging. As information seeps out over the airwaves, your children are being shaped more by forces outside of the family, and your influence is lessened significantly. Child expert Ron Taffel states, “Decades ago, most kids carried parents around inside, whether they wanted to or not. … Parents constituted a deeply felt, internal presence, however neurotic and oppressive it might sometimes have been. Millennium kids live in a context of fragmentation … cool and cruel on the surface while they hide surprisingly healthy passions beneath” (2006).
What Psychologists Say about Becoming Your Own Person While Staying Connected
Adolescence is the continuation of a long process of development, and reaching maturity takes significantly more time for teenagers today than it did for previous generations. Currently, the process of becoming an autonomous adult continues into one’s late twenties. When we consider that our children are experiencing puberty earlier and are no longer launching their careers immediately after college, we are looking at a new extended period of adolescence, with the later years referred to as “emerging adulthood.”
Children’s temperament and personality gradually emerge through the early years, but it is only during the teen years that a coherent sense of self emerges and their unique personality is truly formed. While this process starts at the beginning of adolescence, it’s a gradual and uneven process, which varies from child to child. In fact, at any one moment in time, teens may be at different stages in their intellectual, social, moral, and/or emotional development—and that is why you may sometimes feel confused by inconsistencies in your children’s emotions and behaviors. Your children may be similarly caught off guard and surprised by their feelings and reactions.
The primary task of adolescence is to establish an identity, which is often attained through social and moral development. Social development can be reflected in your teens’ ability to form supportive and close friendships. Moral development can be seen as your teens’ capacity to internalize a sense of right and wrong and to be caring and empathetic persons. During these years, teens will begin to see that there is a world beyond family and school. This is when teenagers look to each other for a better understanding and clarification of their values, a process that helps them individuate and separate from their families. Since Erik Erikson wrote Childhood and Society in 1950, much of the discussion about adolescence has centered on his theory of psychological development. According to Erikson, the crux of adolescence is “identity versus identity diffusion.” In plain talk, this can be interpreted to mean answering two questions: “Who am I?” individually and “How can I remain me, connected to others, without being subsumed by them?” (1994).
Attachment
Attachment refers to your child’s emotional connection to you. Feeling close to a loving caretaker in infancy is fundamental because it creates the foundation for security. The secure bond built through closeness gives your children the ability to separate from you but also to return to seek comfort when they are upset. Healthy attachment allows for individuation. This attachment is very important because it provides the foundation for positive growth throughout life. David J. Wallin, author of Attachment in Psychotherapy (2007), observes that our attachments shape us because they form our concept of self, identity, character, abilities, and attitudes.
Therefore, parents should aspire to give their children a secure attachment, which helps them establish a balance between finding reassurance and connection to others and developing the capacity for exploration. The significance of creating a healthy attachment can’t be overstated, because it lays the foundation for children’s ability to connect to and trust others throughout their lives. Children thrive when they can enjoy warm and intimate relationships. Teens who have a secure attachment with a loving adult from infancy make healthier choices in relationships and are able to trust that the world is safe. A securely attached adult is comfortable trusting others and is able to form lasting relationships.
Unfortunately, our culture suggests that being too close to our teens produces a stifling, symbiotic, and enmeshed relationship. This undermines and conflicts with the actual importance of staying connected to our children. This is especially true in America, where we enshrine the independent spirit of “Go west, young man.”
Finding the balance between attachment and individuation is a high-wire act because people grow best when they experience a balance between support and challenge. It is our job to support our teens’ independence without pulling away, despite the inevitable confusion and tension we may feel when our teenagers appear to be invaded by another personality.
Misreading Psychological Cues
Further complicating the process, society and many parents have very different expectations for girls’ and boys’ adolescence. Our society encourages parents to help boys become men by pushing them away so they can learn to resolve issues on their own. At the same time, our culture gives parents permission to maintain a deeper connection with daughters.
If we give too much weight to those assumptions, we often misread the psychological needs of teens. We tend to think boys are doing well when they could actually be struggling, because they generally don’t give much verbal feedback. It’s easy to assume our sons are fine, even when they could benefit from our attention and assistance. With our daughters, we can misinterpret that they are in agreement when it is more likely that they are uncomfortable with voicing a dissenting opinion. A core dilemma for adolescent girls is their struggle for balance between their need for self-expression and their need to please others, while boys struggle with exposing any vulnerability.
Do We Push Our Sons Away?
The popular conception has been “Boys will be boys.” Instead of promoting connection, our society dictates that separation be the primary focus for boys’ psychological development. Parents have followed the tradition of pushing boys to separate from them, in order to become “healthy” male adults. In fact, many parents believe that remaining too connected to family inhibits the development of the autonomy boys need to be masculine. Independence is almost enshrined in the American culture for American males. We stop nurturing our sons earlier than we do our daughters, because we fear we are emasculating our boys by making them too soft. Despite research demonstrating that at birth male babies are actually more expressive than female babies, one mother remembered how the day after her son was born, she felt scared because she was so bonded but worried whether she could pull away from him to make him strong. Through many conversations with mothers, we found that they hear warnings about boys needing to be tough to survive and fit in.
Based on these traditional cultural pressures, mothers of boys often give their sons much more space than they give their daughters, almost tiptoeing around them. One mother reported, “It’s so hard to get any details from Matthew. He likes to talk when he has a good day, but not when he’s upset or when I initiate a conversation.” Another mother lamented, “If he [her son] is in a bad mood, I stand back. Why should I feel like that?” A teacher told a story of working with boys in her photography class: “When the lights go out, they start to talk. I’m always surprised by how much they self-edit when the lights are on.” Another mother said, “Jacob was telling me about his first day of high school, and my nose started to run. I reached for a tissue, and the box was empty, so I just stood there listening with a nose running, wiping it with my sleeve. I knew that once I left the kitchen to get a tissue, the magic moment would be over!” Parents know that boys determine when they will talk and when they won’t.
However, our need to focus on independence has been in conflict with our sons’ basic human needs for love, support, and emotional encouragement. Boys are as relational as girls. A middle-school counselor we spoke to said, “When I think of the boys I work with and other men and boys I know, they actually place a very high value on relationships and develop powerful and lifelong, unconditional bonds. I believe the way in which boys express their connection is different from girls and women, but the bonding itself can be equally powerful.”
Most teenage boys are preoccupied with social media, sports, and friends. While boys often may seem uninterested in being close, they still cherish and want a close relationship with their parents. Even though adolescence is a time when boys are attempting to strike out on their own path, they still seek their fathers’ approval. It’s important for a father to appreciate his son’s choices, especially when those choices differ from his own. This is how a father can demonstrate respect and support for his son. One father told us how he struggled when his 16-year-old son chose to stop playing baseball:
I was on my high school baseball team and still found time to play on a rec league with my friends. Baseball kept me away from drugs and drinking. I never realized how much I wanted this for my son Ben until he decided to quit. I’m honestly confused. Ben says he’s sure he’s done with the sport and wants to concentrate on lacrosse. I know zero about lacrosse and feel like I have nothing to offer him. Right now I’m struggling with faking enthusiasm, but I know I should get behind his decision. Ben’s choice is about him, not me!
This father is right. Fathers shouldn’t personalize the choices their sons make. Boys want to measure up to their dads and need to know that their choices have value.
Each adolescent boy, and particularly an older teen, feels he is expected to make his own way in the world. Many parents we spoke with, regardless of race, class, or ethnicity, talked about how they often abdicate parenting their boys during adolescence. For example, fewer parents reported that they required their sons to inform them of their whereabouts on weekend evenings; in contrast, all of the parents of daughters required them to call if their plans changed during the course of an evening.
We need to broaden the scope of acceptable behaviors for boys to give them alternatives to the aggressive and competitively driven behaviors typical of them during adolescence. For example, it is fundamentally unfair to discount the role of girls as friends in the lives of our sons. Our sons need interpersonal skills to have successful relationships as partners and parents. One dad reflecting on his son’s college experience told us, “Perhaps there has been a shift with co-ed dorms resulting in boys and girls developing more meaningful friendships more often than in our generation.” It is no longer a cultural norm that boys and girls can’t be friends. Boys can now express a wider range of emotions without being perceived negatively. Keeping this in mind, parents should take into consideration the needs of the individual, instead of relying on expectations and responses based on gender stereotyping.
Do We Hold Our Girls Too Close?
In contrast to what we have observed in boys, adolescent girls do not construct an identity by establishing personal boundaries between themselves and others. Girls do, however, construct their identities through their relationships with parents, friends, and significant others such as teachers, camp counselors, and other supportive adults. This can makes it more difficult for girls to establish healthy boundaries in romantic and friend relationships.
Women form their identities in a context of the mother-daughter relationship. According to Nancy Chodorow, “Mothers tend to experience their daughters as more alike, and continuous with, themselves” (Gilligan, 1982, p. 7). We, mothers and daughters, are mirrored from head to toe, replicated by common genes, sexual makeup, and social experiences. Mothers provide a genetic and emotional road map for their daughters.
In our focus groups, many mothers expressed feeling “tethered” to their daughters. One mother revealed, “Maggie can push my buttons more than anyone. It’s as if we merge together as one person. It’s different with my son, David, whose biology makes it clear that he isn’t me.” This bond is particularly strong during adolescence, a period that offers an opportunity for both mothers and daughters to rediscover their identities. While a shared biology can contribute to an increased potential for empathy and closeness, it may also inhibit the process of differentiation and individuation. This powerful connection creates complex relationships in which mothers and daughters often project and ascribe feelings to each other that aren’t helpful to growth and development.
Physician and author Nancy Snyderman reports in Girl in the Mirror that for a mother, the “past, present, and future collide when we look into our daughters’ faces. All of our dreams—those we’ve realized and those we consider beyond our grasp—are in the room with us” (2002, pp. 12–13). For a mother, raising a daughter is like going back to the future, and watching herself while watching her daughter. Observing our daughters reminds us of experiences we had as young girls. This identification with our own past can provide us with greater empathy and understanding, but it can also resurrect childhood pain and cause us to react in a negative way.
Healthy mother-daughter attachments can foster positive self-esteem and self-affirmation. However, this intense, close relationship can also be a breeding ground for conflict, resulting in the typical example of the “push-pull” nature of the mother-daughter relationship. It was evident that the mothers in our focus groups experienced this paradox. They raved about their daughters in one sentence and expressed hurt, frustration, and pain in the next. In discussing her daughter, one mother said, “I’m surprised at how in one moment I feel so close to her and then just minutes later, I want to strangle her.” The psychological connection between mothers and daughters often creates an environment in which they are overly sensitive to each other. This can result in both mothers and daughters vacillating between demonstrating appropriate empathy and behaving with insensitivity or callous indifference.
Our daughters, unlike our sons, begin to separate and individuate in the everyday, mundane moments, not just around the big life decisions. One mother we spoke with bought herself a jean jacket and showed it to her daughter, Becky, to see if she approved. This mother said, “All I wanted was a simple yes or no. However, Becky looked at me with a sneer on her face and said, ‘Is that for me or for you?’ ‘For me,’ I answered, and then Becky rejected my choice of jacket by spitting out one carefully dismissive word: ‘Trendy.’ I thought to myself, ‘My own mother never belittled me like this.’” This type of nasty behavior comes out when our daughters experience not-alikeness or when they experience too much alikeness. For example, when mothers buy jeans that their daughters would like for themselves, their daughters may perceive that their territory has been invaded. Taylor, a 15-year-old, said, “My best friend’s mother just bought platform sneakers with rhinestones. I want to barf. I feel terrible for my friend. She must be humiliated.”
When parents come to understand that this is a normal process of development, it is easier to accept this type of reaction and see it not just as insensitive and callous. It may simply be an example of their daughters beginning to form their own identities. Daughters very often are judgmental only because their relationships with their mothers are so important and loom so large over their lives.
Another mother told us, “We’re like a mixture of oil and water. We’re always on the verge of an argument; something could explode at any moment. If I tell my daughter her hair looks good curly, she’ll ask me why I didn’t like her hair blown straight. I always feel that I’m dancing on a pin and can tip over any second. Every comment I make has the capacity to be misunderstood. Our conversations are just so loaded.”
This mother was acutely aware that her words have the ability to evoke feelings and emotions in her daughter that the situation may not warrant. Even though we may think our comments are innocuous, our daughters often interpret our words differently from what we intend or actually mean to say. And even when mothers try to be nonjudgmental and supportive, their conversations are often loaded because the present is infused with the past.
Daughters seem to have fewer everyday struggles with their fathers because they are not trying to establish their independence from their dads. Fathers and daughters often have less stormy relationships because fathers have a built-in ability to see their daughters as separate from themselves. This perspective allows dads to be less reactive and daughters give them different feedback.
According to one father, “My daughter, Madison, is my best audience. She laughs at my corny jokes and thinks whatever I do and say is OK, just because it’s me. It drives my wife crazy. It’s definitely a double standard, and I am the beneficiary of her unconditional acceptance. I’ve escaped living under Madison’s microscope, which she expertly uses on her mother. I have it easy compared with my wife, Julie.” Daughters don’t share the same hot buttons with their fathers as they do with their mothers. For this reason, gender definitely affects how you may parent your daughters and how they react to you, which then affects how your daughters feel about themselves.
Time spent with her father can have critical benefits to a daughter’s self-esteem, because a positive relationship indicates to her that she is both interesting and worthy of his attention. Fathers also have an important role in encouraging their daughters to set high expectations for their social and professional lives. When a father demonstrates his comfort in relating to his daughter both as a young woman with a developing body and as a whole person, she becomes more comfortable with herself.
Let’s Get Physical: Brain Research and the Plastic Years
Children’s brains are very pliable and are not exclusively programmed at birth. The fact may seem pretty daunting, but parents can actually affect the circuitry in their children’s brains. Each experience in a child’s life leads to new neurological connections. The ability of the brain to mature and change throughout childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood is called plasticity.
The brain grows to 90 percent of its full size by the time we are 6 years old. Later, between the ages of 12 and 25, our brains undergo a massive reorganization, pruning away unused connections and strengthening those that remain. Also, because the brain acts like a sponge, teenagers can make room for new skills and interests. This explains why we may store our memories from adolescence better than we do during times of less change in our brains. One mother of two teenage sons said, “I still have a soft spot for the cheesy, bubblegum music I loved in high school. Unfortunately, my taste in music never got more sophisticated.” When you consider it, most of us retain a fondness for the sounds of our adolescence. The teenage years are vitally important because the brain’s plasticity can also help teens pick up new skills. It’s a perfect time for learning language, sports, music, etc.
In addition to the brain’s transformation, hormonal changes affect teens. Hormones explain some of teenage behavior, but they hardly account for all of it. The new field of cultural neuroscience helps us understand gender differences in our sons and daughters, and this growing knowledge can help teens develop a wider range of acceptable behaviors. For example, looking at the current research, neuroscientists are saying that the scans of brains in boys and girls are more similar than their behavior would have us presume. Girls and boys adapt to the culture they are born into.
We are just beginning to understand how the different experiences and environments our teenagers encounter in their lives will affect their brain development. In the past, the nature-versus-nurture question was usually framed as an either/or question, pitting biology against culture and heredity against environment. The new research changes how we view the age-old question of nature versus nurture. It is increasingly impossible to view either nature or nurture as mutually exclusive, because the brain changes through life experience. Rather, nature and nurture are exquisitely intertwined.
When we seek to understand adolescent development, a more productive goal than choosing between nurture and nature is to understand how heredity and environment interact. Until teen brains complete the phase of reorganization and development that occurs between ages 12 and 25, their behavior may be erratic and confusing, and their bodies can be awkward and clumsy. A mother of a 16-year-old daughter said, “When Sophie enters the room wearing sandals with her three-inch platforms, she towers over me. I’m not used to looking up to speak to her. Her growth spurt seemed to happen overnight. One day Sophie was short, and now I feel like Gulliver’s mother. What must it be like to be in that rapidly changing body?” Although your children’s physical changes in height and sexual development may be obvious to everyone, the less apparent changes in teenagers’ brains are just as dramatic.
With techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we now understand that the brain overproduces cells and connections twice in our lives: first when we are babies, and then again during adolescence. Dr. Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, reported that during adolescence the brain is very busy pruning and eliminating unneeded connections (Giedd, 2000). The teenage brain undergoes a transformation in adolescence that alters the nature of thinking in profound ways.
Adolescents rely heavily on the area of their brain called the amygdala, the part of the brain that is involved in processing emotions such as rage, fear, and sexuality (Hedaya, 2010). In adolescence, the amygdala is well developed, while the frontal lobe, which is responsible for judgment, is still relatively immature. Since the frontal lobe is not strong in adolescents, we know it’s less likely to process information accurately. This less-developed frontal lobe results in younger teenagers often acting more impulsively. They regularly misinterpret advice from their parents until they a develop capacity for judgment and abstract thinking skills. In adolescents, the frontal lobe is not well enough developed to override emotions from the amygdala with any reliability, which makes teenagers more inclined to respond immediately to stimuli with gut reactions. This immature development of the adolescent brain explains why teenagers are less able to modulate, inhibit, or understand the consequences of their behavior.
Teenagers don’t have the same understanding of cause and effect as adults do. How many times have you asked your daughter with incredulity, “Why did you do that?” and she has answered, “I don’t know”? Or how often have you asked your son, “Why did you invite ten kids to the house, knowing that in a millisecond, the situation could explode?” and his answer invariably is “I don’t know”? They give you this answer because they honestly don’t know. Their judgment is affected by the fact that their brains are not yet fully formed. Specifically, the frontal lobe of their brain, which is responsible for controlling impulses, is still developing. This is why teenagers don’t think through consequences as thoroughly as adults. Development of their frontal lobe will enable them to be less impulsive and to understand that every action has consequences.
Experimentation and Risky Business
Most teenagers get pleasure from taking risks and pushing limits. The changes that are under way in the adolescent brain have an important function because they help your child stretch and take risks as a way to get ready to leave the comforts of home. Daniel Siegel, author of Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain, says, “As children, we’re dependent on our parents for everything, for a sense of security that comes from being seen, being safe, being soothed by our parents. If we didn’t have some fundamental change in how the brain was functioning, why would anyone leave the comfort of the home nest?” (2014).
Siegel describes home as a safe base, a launching pad from which teenagers question the familiar and find themselves attracted to things and activities that are new and novel. Behavior during the teenage years creates the “hard wiring” for the adult years. And as one parent said, “Thank goodness, or else we would have more than twentysomethings to contend with; we’d have forty-year-olds living at home!”
This drive to action contributes to the teenage tendency to minimize risks and focus on rewards, a quality referred to as hyper-rational thinking. Once parents learn that there is an anthropological reason why their teens won’t listen to endless warnings and advice about what not to do, they can focus on giving them the tools they need to keep safe during this period of risk taking.
Siegel suggests that parents can protect their children by helping them to develop an inner compass. “If you teach kids to have an internal compass, they will literally get a ‘gut’ feeling to influence a decision—‘this doesn’t feel right’—his gut will say something, his heart will say something—he won’t listen to the words his mom and dad gave him, but he will listen to his body and his body will influence his brain—this is his internal compass, deciding to not do something because it doesn’t feel right” (Siegel, 2014). An inner compass or anchor helps teens get in touch with what is right and wrong. All kids need this coping mechanism. Siegel recalls one mother who told her son to pay attention to the feeling he had whenever he felt off-kilter. She wanted her son to become more aware that his inner voice was telling him what was right or wrong.
This gut feeling is exactly what Doug, a high school senior, said he used to prevent himself from driving while drunk:
I was at a party with my friends playing a drinking game. After downing more shots than I care to count, I knew I was in no shape to drive myself and my friends home. My friends urged me not to call a parent and kept trying to convince me that nothing bad would happen, but I felt funny and decided to go with my gut instinct. So I called my parents. I used my one “get out of jail free” card, and they didn’t yell or punish me. My parents warned me about minimizing risks and told me to listen to my gut, and I did.
This story demonstrates how Doug followed his inner compass and decided not to do something because it didn’t feel right.
Knowing about the science of the brain may not enable you to change your children’s behavior, but it helps you to better accept and respond to their angst, their sense of invincibility, and their risky attraction to experimentation. Siegel (2004) suggests that parents recognize intent in behavior and respond to the teen’s mind-set (the motivation) rather than the teen’s behavior. The intent may be to explore, while the outcome may be destructive. When parents understand that their teens were motivated to investigate, their response may be very different. We want to reinforce and validate exploration.
Your discussions and debriefings with your teens can help establish and reinforce the pattern of listening to their hearts and paying more attention to their inner voices. With this knowledge and greater understanding, you will have more success in reaching your teens at a time when they normally would be resisting, avoiding, and pulling away.
Young teens are a particularly high risk group. Their brains, which are not yet fully developed, make them even more prone to risky behavior, including drug and alcohol use. Teenagers can be very concrete, which is reflected in their black-and-white thinking. They experience mood swings, which makes them generally more reactive and emotional. This combination of emotional instability and risky behavior explains the constant conflict you may be experiencing with your child.
Risk taking is both normal and developmentally appropriate during adolescence, and this puts parents of teens in a difficult position. A natural inclination for many parents is to try to put cotton batting around everything to protect their teens. But there is only so much hovering parents can and should do. Parents would be wiser to recognize that not all risk taking is bad and perhaps even anticipate this behavior. It’s precisely this need to push the edge of what’s acceptable that helps teenagers mature and grow into healthy adults. Teens take risks to see for themselves what works and what doesn’t, who they are and who they aren’t, testing limits as a means of creating their own uniqueness. This in turn helps our teens grow into mature, analytical adults. Not all risk taking is dangerous. One father of a 15-year-old daughter recounted a situation where he recognized that fact:
Liz is normally the one I would refer to as my careful child. I’ve never had to take her to the emergency room, because generally she doesn’t push herself to try anything that’s scary. But last summer at camp, she was either too embarrassed to admit her fear or didn’t want to miss out, so she did something uncharacteristic for her. She learned to water-ski and was so proud of herself she had the counselor videotape it because she knew we’d be surprised. I know this is no big deal for most kids, but I’m happy Liz overcame her fear. In this instance, she took a chance and succeeded.
Positive risk taking allows teens to make safer choices and reap rewards. Making new friends, exploring new interests, and participating in activities such as sports, plays, and community volunteering all have components of risk taking. The opportunity for success represents the positive aspect of risk taking, while the threat of embarrassment and failure represents the flip side. With proper encouragement and guidance, parents can help their teens channel the dangerous parts of this developmental stage into positive learning experiences.
However, some of this experimentation can be very dangerous, especially today. Our high tech and sexually provocative world often puts our children in stressful and precarious situations. The following scenario describes how risk can creep into a normal social activity: Your teenage daughter goes to a party with kids she knows, so she thinks she has no reason to be afraid. Someone secretly drops a drug like Rohypnol or ecstasy into her drink. When the drug dissolves, it is colorless and odorless. As she consumes the drug, it takes effect. Under the influence of either one of these drugs, she may experience drowsiness, dizziness, confusion, lack of coordination, loss of inhibition, impaired judgment, and reduced levels of consciousness. This is a chilling scenario.
Some parents totally ignore this reality, while others are overly consumed with anxiety about the dangers that can befall their children. One parent who might belong to the second group is the mother of two high school teens:
My kids know that I worry. Unfortunately, at the most inopportune moments, I have a tendency to make public service announcements about some information that I believe is important to keep them safe. Yesterday I was with my son, daughter, and a few of their friends who know me well. The subject of drinking came up. I went into automatic pilot and proclaimed, “Kids, you know those red Solo cups you drink from at parties? Well, while you aren’t looking, someone else may put some drug in your drink. You have to be very careful.” I then blurted out, “Wait! I have a good idea: maybe carry some plastic wrap with you and put it on the rim of your cup to keep your drink safe.” As you can see, I was on a roll, lost in my parental paranoia. I thought this was a fabulous idea, and in retrospect, it’s just crazy. In response to my overzealous, nutty idea, one of my kids’ friends said, “Stacey, why not just send them to college with sippy cups?”
Knowing that this type of risk exists requires you to present information to your teens in a way that strikes a balance between scaring the daylights out of them and teaching them how to be aware of their environment. Doing this without sounding like a caricature can feel like a high-wire act.
Teenagers should be allowed and encouraged to grow up, have a good time, and test limits. We have to acknowledge that experimentation is a normal part of adolescent development. Yet if you suspect your child is excessively using drugs and alcohol, then, of course, you need to step in. Knowledge is power, and to gauge how your teens are handling their lives, you have to be aware of what’s out there.
One father told us how his daughter, who had been invited to a party at a friend’s house, cried and pleaded with him not to call the friend’s parents before the party. He said, “Through her sobs, she cried, ‘Dad, I’ll die if you call! No one’s parents call; it will be the kiss of death. I won’t go. Just don’t call!’ And she’s right. I’ve asked around; after a while, most parents stop calling.”
Many parents had personal stories that rivaled the plot of the movie Risky Business. One mother said,
Your house is a bull’s-eye if you aren’t home. Imagine how fast the news of your absence spreads with cell phones and e-mail. My son, Josh, invited a few of his friends to our house when my husband and I were going to be away for the weekend. Josh, in his naïveté, thought he could put up tape to block off the newly decorated living room, believing that a masking tape barrier would protect my new furniture from two hundred of his “closest” friends. We were lucky in that we learned about the party through a friend who had placed her ear next to the bathroom door, listening to the plans being formed.
Even though we knew about the plans for a party, we decided to go away because of our friends’ willingness to house-sit. They parked their car in front of the house to prevent kids, who came in droves, from entering the house. Our friends observed a Field of Dreams–like line of car headlights for the entire block and around the corner. My son learned that there were going to be hundreds of kids after one friend posted the address on Twitter!
Many other parents echoed this reasoning. One mother said of her daughter, “During Steph’s first high-school party, she had the largest boy, a defensive tackle, guard the food while the jewelry upstairs was left unguarded. Did she think the milk and American cheese were more valuable than my engagement ring?” That’s how naive they are. Consequences seem less important than the attraction of doing something they know they aren’t supposed to do. No matter how smart your son or daughter is, you can’t anticipate how convoluted their reasoning can become. As we discussed earlier in this chapter, your teens’ judgment and ability to forecast consequences are not fully developed.
As a parent, you must recognize that incidents can get out of hand in a flash, and you have to be prepared to protect your children and yourself from the potential consequences of these occurrences. These years take a kind of parental vigilance the military would be proud of.
What’s a Parent to Do?
While teenagers are hardwired to take risks, we can steer them toward more appropriate activities that will boost their self-confidence. Think of your role as building the scaffolding that supports your teens until they build their own sturdy sense of self. Parents are so important during this period. Be around, not like a hovering drone, but more like a safety net, and when your teenager royally screws up, make the punishment fit the crime. One dad said, “If he can’t get home before his curfew on Friday night, he doesn’t get to use the car Saturday. I don’t take it away for a month; that will just be overkill and probably make him more oppositional. My thinking is a small offense gets an equally small punishment.” Freaking out never gets your point across; take a breath, think, and then talk to your teens. They all mess up, and those who took risks as younger children may develop personalities and temperaments that lead them to take more risks as teenagers. Be aware and be ready and open to discussion. After all, teenagers eat and breathe risk.
It’s confusing when our teenagers often make it very clear that they don’t think we have much to offer them during adolescence, yet they still want and need our attention. Time and again, teenagers say they want and need their parents, even though parents are surprised to hear this. One mom said, “My daughter is constantly treating me with such disregard that it makes my blood boil.” A dad said, “My son, Josh, is always sleep-deprived; his sleep has been pushed into a slice of time between midnight and dawn, so he’s working with absolutely no reserve.” Another dad said, “Jenny feels that no one understands her, and you know, she’s not so wrong.” In fact, during adolescence many parents say they don’t quite know their kids, and it throws them off balance. Our teenagers are sleep-deprived, give us mixed messages, and feel misunderstood; it makes sense that we have no idea how much they want and need us. But they do!
So Much to Do and So Little Time
Today’s world puts our children under too much pressure. With so many competing demands, parents need some perspective themselves to know when to step in and provide some relief for their teens. Years before the college application process, parents and teens worry about creating a résumé worthy of somebody who has already been in the workforce for a while. They feel compelled to pursue many time-consuming interests at the same time. The pressure to be multitalented can result in overscheduling and burnout. Teens feel tremendous anxiety and stress from doing so much in so little time, as well as from failing a test, not being chosen for the sports team or getting a part in the school play, or losing a boyfriend or girlfriend. The mother of a 17-year-old high-school junior offered this example:
Jed had his heart set on getting a lead in his high school play. He had a callback for one of the parts, and I could feel how nervous he was, waiting for the selection. The day the cast list was posted in school without Jay’s name on it, he was devastated. Not only was he embarrassed, but he was devastated. I was concerned because Jay didn’t seem to have any ability to make himself feel better about this disappointment.
We had a real heart-to-heart, and I said, “Jed, usually you can handle disappointments and you can bounce back. What’s going on?” And that’s when he broke down and sobbed. He said that he had so much on his plate, so much to do between the school-required community service, his soccer practice and games, and his schoolwork. He absolutely couldn’t figure out how to get it all done, nor could he decide how to cut back. When I tried to reassure him that his dad and I would sit down with him and see how to help him prioritize, he cried and said, “But what about college, what about college?” I just felt so bad because we had been putting so much pressure on him to achieve without being sensitive to the fact that he is just a kid. At 17 years old, he felt the burden of his entire future on his shoulders.
Many teens do not have the skills needed to handle their stress and the anxiety that comes from stress. Parents have an opportunity to help buffer their children during these stressful years. This is where parents can have such an impact, not only psychologically but in their children’s brain development. When adults help buffer a teenager from stress, this sets the stage for children’s optimal brain development. Parents who create a safe, loving, and supportive environment for their children help ensure healthy brain development. Just knowing there’s someone to talk to when they’re desperate or overstressed is very reassuring to teenagers.
A New Vision
Societies are capable of creating intimate and fruitful human relationships that nurture the best of the female and male brains. The brain’s plasticity is the reason gender stereotypes are diminishing as we respond to the enormous societal changes that have been going on since the 1970s.
Cultural and social changes driven by technology, together with discoveries in brain research, redefine how we think about raising strong, confident, and healthy children. You don’t have to separate for your children to become autonomous. They can be connected while becoming individuals. You don’t need to disconnect from your children for them to grow into independent adults.
We want our children to develop a secure sense of self, which is why it’s so important for them to maintain a deep connection with parents. Having a parent or parents who want to remain competent and close does not diminish our children’s maturity. Instead, it’s helpful to view this period of adolescence as a change in your relationship with your teen rather than a separation from you.
We believe that connection is realistic and compatible with today’s mothers, fathers, and caretakers. There is a balance to strike between the interaction of children’s unique biology and their life experiences. Our behavior is not predetermined by biology; it is more determined by how we love our children and how connected they are to friends, their community, and us.
As they age, teenagers begin to see themselves in relation to the world. As teens develop a greater and solid sense of self, they ask themselves: What kind of an adult do I want to be? What impact can I have on the world? This maturity comes from feeling worthy and believing that they have the ability to effect positive change. For parents, the teen years are part of the continuing cycle of letting go while continuously giving our children the tools to make their way in the world.